The beginning of 2016 saw Estonia and Norway trump the UK as the best European countries for recruitment.
Accordingly, Recruitment Grapevine asked Jon Ingham, a Careers and Marketplace Expert at Glassdoor, how the European jobs market is changing, and how the quality of the UK’s workforce can be increased.
“As the report notes, approaches which have positive economic impacts can often have side effects as well. In many of the less regulated countries in Europe, which have seen the greatest boosts to employment and economic performance, there are concerns about the quality of these jobs.
“France in particular has still not shown readiness to follow Germany's economic strategy based on what they dismissively call 'mini jobs' or ones based on fixed term, part-time contracts.
“The UK has less employees working in temporary roles or involuntary part-time positions because there's not the same need to avoid the potential cost of full-time permanent employment that there is in more regulated markets (and some might suggest that many employers almost seem to treat any employee with less than two years’ service as a temporary worker).
"However there is a prevalence of other forms of non-employed contribution including agency working, zero-hour contracts and self-employment; including increasing numbers engaged through the 'sharing economy'. Many of these organisational contributors would also like traditional permanent, full-time positions if they could get them.
“Therefore the easiest way for the UK to improve the quality of its workforce is probably to mitigate the impacts of these side effects by ensuring, as much as possible, that these other ways of contributing to organisations are high quality opportunities as well.”
Last week research by Glassdoor revealed what the best European countries for recruitment were. The article can be found here.
