One in seven workers in Belgium does not have Belgian nationality, according to figures released Wednesday by Acerta. This proportion has increased by 13.6% in five years.

The human resources service provider obtained data from 40,000 private sector employers, both small and large. In June of this year, 14.1% of employment contracts were concluded with a non-Belgian. In 2014, they were 12.4%.

The trend is more pronounced in Brussels, where 27.4% of workers are foreigners. Among non-Belgian workers, there are also more men (15.5%) than women (12.9%). Among the countries of the European Union, the Netherlands, Romania, Poland, France and Bulgaria are the most represented among foreign workers active on the Belgian labor market. The most common non-EU foreigners come from Morocco, Turkey, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia and India.

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If you are a job-seeker you will be familiar with this scenario: week after week of sending in job applications, you don’t hear back from employers. You might have a few automatic emails, courteously reminding you that you should not expect to get any feedback, or even a rejection from the employer. You are not alone: according to Stepstone, one of the main job boards in Belgium, less than 1 in 4 job-seekers receive a response regarding their application, despite 85% of them finding themselves to be a good fit for the job. Belgium fared better than France, where only 15% of applicants got a reply, but significantly worse than the Netherlands (35%) and Germany (52%).

In this extremely competitive age this dynamic leaves job-seekers at loss. Having no feedback means that you do not know whether you were directly rejected, made it into a first shortlist and were dropped out of the interview stage, or if the job was not filled by anyone. Considering that it took an average of 18 applications to get an interview, and that it took on average 3 interviews to get a job, this can be quite a frustrating process. The job funnel gets very narrow very fast: around one in twenty got an interview and less than 2% received a job offer.

This could be either that the gap between employer and applicants’ understanding of the right profile for the job is huge, or that the job market is a buyer’s market and so many people are looking for jobs that the competition is huge. The truth probably lies within a bit of both. More feedback would certainly help job-seekers to better understand why they are not a good fit and improve their skills to be more successful in future applications. As Eva Ba, product manager at Stepstone says: «We encourage customers to put themselves in a job-seeker’s shoes. That way we help them being more transparent in the recruitment process & providing feedback to candidates systematically.  We even facilitate personalized feedback in our StepStone application management tool. Companies should rethink the full application experience to be simple and accessible. »

So if you are hiring, remember, don’t make applicants input the same information as the CV you requested in an online form, prepare an automatic reply that will clearly state what the candidates can expect from the selection procedure, and if you can, provide some valuable feedback at least to those that came close.

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High demand for project managers, foremen and electricians

StepStone analysed the advertisements for all Belgian online job sites over the past two years. They examined the advertisements of the 20 construction companies which most frequently publish job advertisements. From the 8,948 job postings examined, the following profiles emerged as the most in demand:

Almost a third of the advertisements examined requested one of these five profiles. It is not entirely surprising that companies are looking for skilled employees who possess either managerial qualities or technical knowledge. Moreover, the top five remained stable over the past two years.

Demand for workers in the construction sector continues to increase

In general, the job-site also notes that the number of advertisements posted by the construction sector is also increasing. This is what transpired from a second analysis carried out by StepStone based on data from all Belgian job websites via the aggregation tool Index. When comparing the first three quarters of 2017 and 2018, we see a 14% growth in job advertisements. For the same period throughout 2017-2018, there was also an increase of 7% in the number of companies in the construction sector posting advertisements.

StepStone as official HR partner for BATIBOUW

To address this need and to connect employers with employees, StepStone has been selected as the official HR partner for BATIBOUW in 2019. Expect, among other things, a true “Jobwall” on which vacancies from the construction sector are displayed, as well as a specific Jobday at BATIBOUW.

Meet StepStone at BATIBOUW 2019 from Thursday 21 February through Sunday 3 March at Brussels Expo. Save the date & practical information can be found on the official website.

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This percentage increase was the highest in Belgium, compared to Flanders and Wallonia.

In 2018, 1 out of every 7 Brussels residents with a job is a commuter (13.6 % of the employed active population). In 2023, the proportion is expected to be close to 1 out of every 6 (15.5 %).

Job creation is expected to fall

The number of net new jobs will subsequently begin to fall, in line with the expected slow-down in economic growth. By 2023, net new jobs are expected to fall to 3,000 units.

Over the 2018-2023 period, employment in the Brussels Capital Region is expected to increase by an average of 0.6% per year, the number of workers reaching 727,000 in 2023. This corresponds to the employment of slightly more than 24,000 additional workers over the entire period, or an average of 4,000 net new jobs created each year. This figure appears high when seen from a historical perspective: between 1985 and 2016, the average net job creation in the Brussels Region remained under 2,400 units per year.

The employed active population in Brussels is rising twice as fast as domestic employment

The number of Brussels residents in work should increase by an average of 6,200 units per year over the 2018-2023 period. The expected increase in the Brussels Region is thus relatively high as compared to the results for the two other regions (annual rise of between 10,000 and 11,000 units). With a growth of 1.3 % per year, the change in the employed active population in Brussels is more dynamic than in Flanders or Wallonia (+0.8 % in both cases).

Moreover, the employed active population is expected to grow more rapidly than domestic employment within the territory of Brussels (+1.3 % and +0.6 % respectively between 2018 and 2023). Over the same period, the proportion of domestic jobs in Brussels held by residents of the Region should continue to increase, rising from 53.5 % to 54.4 %

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Due to the high risks, innovations are usually commercialised via startups. The increasing number of startups being launched every day all over the world that are successful and impactful attests such statement. Nevertheless, even though stories of success, fame and wealth are highly publicised, many startups fail.

This should not come as a surprise. The risk/reward ratio is extensively used to compare the expected returns of an investment with the amount of risk undertaken to capture these returns. Simply put, in order to reap higher rewards, one must undertake more risk. Thus, not surprisingly, for every startup success story, there are several others of failure.

However, in the business world, there is a risk threshold any capable person is willing to take. Sure, there will always be unknown variables over which we have no control or knowledge, but, similarly, by preparing, analysing and assessing in advance several uncertainties can be mitigated or, at least, minimised.

For this reason, among other, not only entrepreneurs, but also corporates, investors, economic development folks, academics and journalists want insights on what the reasons startups fail are and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

Not-so-great team

One of the success factors most commonly mentioned as being critical to the success of a startup is having a good and diverse team. In fact, 23% of failed startups referred wrongly choosing the team members to run the business as the main reason for startup death. The team is the driving force making the founder’s vision a reality.

In these cases, founders and the team initially recruited to develop the venture do not have the skills, experience, culture fit or vision/purpose required. Wishing one of the founders had a specific skill-set they do not currently posses, identifying that the founding team was not able to, independently, or with a small amount of external help, build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and recognising that another founding partner should have been engaged in order to balance people out are only a couple of the factors leading to failed entrepreneurial teams.

Some effective tactics in avoiding this mistake are to thoroughly identify the requirements and expectations for each position within the startup, use a good recruitment agency, recruit people matching the requirements listed, provide appropriate training, develop an effective compensation and a benefits scheme, and build an inspiring company culture, among others.

A curious and somewhat worrisome trend, even though still not very significant, are cases where it is uncovered that the team is responsible for financial discrepancies or other activities or operations on the fringes of the law.

Running out of money

Roughly 29% of startup deaths are due to running out of money. To be clear, this does not necessarily mean a lack of capital invested in the project. A startup can run out of cash due to several reasons, such as lack of planning or underestimated assumptions about the projected cash flow, both the short and the long term.

A steady and healthy cash flow is key for the proper functioning of a business. In order to avoid this, founders should develop a pessimistic financial statement and assume it to be true, calculate the initial capital required carefully, seek support from appropriate professional (accountants, consultants, angel investors, etc), and plan exit scenarios and thresholds, among others.

Building stuff no one wants

Entrepreneurs tend to focus on interesting problems to solve or on their own interests. Even though this is an interesting technique to boost passion and dedication to the new venture, 42% of startup deaths are due to focusing on these issues rather than serving a market need. Entrepreneurship is all about finding a way to solve a pain point in a scalable way.

Offering products or services that the market is not interested in buying at scale and/or repeatedly leads several startups to death. Additionally, often the market is not convinced about the value of the offering or is already buying it from a competitor with a better offer.

To avoid this common drawback, entrepreneurs must prepare a thorough business plan from day one, identify the weakest assumptions and prepare prevention and contingency plans accordingly. Similarly to what I previously argued, hiring appropriate professionals (consultants, accountants, etc) is also an effective tactic in avoiding this pitfall.

Key take away

These three factors are, undoubtedly, those contributing the most to startup failure. Nevertheless, these are not independent and are often tied to other reasons for failure.

Curiously several other start-up failure drivers are directly related to those mentioned above. For example, having a user un-friendly product and ignoring customers — factors leading to startup failure in 17% and 14% of cases — are directly related to offering products the market is not interested in.

In fact, most entrepreneurs fail on their own fault. From the top 20 factors leading to startup failure, less than 3 are due to external factors. In order to help entrepreneurs be more successful it is important to focus on the development of their own skills, specially concerning the factors that, historically, have led most of them to failure.

Next time an aspiring entrepreneur tells you that there is no money available for entrepreneurs out there, come back to this data. It is really important to clear up some misconception and focus on the most essential.

Entrepreneurship is a well recognised driver of economies and, for that reason, experts, business and political leaders as well as scholars argue it is a priority to foster an entrepreneurial culture. Concurrently, entrepreneurship education, which is a life long process, is key to prepare youth and adults for an entrepreneurial economy. Therefore, a significant investment in entrepreneurship education must be made and the proactive participation of the whole community, education system, government and businesses is required.

From my end, I have taken this seriously and invested a big amount of my time in giving visibility to entrepreneurship education, mentoring first-time entrepreneurs and producing content (hopefully engaging) about it. Through my consulting practice and mentoring activities, my collaboration with universities in providing entrepreneurship education together with more traditional curricula and my blog, I intend to help build this culture in Europe.

What about you?

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Last February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg made it possible for companies in the United States to publish job ads to find “The one”, by using a specific tool. As it has been successful over the past few months, the famous CEO decided to extend that service to 40 countries, such as Belgium.  No date has yet been set, but face Since Facebook was first launched in 2007, the small startup has been exponentionally growing, become a major international company and  offering more and more services each year.

This jobs service will allow companies to insert a specific category on their facebook page, which will include a precise form to fill out. The candidate will fill all the fields, and they will also be offered the possibility to add any information that they finds appropriate. If the recruiter is interested in knowing a bit more about an applicant, both sides can then be in touch on facebook’s own messenger.

How will you see the ad?

You can be informed about the job ad if you ‘like’ the company’s page, and you then will be shown it on your newsfeed. But following millions of companies on Facebook, it is both useless and heavy, in terms of data privacy to try to find the application accepatnce/refusal through an avalanche of news. This is why the California-based company has designed a specific app, ‘Jobs’, which will gather all the ads that can be relevant to you, thanks to a special algorithm that has been implemented by the Facebook engineers.

The basic service is free of charges, but the employer can make the ad more visible and popular in case they pay a small amount of money. On the other side, the candidate doesn’t pay anything to access all the ads and applies as much as possible.

Whether you agree or disagree with the extension to new services, there is no way denying the power of Facebook and the impact it could have on different parts of society. It therefore makes sense for them invest in labour market and use all the information they have on both sides to foster employability. Will Facebook completely absorb that sector? That’s another issue.

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