Enterprises face a record shortage of personnel, follows from a survey of employers by specialists from the INP RAS

In a survey conducted in May by the Institute for Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INP RAS), enterprises reported a record shortage of labor resources since 2013. This may prevent enterprises from investing in production, despite the fact that the proportion of those who announced such plans has increased. In the fight against the shortage of workers, many enterprises are reconsidering the requirements for the quantity and quality of work and employees of HR departments.

Enterprises are faced with a record shortage of personnel, follows from a survey of employers by specialists of the INP RAS in May, its results are presented in the monitoring “Russian enterprises in the spring of 2023: combating the consequences of sanctions and relations with state authorities.” The shortage of personnel has become especially obvious against the backdrop of a recovery in economic activity: a year after the start of the “sanctions war”, already 31.5% of the enterprises surveyed believe that they have not suffered from the sanctions (in 2022 – 18%), and the share of enterprises intending to launch investment projects in the next one or two years, in 2023 it increased by one and a half times (40% instead of 26% in 2022).

Against this backdrop, the proportion of companies complaining about a shortage of personnel has grown to a record high in the entire history of observations – up to 50% (only 1.6% of respondents speak of an excess of workers). Since the start of observations in 2013, the percentage of people talking about a shortage of staff has only once risen above 45% – at the end of 2021, when enterprises stepped up hiring after coronavirus cuts. The minimum shortage of personnel was recorded in 2015, which coincides with an increase in the unemployment rate in the Russian Federation. Thus, the authors of the monitoring note, the dynamics of estimates of labor shortage correlates with the growth and recession of the country’s economy. Among the reasons for the reduction in the number of workers, as Kommersant previously wrote, may be emigration from the Russian Federation, the need to recruit volunteers for military service, and structural changes in the economy caused by the pandemic. In favor of the latter, in particular, is evidenced by the situation in the United States, where the number of vacancies exceeds the number of unemployed twice (an absolute historical record, see Kommersant of May 30).

In an effort to solve the talent problem, businesses are starting to rethink their approach to hiring HR professionals, including recruiters. So, according to hh.ru, in June the number of vacancies for HR (23.5 thousand) for the first time exceeded the figures for 2022. In 2022, the average number of such vacancies per month was at the level of 14 thousand, in 2023 – already 19 thousand. The service also recorded a drop in the number of resumes of HR specialists (by 6%, the level of competition among them decreased from 7.9 resumes per vacancy at the beginning of the year to 4.7). Data from the SuperJob portal, however, only partially confirms the trend of growth in demand for HR specialists – the number of such vacancies has really increased significantly over the past six months (by 24%), but this is not a record (increase in industry – 49%, in construction – 39%) . At the same time, according to Elena Artemyeva, Director of Analytics and Data Science at the Rabota.ru service, even if the competition for the applicant is not so great in the HR sphere, employers are increasingly looking for specialists who can provide more efficient recruitment for their enterprise. “The HR profession requires more and more digital skills and is moving more and more online. Recruiters are increasingly required to be confident in CRM systems, analytical thinking, skills in automating HR processes, including recently there have been vacancies that indicate the skills to use ChatGPT in work,” she notes.

Anastasia Manuylova