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"Huge opportunity": Immigration law for skilled workers meets empty labour market

Düsseldorf, 22/06/2023

  • Eight out of ten companies in Germany have long felt a loss of productivity due to unfilled positions
  • Sebastian Dettmers, CEO at The Stepstone Group: "Without skilled immigration, we will not be able to cope with the looming great people shortage."
  • Job market becomes more international: already 13 percent of applications from abroad

Düsseldorf, 22 June 2023. The planned immigration law for skilled workers is hitting an empty German labor market - with dramatic consequences: Eight out of ten companies are already suffering from productivity losses due to unfilled positions, according to a survey conducted by The Stepstone Group among 700 HR managers in autumn 2022. 83 percent of respondents described it as a challenge to find enough candidates for their open positions. Fifty-seven per cent said increasing competition for the best professionals was one of the biggest challenges to their business success.*
"The new law is an overdue step and a huge opportunity for companies," says Sebastian Dettmers, CEO at The Stepstone Group, a leading global digital recruiting platform. "Not only politicians, but all of us urgently need to remove hurdles and not just make it possible for qualified immigrants to work in our country. Rather, we need to actively recruit skilled foreign workers, because in the 21st century, an unprecedented competition for immigration will begin. In order to survive in this competition, we need not only a modern immigration law, but also a positive vision of the future with which we can spark a spirit of optimism," he emphasises.


Only two per cent of all job advertisements are written in English
According to Stepstone's market research of 2022, the majority of German employees (63 per cent) consider the immigration and integration of foreign skilled workers to be an important lever in order to be able to fill all vacancies in the future.** However, only about two per cent of the job advertisements on the Stepstone.de job platform are currently formulated in English. The largest share of these are IT jobs (33 per cent), followed by engineering and technical jobs (around 20 per cent) and jobs for managers (around 9 per cent).


Nevertheless, the German job market is becoming more international. Most recently, the number of applications on Stepstone.de from abroad was around 13 per cent. Most applications come from Eastern Europe and Turkey, India and North Africa. The proportion of foreign applicants is particularly high in IT (28 per cent), engineering (21 per cent), construction, design (20 per cent) and science (all 20 per cent each).*** "Germany is still very popular as a destination for foreign professionals - we must not jeopardise this under any circumstances. Businesses should now react to the new law and make their recruiting even more international and accessible - for example, by placing job advertisements in several languages or by companies explicitly pointing out when, for example, German mother tongue is not a direct requirement. Because there are more and more companies that have introduced English as a corporate language, for example - including The Stepstone Group," says CEO Sebastian Dettmers.

* In September 2022, the StepStone recruiting platform surveyed around 700 HR decision-makers on current challenges in recruiting and their impact on corporate success, see also: https://www.stepstone.de/e-recruiting/wissen/wie-dramatisch-trifft-die-arbeiterlosigkeit-die-wirtschaft-wirklich/


** As part of an international study, The Stepstone Group asked employees and decision-makers about future developments on the labour market and possible options for action. For this purpose, The Stepstone Group conducted a survey among around 20,000 workers in the USA, Great Britain, Germany and China in the period from December 2021 to January 2022. More at: https://www.stepstone.com/de/insights/the-great-unemployeement/


*** Results of an evaluation of all job advertisements on Stepstone.de (as of 12 June 2023) as well as an evaluation of applications in 2022, based on the IP address.