Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can’t find the candidates.

After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he’s given up and is casting his net elsewhere.

“We were looking for people for two months,” Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. “We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others.”

Pimentel’s experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country’s efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need.

“It’s a paradox,” said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. “The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we’re seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don’t have the skills employers demand.”

From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe. Randstad estimates that Spanish companies may struggle to fill almost 2 million posts through 2020. Data released by the European Union’s statistics office Friday shows that unemployment in Spain was at 19.8 percent as of May compared with an average 8.6 percent for the 28-country bloc.

Weighing on Growth

Caretaker Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, the front-runner to lead the next government after posting gains in Sunday’s election, has pledged to add half a million jobs a year, but his campaign focused on posts for the legions of unemployed, rather than producing skilled workers to power the economy. Rajoy’s opponents say his policy of driving down wages and stripping back job protection has mainly created poorly-paid low-skill posts.

The failure to equip sufficient numbers of workers with the skills sought by modern companies is holding back the Spanish economy. The skills shortage is a drag on productivity, delays investment and strains a pension system dependent on new workers with good salaries to pay for an aging population, according to Sandalio Gomez, emeritus professor at the IESE Business School in Madrid.

“The workforce does not have the qualifications the market needs,” he said. “That’s a real problem.”

Source:
courtesy of BLOOMBERG

by Maria Tadeo and Esteban Duarte

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