Economy - published on 12 January 2024
Source: press office Unioncamere
Rome, 5 January 2024 – More than 508 thousand workers were sought by companies in January and around 1.4 million for the first quarter of the year. Over 4 thousand more hires than in January 2023 (+0.9%) and +69 thousand hires (+5.3%) taking the entire quarter as a reference. Leading the demand for labour are personal services, which plan to hire 70 thousand people in January (+10.0% compared to January 2023). This is followed by trade (68 thousand units; +13.7% year-on-year) and construction (51 thousand units; +1.8%). However, the expected trend in January was negative for tourism and manufacturing companies (-12.1% and -2.3% year-on-year, respectively). The difficulty in finding jobs rose to 49.2% (+3.7 percentage points compared to a year ago). Outlining this scenario is the Bollettino del Sistema informativo Excelsior, produced by Unioncamere and Anpal.
In January, industry as a whole is planning to hire 172,000 workers (-1.1% year-on-year), 121,000 of whom are in manufacturing and public utilities, while the other 51,000 are in the construction sector. Services expect to hire a total of 336 thousand workers (+2.0% year-on-year).
In general, it is the small (10-49 employees) and medium-sized enterprises (50-249 employees) that are forecasting growth in hiring for January (respectively +3,300 and +3,800 compared to January 2023). Large enterprises with more than 250 employees are also forecasting positive hiring trends (+1,900 hires), while micro enterprises in the 1-9 employee bracket expect a drop of about -4,500 hires compared to the same period in 2023.
In January, the mismatch between labour demand and supply affected 250,000 recruitments out of the 508,000 planned (49.2%), mainly due to a lack of candidates (31.1%), followed by inadequate preparation (14.3%) and other reasons (3.8%). According to the Job Market, specialists in the life sciences are hard to find on the market (91.4% of pharmacists, biologists and other profiles belonging to this professional group are hard to find), followed by textile and garment industry machine operators (72.8%), foundry workers, welders, metal carpentry assemblers (72.6%), specialised construction finishing workers (71.8%) and technicians in the management of goods and services production processes (70.6%).
Fixed-term contracts continued to be the most popular form of employment with approximately 206,000 units, or 40.5% of the total, although they were down from a year ago, when they accounted for 41.3% of the total. On the other hand, permanent contracts are on the rise, rising from 122 thousand in January 2023 to the current 129 thousand (+7 thousand; +5.7%).
With reference to education levels, 19% of personnel searches are aimed at university graduates (97 thousand), 30% at high school graduates (155 thousand) and 32% at those with a professional qualification/diploma (163 thousand). Around 7 thousand applications for ITS Academy graduates.
For 18.1% of recruitments (over 91 thousand), companies plan to preferentially target immigrant workers, especially in the sectors of operational services (30.8% of total entries), logistics (29.1%), accommodation, catering, tourism (24.4%), construction (21.0%) and food, beverages and tobacco industries (20.6%).
At a territorial level, it is the macro regions of the North-West and North-East that are planning to hire more people (over 174,000 and over 118,000 respectively), followed by the regions of the South (over 110,000) and the Centre (about 105,000). The regional hiring rankings see, in order, Lombardy (around 123,000), Lazio (over 53,000), Veneto (over 48,000), Emilia-Romagna (around 48,000), Piedmont (over 38,000) and Campania (around 35,000).
The January forecasts are based on interviews conducted with a sample of more than 121 thousand companies. The interviews were collected in the period 13 November 2023 – 30 November 2023.
