Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011, during Spain’s economic crisis, and its picture of the Spanish job market reflects that time. Steve Jobs, mentioned in the present tense, died in October 2011.
For a few days now I’ve been reading articles by some of those “supposedly influential” people in Spain’s tech world who complain about a lack of talent in Spain, when in fact I’m sure that Spain has no shortage of talent.
In Spain, companies are looking for something we’re probably not prepared for. To begin with, they want a highly qualified worker, with a degree, professional and, to top it all, cheap.
On the other hand, if someone with talent but no degree comes along, they’re no use to that company either, and that person leaves for another country where their talent is appreciated. Years later, that person works for a company that ends up being the biggest competitor of the company that turned them down.
As a third case, there’s the person who, with or without a degree, isn’t interested in working for a low salary and doesn’t want to leave Spain either, so they decide to start their own business. Imagine their surprise when they go to the bank and it refuses to finance their project. That’s when they have to turn to private investors, a system that isn’t well established in Spain, so in the end this entrepreneur has no choice but to take the project to Silicon Valley, where Spanish entrepreneurs with tech business projects are being welcomed with open arms.
In Silicon Valley they find talent every week. They’re probably finding the talent that is fleeing our country and some other countries that share our mindset.
There is no shortage of talent in Spain; what there is, rather, is an inability to spot talent.
On top of that, we’re probably the only country where workers have to “slim down” their CV instead of fattening it up, because if they come across as too well prepared, the company will reject them.
In Spain we tend to confuse talent with qualifications in certain jobs and professions, whereas in other countries people aren’t judged by what they have but by what they can do with what they have.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Amancio Ortega would be turned down by a Spanish company for not having a degree or for being overqualified, which brings us to the next point. In the end, we are what we are because we surround ourselves either with “incompetent” people or with people less prepared than other possible candidates.
A recent study of how companies use the CVs they receive through job portals such as Infojobs.com showed that in 95% of cases they give the job to a single person, who goes through the first 100–150 CVs and forgets the rest. This means that, out of a list of 700 CVs, most of the time 550 candidates never get the chance to have theirs looked at.
As a result, by analyzing only the first 100 CVs, a company is very likely to choose not the best and most talented person for the job, but the “least bad” of the first 100.
In short:
- If an outside company finds talent in someone your company turned down, that makes you incompetent.
- Before complaining about a lack of talent in Spain, we should ask whether the “talent hunter” is equipped to recognize talent.
- Spain is still lagging behind in new technologies, while Google, Microsoft and Apple already have Spanish professionals on their staff who had to “emigrate” because they had no opportunities in Spain. First it was the workers, and now it’s our entrepreneurs.
In Spain we still have the perfect ingredients for a brain drain.
Featured image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
