The 30 glorious years marked a prosperous era in France, where unemployment was just a detail. The factories were then the organizations providing employment in the country: Moulinex, Renault, La Redoute… For mainly “blue collar” positions in sewing, welding, mechanics… Full employment was a reality.
Since the 1980s, this period has been considered to be over, with unemployment rates above 10% in 1993 and 2012. Doubts hover over the country's ability to reverse the situation. However, since 2016 unemployment has been falling. In 2019 it is at 8%, the lowest rate in 10 years.
Among the industries driving this drop in unemployment: logistics.
Warehouse openings are increasing, as each Supply Chain Magazine newsletter bears witness to. Warehouse sizes break records every year, like the 142,000 m2 Amazon site in Brétigny sur Orge which will be opened by December.
The warehouses of the 21st century are the factories of the 20th century.
Opening a site means opening positions: forklift drivers, handlers, team leaders, etc. Each municipality is fighting to attract new sites and thus reduce the local unemployment rate. Pockets of employment do exist. Today, order pickers are the new blue-collar workers.
The problem is the scarcity of good candidates.
There are many job openings, but the right candidates are rarely found. For what ? For 3 main reasons:
1) Warehouses are looking to reduce their land costs and are moving further and further from urban areas, making it more difficult to source suitable candidates.
2) Logistics jobs in 2019 are demanding, they require high speeds to meet the deadlines requested by end consumers, as well as technological ease to manage tools such as PDAs.
3) Traditional recruitment providers are no longer able to attract talent and are working with the same reduced pools of candidates.
The key is the creation of new breeding grounds and specialization.
To make warehouses a new Eldorado of full employment, recruitment providers have an essential role to play. First, they must succeed in attracting new profiles, comfortable with new technologies, ready to travel, to respond to the shortage of logistics areas. These new profiles can come from Instagram, Facebook, local IUTs (like the very good IUT Logistique de Sénart), but they are no longer in physical agencies.
Furthermore, as logistics jobs become more and more specific depending on the sector (a fruit and vegetable preparer in Rungis will not have the same skills as a preparer on a ready-to-wear e-commerce site ), then service providers must be able to understand the specificities expected by each company to qualify and then train the profiles accordingly.
This is exactly the commitment that Side is making: logistical specialization and creation of new breeding grounds by zone.
Side is a new type of temporary employment company:
– we are developing an online interface where companies can manage their temporary needs in complete transparency
– we are developing new profile acquisition channels to have candidates who are out of the ordinary
– we specialize in logistics and retail professions to provide the necessary expertise
This positioning allowed us to achieve a satisfaction rate for 92% profiles in historically very deprived areas, such as Saint Quentin Fallavier (Isère) or Lognes (Seine-et-Marne).
For more information, do not hesitate to look https://www.side.co/fr/companies or contact us directly.
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