Recruiting in Italy? Main factors to be considered in 2023
Table of contents
1. Overqualified candidates in Italy
4. White Collars vs. Blue collars in Italy
If you need to hire new professionals for your company in Italy or expand to the Italian market, you might face more than one challenge:
Abundance is not always good
An extraordinary number of non qualified or non-eligible applicants. This might result in a big potential risk of wasting your time and being literally inundated of resumes. Italy is indeed a country with a very high unemployment rate, especially diffused within people under 35. At the same time, in Italy, almost 4 young professionals on 5 completed a Master degree and have studied for at least 5 years, usually supported by his/her family. This setup rarely requires them to work and acquire professional experience already during their studies. This means your applicants will have a great majority of people with great theoretical knowledge but no field experience. This, especially when looking for medior or senior candidates, makes the pool of eligible candidates much smaller against the total amount of applicants. The Italian hiring process for roles over the 70k EUR Gross can be like a long endless “peacock courting ritual” mainly because it is a very complex multistep process where both parts are studying and understanding the other especially if there is no prior personal reference, collaboration history or networking. If you don't have a recognized brand for Italians, you might also experience a general passivity or lack of interest
Very slow rection time
Data shows that rarely Italians are changing employer more than 4 times in a lifetime. This means that in average many professionals are sticking to 1-2 employers during all their life and they are not really keen to seek new opportunities until your company can offer a stable and advantageous perspective compared to what they already have. Italy is a country where people appreciate stability on the employer and employee side more than challenges or chasing few bucks more. For this reason, they tend always to stick to their current job and prefer to seek internal career opportunities more than external ones.
Location related challenges
Whether you are hiring in Milan, Turin, Rome, Naples or Palermo, you have to consider Italy as very widely extended Country with very different regions based on different pre-unity cultures, traditions l, climate conditions and people often is not really happy to move from a city to another or might require additional compensation to make the relocation worth.
Locations of Offices vs. Production in Italy
Many Europeans might be surprised by this topic but very often in Italy you will find scattered deployments of HQ or Commercial offices and Production within different regions very far from each other. This makes your search more complex because there are literally entire regions more committed to whether white, blue or grey collars and you might need to follow a similar trend if you wish to be successfully enriching your team with the right skills whatever could be the planned location. This is the case for Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, Lazio or Piemonte.
Emigrated talents and brain drain
30% of the young Italian talents is not in Italy but emigrated in the last 10 years towards Western more stable economies or Eastern fast growing countries. They could actually be one of the best target audiences for your search for 2 main reasons: they collected an International work experience already consolidated in multinational companies and they can benefit from conspicuous tax discounts from the National Authorities if they get back again the status of permanent residence in Italy. Does it sound intriguing? It becomes even more convenient when you find out that also employers hiring this category are eligible for significant tax discount on social contribution. Want to understand better how does it work? Check out our post on this specific expat re-impatriation process and benefits.
If you are facing troubles recruiting in Italy, meet our Italian team at RED. Recruitment contacting us on our Italian local webpage
Find out what are the best regions to employ talents and a human capital investment in Italy.