Trees do not rise to the sky, warns a well-known adage of financiers. The latest figures for job vacancies, published this Friday by Dares, once again remind us of its veracity. After soaring, almost continuously, for ten years and particularly after the Covid crisis, their number fell slightly in the first half of 2023. In total, 355,600 jobs were vacant in the second quarter, down 4 %. A second fall after that of 5% observed during the first three months of the year. A trend that allows the job vacancy rate to fall to 2.2% today against 2.3% in the first quarter of 2023. A rate that is still extremely high, for comparison, it was 0.6% ten years ago.
A vacant post is defined at European level as a post that is newly created, unoccupied, or still occupied and about to become vacant for which active steps are taken to find a candidate. According to Dares, the decline affects all the major sectors: “-7% in the non-market tertiary sector, -5% in construction, -4% in industry and -3% in the market tertiary sector.”
The increase in the number of vacant jobs observed in recent years is mainly due to the fall in the unemployment rate and the increase in job creations recorded in France in recent years. The scarcity of available labor translates into difficulties in hiring and therefore a shortage of personnel. If this increase is never good news for companies, it remains natural when a country is in full employment. This is the situation in certain northern European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands.
Problem, “France associates high levels of vacant jobs and recruitment difficulties with still high unemployment, which reflects an insufficiently efficient functioning of the labor market”, warns Gilbert This, professor of economics at NEOMA Business. School and labor market specialist.
Behind this friction, there are actually two quite different cases. The majority of vacant jobs relate to unskilled positions in the commercial tertiary sector, construction or hotels, cafes and restaurants… Deemed not attractive enough, former employees are turning away to go to other sectors with better wages and working conditions. An old problem that has been further reinforced after the Covid crisis. “These professions are even less popular than in the past. Finding people who are interested and who make a long-term commitment was not easy before, now it’s the cross and the banner,” underlines Roland Gomez, president of the interim group Proman.
Back to the wall, many bosses do not hesitate to make efforts to make jobs more attractive. Going from two to one service, higher wages… the gestures are numerous but not by all and not always in the necessary proportions: “Some people have the impression of doing a lot but in fact it is sometimes far from being sufficient”, underlines Roland Gomez.
For these profiles, business leaders can count on the support of the State, which has undertaken several reforms to make periods of unemployment shorter and less profitable. In particular through two reforms of 2021 and 2023 which reduce the duration of compensation when the unemployment rate drops below 9% and review the calculation of the amount of compensation.
At the same time, cutting-edge sectors are also faced with the impossibility of recruiting, this time due to a lack of skills in society. Only one solution: training. There too the site was opened by the government through the multiplication of apprenticeships, the reform of vocational training… but it will take time before the effects are seen.
In the immediate future, France must face a series of bad news. After the rise in the unemployment rate in the second quarter and the drop in activity observed in temporary work, the fall in job vacancies once again reflects a slowdown in the labor market. Long announced and contradicted by the facts, the trend reversal now seems to be topical.
