Tech companies agree on one point: the difficulty of attracting and retaining the best profiles. The stakes are high and the risk of creating a talent shortage is growing. According to a study by Udacity carried out in February 2022, 63% of French managers believe that the lack of qualified employees has a major or moderate impact on their activity. From a broader point of view, the whole sector is therefore likely to suffer.
The time when candidates had to seduce recruiters seems to be long gone in this area. According to a February 2021 study by Harvey Nash, 40% of managers surveyed fail to keep their qualified employees because they are poached by the competition. Today, it is then up to companies to do everything possible to stand out and convince talent to stay.
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Gilles Bertaux, Co-founder and CEO of Livestorm, an engagement platform for managing meetings, webinars and virtual events from A to Z, talks about the talent shortage and the solutions to deal with this problem.
What are we talking about when we talk about the talent shortage-war?
Some sectors such as tech are facing difficulty in recruiting new qualified talent. Developers, designers, data professions, recruiters, and even salespeople are now worth gold provided they can get their hands on them and then keep them. Hence the term talent war.
The areas – profiles for which there is the most recruitment tension?
I can only express myself on the field that I know, that of tech. We have difficulty recruiting qualified profiles, such as developers and designers (among others).
This difficulty is linked to two things: France has been lagging behind in terms of training in digital professions for several years, in particular very early in school. Even if this delay tends to be made up in secondary school thanks to specialized schools/universities (and still), the new generation that is often assimilated to a generation very “at ease with digital tools” is not much more qualified than the previous one. The problem probably comes from a systemic misunderstanding of the school on the new digital professions, the reality of the labor market, innovation in general.
Now, we must also qualify this statement: France also has a real pool of highly qualified talents and in very specific sectors such as artificial intelligence. Our universities train very good doctoral students, for example, often imbued with experience across the Atlantic. This expertise is reflected in the number of foreign capitals that come to invest in our startups (whether in fundraising or acquisitions).
Faced with the problem of the shortage of talent, shouldn’t companies help their employees grow, train them better, support them in changing their profession?
I think that new specialized training establishments, such as HETIC, Ecole 42 or Epitech, must already emerge so that France can make up for its deficit in certain digital professions. Example: there is still very little training in commercial professions for prospects other than going to work in a Big4 firm. There are still too few training courses on the reality of product management or product design professions. The proof of this is the emergence of a para-educational structure for these professions: Humind School for Tech sales, Thiga which has been training PMs since 2014, etc. Today’s tech job is not being a developer, it’s considering a new way of doing marketing, sales, comm, product, even finance to match the specificities of an ecosystem. .
Then comes the involvement of companies to train their employees who need to develop their skills.
Are flexible working methods a major issue in recruitment today?
Absoutely ! COVID has had a huge impact on the new aspirations of employees. This period of confinement and long-term teleworking has naturally generated new questions about how to live, both from a personal and professional point of view. If the salary was for a very long time one of the major criteria, it is no longer so preponderant for employees.
Indeed, a better match between professional and personal life as well as a demand for personal added value in the missions offered are now linked to the salary criterion. The attractiveness of companies is now based on these new criteria.
Do the best talents expect companies more and more on the culture of ideas, diversity within management and modernity in values and culture?
In addition to the flexibility which, in my opinion, must be part of a real corporate culture, management is another very important point. It is necessary to have experienced and agile managers, flexible themselves, to lead teams in a remote context. It takes managers who understand the remote work situation, don’t micromanage, and who are able to lead the way in a very simple and clear way in order to build trust within their teams.
Corporate culture is essential to maintain cohesion. To ensure that everything runs smoothly for employees, it is important to invest in tools that allow working asynchronously and ensure that communications are in one place, available at all times and easily. searchable.
Employee commitment is also an element to be integrated into the corporate culture. Indeed, some employees who work remotely may feel disengaged, for example if they work in different time zones than their manager or other team members. It is therefore important to ensure that they are offered a virtual space to share information.
What about CSR values in terms of employer branding? (M/F equality, inclusion, sustainability, etc.)
A company’s CSR values are an integral part of a company’s culture.
The quest for everyday meaning has become an important decision factor when it comes to choosing a job and a company. CSR responds to this.
Now we must consider the meaning beyond what the simple definition of CSR already offers. There is the environment, society, diversity, but there are many nuances within these notions. Let’s take the societal one, we can include subjects such as equal opportunities, access to education, access to the labor market, simply access to information.
However, you may think that your product or business does not meet these topics. That’s surely true, by the way. Intrinsically, a CRM does not respond to an issue of inclusion (for example). However, it is interesting to dig into these notions above as tools and ask the question of a) what speaks to me as a founder from my experience, and b) how my teams can contribute to it.
In the context of Livestorm, it is quite obvious that access to information is a subject (cf the Covid), access to education too (since we work with universities), as well as the environment (a call rather than a 737 trip). But our remote-first DNA also raises the question of inclusion and difference. Working with someone 3,000 km away with a culture and a point of view very different from ours is a subject of openness to the world.
Another subject that is close to our hearts and on which we are bad students, or in any case not as good as we would like: our significant need for recruitment this year has led us to note the difficulty of recruiting female profiles in our field.
85% of French founded start-ups created in recent years are exclusively made up of men. Only 10% of French start-ups that raise funds are made up of mixed teams.
This observation is also confirmed at Livestorm: 12% of applications submitted to Livestorm are women for a position in tech, while parity is respected for other types of position. We also carried out a study to understand the reasons for this observation. It reveals a real problem linked to a false perception of jobs in this sector. However, flexibility and wages are two attractive reasons particularly recognized and favored by women.
I think this diversity issue contributes to the talent shortage issue.