Recruiting qualified professionals from abroad
In a globalised world, businesses are faced with the need to continually develop not only their products, but also their employee structure. If businesses want to remain attractive, competitive employers, they have to offer their workforce good working conditions and a future-focused team structure.
As an entrepreneur, any number of possibilities are already open to you for meeting your needs for qualified professionals. For example, you can seek expressly to recruit women, older people, disabled people or people with a migrant background, or take on interns once they have completed their training. You can also introduce modern time-sharing work models that allow employees to strike a balance between their family and professional lives. Another possibility is to recruit international qualified professionals. There is a broad potential for these, not just abroad, but also in Germany universities.
The advantages of recruiting abroad
Are you an entrepreneur and have had vacancies for long periods for which you have been unable to find a suitably qualified professional? You are not the only one to be experiencing this problem! In Germany, certain sectors and regions are already suffering from a lack of qualified employees. And this trend is set to continue. The Federal Employment Agency estimates that due to changing demographics, if no active measures are taken to reverse the trend, by 2025 there will be six million fewer workers on the labour market than in 2010.
Recruiting internationally can help you to meet your need for qualified professionals, but not only that. The presence of a skilled professional from abroad can also give your business new impetus, thanks to their specialist knowledge, linguistic skills and knowledge of markets and products specific to their own country, or intercultural skills of relevance to your business. In addition, the broadly differing body of experience, ways of thinking and knowledge that a diverse employee base has to offer can raise your company’s creativity and potential for innovation. It can even improve the image of your business at home and abroad, raise its name recognition and help you establish customer relations abroad.
You can find out more about recruiting from abroad and the topic of diversity management on the Web site of Kompetenzzentrum Fachkräftesicherung, the centre of excellence aimed at securing a supply of qualified professionals. You will also find some useful tips on the Qualified Professionals Initiative portal.
What potential do the EU and third countries offers?
According to the Federal Employment Agency (BA), numerous qualified professionals from the European Union – for example Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – are interested in working in Germany. Many of these are mechanical and electrical engineers and IT specialists as well as doctors and care workers. Added to these are highly trained professionals from states outside the European Union, referred to as “third countries”.
An important part of this potential is made up of students studying at German universities. The advantage of the latter is that, besides their specialist qualification, they are usually already au fait with German culture and with the German language. There are currently some 250,000 foreign students, accounting for 11 percent of all students in Germany. You can find out more about international students in Germany here (pdf-download).
You can find out about successfully recruiting and integrating international qualified professionals in the article “5 steps to find an international qualified professional”:
Step 1: Analysis and preparation
Step 2: Choosing the country
Step 3: Recruitment
Step 4: Welcoming new recruits and integrating them into your company
Step 5: Monitor integration progress
Infos im Web
Qualified Professionals Initiative portal
You will find further useful tips on the Qualified Professionals Initiative portal (German).
Federal Employment Agency – International Placement Services (ZAV)
Advice for international qualified professionals about employment opportunities in Germany, handling of labour market approval procedures and placement of job applicants in occupations where there is a shortage of skilled labour (German)
EURES
Job exchange and information platform about employment opportunities on the European labour market (in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and other languages)
Confederation of German Employer Associations (pdf)
“A companies' guide to creating a culture of welcome” (in German)
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