‘They fire, we hire’ – Germany seizes on Silicon Valley’s woes

By Rene Wagner and Jan Schwartz

BERLIN, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Faced with a tight labour
market and a shortage of workers with key software engineering
skills, some German companies are looking at thousands of
layoffs in Silicon Valley as an opportunity to recruit top
talent.

The U.S. West Coast has always been the main destination for
ambitious software engineers looking to work in the best-paid,
most elite corner of their profession, but the mass redundancies
have created a pool of jobseekers that Germany is eager to tap.

“They fire, we hire,” said Rainer Zugehoer, Chief People
Officer at Cariad, the software subsidiary of automaker
Volkswagen. “We have several hundred open positions
in the U.S., in Europe and in China.”

Spooked by inflation and the prospect of recession, Google
parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook owner
Meta have announced a combined almost 40,000 job cuts.

While Germany is also teetering on the edge of recession,
its companies have grown more slowly in recent years and, in a
country notorious for still handling business by fax, there are
huge technology leaps to be made.

Germany, with one of the world’s oldest populations, has
gaping holes in its labour force: according to IT industry group
Bitkom, 137,000 IT jobs are unfilled.

The government is simplifying immigration rules and dangling
the prospect of easily-acquired citizenship to tempt skilled
would-be immigrants, and regional authorities are pressing
ahead.

“I would like to cordially invite you to move to Bavaria,”
wrote Judith Gerlach, digitalisation minister in Germany’s
wealthiest region on LinkedIn in a post addressed to the
recently laid off.

Especially with the euro at dollar parity, few European
companies pay rates that compete with the hundreds of thousands
of dollars on offer at California’s most successful companies,
but some hope cheaper healthcare and lower costs compared to
hotspots like San Francisco can help.

“And did I mention Oktoberfest?” Gerlach added, adding
Munich’s famed beer festival to the strong labour protections
that might prove attractive to the newly jobless.

Some are sceptical, with Bitkom’s Bernhard Rohleder noting
that Germany is competing not just with other countries for the
most talented, but with potential recruits’ home countries too.

Germany’s penchant for red tape could be another challenge:
companies are already reporting months-long delays in securing
appointments for their new hires to get work permits.

“Bureaucracy in Germany is utterly crippling for most
highly-qualified workers when they first encounter it,
especially if they don’t speak German,” said Diana Stoleru of
Berlin startup Lendis.
(Writing by Thomas Escritt
Editing by Mark Potter)