German IT firms eye up Silicon Valley layoffs

BERLIN 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 US 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 resulted in a pool of jobseekers that Germany is eager to tap.

Rainer Zugehoer, Chief People Officer at Cariad, the software subsidiary of Volkswagen, said that they fire, they hire. We have several hundred open positions in the U.S. in Europe and China. A combined almost 40,000 job cuts were announced by Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta, a company that was sparked by the prospect of a recession.

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

According to Bitkom, 137,000 IT jobs are unfilled in Germany, with one of the world's oldest populations.

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 invite you to move to Bavaria, wrote Judith Gerlach, digitalisation minister in Germany's wealthiest region on LinkedIn in a post to the recently laid off.

With the euro at the 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.

Did I mention Oktoberfest? Gerlach added that Munich's famed beer festival has strong labour protections that might prove attractive to the newly jobless.

Some are skeptical, with Bitkom's Bernhard Rohleder noting that Germany is competing not only 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.

"The bureaucracy in Germany is crippling for most highly qualified workers when they first encounter it, especially if they don't speak German," said Diana Stoleru, founder of Berlin startup Lendis.