Companies promise to hire tens of thousands of refugees in Europe

June 19, 2023

On the one hand, often unemployed exiles, on the other a chronic labor shortage. It is in this context that around forty companies, including behemoths like Amazon, pledged on Monday to hire tens of thousands of refugees across Europe, in a “win-win” operation.

In total, these promises of hiring and training over the next three years, announced by 41 large companies, will have “a direct impact on 250,000 refugees” for whom this should generate “each year more than two billion euros in income” , assured AFP Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of the NGO Tent Partnership for Refugees which organized this summit in Paris on the eve of World Refugee Day.

In detail, the promises of firm hiring must concern the recruitment of 13,680 refugees. Amazon has thus announced its intention to hire at least 5,000 refugees, the hotel chains Hilton and Marriott 1,500 each or even 500 for the French multinational Teleperformance.

In addition, the main temporary agencies (Adecco, ManpowerGroup, Randstad) have also pledged to “connect 152,000 refugees to jobs”, while other companies have promised to train “more than 86,000 refugees”, according to Tent.

These promises, which should make it possible to respond to “labour shortages” while “Europe is currently facing its biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War” with the exodus generated by the conflict in Ukraine , constitute “the most important set of commitments ever made by companies to advance the economic integration of refugees”, according to this organization.

This level of commitment is partly explained by the wave of emotion generated by the movement of displaced Ukrainians, believes Hamdi Ulukaya. A former refugee himself, the founder of Tent became a billionaire in the United States thanks to his food company Chobani.

“People support these Ukrainian refugee women. What happened to them had a huge impact on the companies that made these promises,” he said.

“This unprecedented show of support from companies (…) will be essential to allow tens of thousands of Ukrainians to meet their needs”, also declared during the event Margaritis Schinas, vice-president President of the European Commission, believing that these hirings could create a “win-win” situation.

For the time being, refugees are struggling to integrate into the market, in particular because of the language barrier which remains the main obstacle to their recruitment, underlined last week in a study the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR ) of the United Nations and the French committee of the International Chamber of Commerce.

The organizations, which surveyed 225 French companies, also noted that 80% of companies that do not employ refugees said they were “not informed, or not sufficiently informed” about the employability of these people, who have the right to work.

Chance of the calendar, another study published Monday by Bpifrance shows that, despite recruitment difficulties, only 29% of managers of SMEs and mid-sized companies in industry plan to recruit foreign employees in the next five years.

In these companies which employ 10 to 5,000 employees, 54% of the 2,454 bosses in the sample do not know if they are going to hire foreigners (without the refugees being singled out) while 62% of them admit to having difficulty to recruit.

So will Monday’s hiring promises clash with market reality?

“We don’t throw numbers in the air,” defended Hamdi Ulukaya. “Our experience of the last summits of this kind shows that companies not only respect their commitments, but that they surpass them”, in particular because these hirings go beyond the simple “humanitarian commitment”: “Companies know that it is beneficial for business,” he insisted.

The boss also hopes that this high mass will instill “a momentum”. “When these iconic companies say, We’re going to hire and train them, it creates a snowball effect and small businesses can (take inspiration from this) to start hiring.”

As for the main stakeholders, Hamdi Ulukaya concluded, “the moment a refugee gets a job is the moment he ceases to be a refugee”.