Over the past 15 years, employee recruitment and retention have changed massively – also in the IT and telecommunications industry. What has remained unchanged is a gap between talk and action when it comes to major HR issues.
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Companies in the DACH region have been much more cautious when it comes to personnel planning in recent years: the proportion of companies currently hiring has fallen from 66 percent to just 41 percent since 2012. At the same time, the number of companies that are not planning to hire any employees doubled during the same period, from 15 to 31 percent.
“Reluctance to hire new employees reflects the economic uncertainty as well as the expected automation of many activities through AI,” says Imke Mahner from the Hays personnel agency. Hays is one of the largest personnel service providers in the world with around 13,000 employees.
IT industry more robust
In the IT and telecommunications industry, the proportion of companies recruiting new staff has fallen from 68 to 44 percent, according to Hays. At the same time, the proportion of companies with planned hiring rose from 14 to 25 percent. This means that the industry has more robust hiring behavior than the market as a whole.
“Over the years, there has not been a linear decline in hiring in this industry, but rather an increasing shift in the timing between planned and actual hiring – especially in economically uncertain phases,” says Andreas Sauer, Head of Technology at Hays.
“It is also noticeable that staff expansion in this industry is more often done through planned hiring and is less cyclical,” says Sauer. In periods of uncertainty such as 2020, 2021 and 2026, it remains significantly more resilient, while the market as a whole cancels more planned new hires.
Hays publishes an annual report on human resources topics and, in cooperation with the Institute for Employment and Employability (IBE) at the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences, has evaluated how the world of work has changed since 2011. From leadership and corporate culture to employee retention, securing skilled workers and flexibility: the analysis makes it clear how priorities for human resources departments are shifting and which trends are shaping companies in the long term, according to the IBE.
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Staffing trends shifted
This doesn’t stop at IT and telecommunications, as shown by an analysis of the development of the industry, which Hays and IBE prepared exclusively for heise online. Accordingly, the focus on human resources has shifted significantly over the past 15 years. Recruitment, employee retention and flexible work structures are important today. Leadership and corporate culture, which were previously much more of a focus, are losing significantly in importance.
The trend towards employee loyalty is particularly strong. As early as 2011, it was one of the most important HR topics for 43 percent of those surveyed, and in 2026 it will reach the highest value in the time series at 55 percent. IT and telecommunications have developed in exactly the opposite way: in 2011, at 53 percent, they had a higher share than the overall market, and in 2026, at 45 percent, they had a lower share.
While employee retention rose overall, it fell in IT and telecommunications. This is primarily due to the fact that many large companies are currently fundamentally reviewing, consolidating and, in some cases, deliberately downsizing their IT structures, says Sauer: “In this context, the focus is shifting from long-term employee retention to efficiency, cost optimization and strategic realignment of the IT organization.”
Talking instead of acting
A discrepancy between talk and action runs through all the Hays reports of the past 15 years: many companies talk more about the big HR issues than they actually tackle them. Implementation is therefore a key weak point. This gap between expectations and reality can be seen, for example, in leadership, work-life balance and learning.
“Many companies prefer to follow familiar paths,” says Jutta Rump from IBE. She is a professor of general business administration at the University of Economics and Society in Ludwigshafen with a focus on international human resources management and organizational development.
Companies would definitely adopt new technologies and organizational approaches. “But instead of developing new business models, they optimize the existing business with its established processes and procedures,” says Rump. There is often a lack of courage to consciously take risks and establish new solutions.
The time series also suggests that HR has fundamentally changed its role in the company over the past 15 years. In previous reports, HR managers paid attention to key employee issues. Today they are much more oriented towards the perspective of management, especially on strategic issues such as performance, transformation and culture.
According to those responsible at Hays, this reorientation could indicate two things: either HR managers accept the opinion of management because these topics are outside their competence. Or they have moved closer to the strategy table and developed into business partners of top management.
(vbr)
