Are there “hundreds of thousands” of unanswered job offers as Emmanuel Macron claims?

It is an argument which points the finger at the unemployed: there are many vacant jobs which cannot find takers. On Tuesday 9 November again, the President of the Republic promised to tackle the problem head on. “Pôle emploi will review the hundreds of thousands of unanswered vacancies in the coming weeks”, he asserted during his speech to the French. The government also wants to strengthen controls. However, data from the Ministry of Labor shows that the jobs available are not that many.

Let us first eliminate a confusion often made. The Pôle emploi website displays a counter of the number of job vacancies available. To date, it displays a little over a million offers. But we must see this counter as a stock at a time T. This does not mean that these offers will not be filled. To have an estimate of vacant jobs, you should rather look at the statistics of the Ministry of Labor. A survey is conducted quarterly among companies to find out if they are looking for a candidate.

Thus, according to the Dares, in the second quarter of 2021, we counted 264,800 vacant jobs. But the Dares also specifies that only 48% of these jobs declared vacant correspond to jobs really unoccupied. 27% in fact correspond to newly created jobs and 22% to jobs still occupied and about to become vacant. So according to this study in the 2nd trimester there was no “hundreds of thousands of offers” not provided, as indicated by the Head of State, but a little more than 100,000.

A study by Pôle emploi published last year on the vacancies filled and the abandonment of recruitment also shows that over the whole of 2018 less than 5% of the vacancies had led to an abandonment for lack of candidates. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a candidate at all. Employers could have received up to 5 CVs but therefore felt that they did not have enough choice and then essentially pointed to a lack of motivation or competence of the candidates.