The essential: With the end of Covid aid, Adem feared layoffs and a sharp increase in registrations. Has this been the case?

Isabelle Schlesser, director of Adem: This was not the case and fortunately. Unemployment fell and fell steadily once the pandemic waned, until the summer months of last year. From then on there were a few more job seekers but still at very low levels. The pandemic has not had too much impact on the labor market thanks to all the aid, which has enabled Luxembourg to save jobs.

After the Covid, now it’s the war in Ukraine and inflation that is weighing on businesses…

For two or three months, we have had a little less job offers. We still have a lot of them, more than 10,000. At one point, we had more than 13,000. I think that shows a certain caution of companies that have multiple problems and that are perhaps recruiting less massively than before the crisis.

With a low unemployment rate, is it difficult to fill vacancies?

On the one hand, we hear: “It’s going badly”, “The order books are less full” and on the other about a severe shortage of labor in certain sectors. This is really a problem for businesses. With an unemployment rate of 4.8%, which corresponds to full employment, there aren’t hundreds of thousands of candidates that we can find. There is also the question of the adequacy between the profiles and the needs of the companies. The 15,000 job seekers available to go to work do not all have the profiles sought. Otherwise the unemployment rate would be even lower. We must continue to provide training to job seekers to match their profiles with the job market.

Has offering teleworking become essential to attract candidates?

It is certain that teleworking has become a real subject. Which was not the case before. The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated this demand from employees to be able to do part of their work from home. There are also professions that are not “teleworkable” and many of these professions also correspond to the profiles of our job seekers. There are aspirations for a better balance with private life, family life. Salary is perhaps a little less important for employees than it was a few years ago. Job satisfaction, finding meaning in what you do, these are underlying trends. It’s not just teleworking.