Virtually all companies, in almost all sectors of activity, are currently experiencing difficulties in covering certain job profiles. This is how conclusive the conversation began Ángel Sáenz de Cenzano, general director of LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft since 2017) in Spain and Portugal.
It does not lack credentials: this social network for professionals, with 16 million members in Spain (and 900 million worldwide), establishes 9,000 interactions and channels 5,400 job offers every minute. A second sentence is no less exhaustive: "Unlike what happens in other countries, the drama involved in collective dismissals has little significance in Spain, in a different context."
Indeed, the contrast with the news of mass layoffs in US big tech could not be starker. The interviewee maintains that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others that have cut staff in recent months will continue to create jobs. And in Spain, IT companies are saturated with work.
The meeting had been arranged to discuss the employment situation in the information technology sector, the most represented in the worldwide network of LinkedIn. “An employee who leaves today –voluntarily or not– from an IT company will have no difficulty finding a job in another in the same sector. And I dare say that this is not going to change in the next five years, at the very least”.
Once again, the pandemic is valid as an argument: for many companies it was a disaster and for others, an impulse, leaving in all a willingness to adapt that very few had in 2019. IT companies have found it natural to open up to the emerging ways of organizing work. “Ten or twenty years ago, we worked worse and produced much less”, sums up Sáenz de Cenzano.
And the professionals, the other term of the equation? In the LinkedIn online forums, the vast majority say they enjoy the benefits of work-life balance and are comfortable with teleworking. Companies have to adapt to the new reality: "It is true that many find it difficult to reflect these preferences as active policies, especially in sectors with high attendance." Which is not the case for IT.
Really, he points out, the priorities of the professionals have not changed so much nor do the generational differences matter much. For everyone, “the first priority continues to be compensation, like all life; The second is employment stability, which is closely followed by flexibility; what before could be a wish, has become a condition. There is a fourth priority that I find very interesting, development and learning as the backbone of a professional career”. What really changes the game, he explains, is training (whether internal or external), which expands economic opportunities.
Companies accept that flexibility is a component of attracting talent, it would be missing more. “They have assumed it, even when it hurts them intimately. Not all of them know how to act when faced with a requirement that is unknown to them, but they are aware that they cannot close in on each other”.
A week of four working days can be perfectly productive, he confirms: “For us, flexibility is not working Tuesday and Thursday from home, it is something else. In a company that employs hundreds or thousands of people, there is a diversity of categories, experiences and objectives, so implementing labor policies with equal respect for everyone is very complicated”. Although it was not a topic of conversation, Sáenz de Cenzano highlights the qualitative leap that has taken place in the role of Human Resources directors.
The taxonomy of skills demanded by the labor market is not as obvious as one might think. “On our platform, we have almost 79,000 different skills represented. And the worst thing is that there is no satisfactory method to verify and consolidate them. According to a recent study, 88% of recruiters say they have lost valid candidates in selection processes because they have not come to understand the capabilities that applicants for a position expressed in their curriculum vitae”.
LinkedIn recognizes this problem and takes it very seriously, says its director in Spain, but with 900 million members in its network, at times it seems insoluble. Regarding Spain, he points out “an endemic titulitis, with more university graduates than any great power, but the conventional scheme is insufficient to have a good representation of the capacities offered and demanded. I am not referring to professional categories or qualifications, but to attributes such as communication skills, analytical skills or the need to update skills acquired in any field”.
LinkedIn can be – and in fact is – an ideal barometer of the labor market. It continually incorporates new sectors of activity that extend its reach. "What we do -says Sáenz de Cenzano- is to offer information, content and a mechanism for members to express themselves and interact".
Do biases appear? “They may be unavoidable, but we do not claim to be seen as opinion makers, but as a safe and friendly platform for professionals. The consequence is that the companies that come together on LinkedIn have decided to be less commercial and more open”.
