Brazilian Businesses Struggle to Find Skilled Applicants

By Xiu Ying, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In the last two years, sixty percent of the 11,800 positions offered in the market by large companies were not filled due to applicants’ lack of skills.

At the beginning of the year, telemarketing company Atento offered 1,200 openings in the collective labor market, promoted by the São Paulo Trade Union. It only managed to hire seven workers out of 600 – less than 1 percent of what it required.

Grupo Pão de Açúcar, in turn, offered 2,000 positions and approved 700 candidates, but so far only 32 are currently employed, according to organizers.

In the last joint effort, about 2,000 positions were also opened for supermarket cashiers, with minimum wage salaries close to R$1,100 (US$275), but half were left open due to lack of skills.

Issues include the difficulty to express oneself, to make calculations, lack of basic IT and English knowledge and insufficient schooling.

According to recruiting firms, outplacement tends to be more difficult for those who attended elementary school, aged under 20 and over 45, and those who have been out of the job market for over a year.

Among the 13.4 million unemployed in the first quarter of 2019, 635,000–twice the figure recorded in the same period in 2014 before the recession–are considered difficult to relocate by recruiters, according to LCA economist Cosmo Donato.

Fabio Bentes, chief economist of the National Confederation of Commerce (CNC), says the gap between the quality of the unemployed labor force and what companies are looking for is not likely to be closed, even with economic revival.

He estimates that two out of ten unemployed should be out of the market within the next decade for lack of skills. This means that the mass of workers with no chance of relocating may leap from the current 635,000 to 1.4 million in ten years.

“There will not be sufficient growth of GDP to incorporate this mass of unemployed with low qualifications,” he points out.

The low productivity of Brazilian workers will only be fixed with training, which depends on investments, according to Bentes, from CNC.

In the public sector, under pressure from cuts and contingent spending, it will be difficult for the budget to grow in the coming years at the speed required to meet the need for training workers.

When left to their own initiative, only a tiny portion of unemployed can afford their studies. “Most people sell lunch to buy dinner.”