Lazy and unwilling to work are just two of the clichés attributed to Gen Z. The fact that the generation born after 1996 will change the world of work is also clear to HR consultant Oliver Kremer, but he can do little with the clichés. The fact is that the baby boomers are now retiring, and the Gen Z that is coming up is demographically only half as strong as the baby boomers who are leaving. “It's a tsunami that's rolling towards the labour market,” says Kremer, Managing Director of K-Recruiting GmbH, a Munich-based company that specializes in the placement of specialists in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.

If you believe the forecasts of experts, this tsunami will fully engulf the world of work by 2030 at the latest. In that year, Gen Z and the so-called millennials, i.e. those born after 1980, will make up three quarters of the workforce in Germany, compared to only half today. Even if 500,000 people were to immigrate to Germany every year, the working-age population would still fall by 1.5 million people over the next ten years, according to a calculation by the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB). Demographic change is leading to a “declining labor force potential”, as it says.

This is accompanied by a change in values. Young people, says 44-year-old Kremer, are by no means lazy or unwilling to work, but they want to work more flexibly and independently and therefore often reject permanent employment. With this attitude, they are likely to trigger a revolution on the job market, he predicts. "Many of our customers can no longer fill vacancies because suitable, young applicants no longer want a permanent position. They are therefore reliant on freelancers. When I founded K-Recruiting in 2014, I still had to explain the advantages of freelancers to companies."

K-Recruiting's client list reads like a who's who of the so-called healthcare industry, including Pfizer and Novartis as well as Roche and Siemens Healthineers. From today's perspective, it seems almost inconceivable that such well-known employers could find it difficult to find permanent employees. Nevertheless, Kremer advises them to prepare for the change in values: "Companies must be open to hybrid forms of work. They will soon have no other choice."

Kremer points to the example of Biontech. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Mainz-based company deliberately opted for freelancers working in data analysis and clinical trials for its vaccine development. "Biontech was looking for external talent. The aim was to recruit people for one thing in the shortest possible time. We were able to provide them with more than 40 experts from our database." According to Kremer, freelancers bring fresh ideas and new perspectives in addition to their expertise, they require less training time and therefore increase a company's efficiency. According to K-Recruiting, its database contains 33,000 specialists, including scientists, doctors and pharmacists, mainly from Germany, Europe and the USA.

In politics, however, freelancers are viewed critically. Legislation divides the self-employed into tradespeople and freelancers. Freelancers could be considered pseudo-self-employed if they are only formally self-employed but are in fact employed. Kremer is familiar with the accusation: "Politicians should stop placing freelancers under the general suspicion of bogus self-employment. In Holland, the legislation is much more liberal." There, the tax office publishes model contracts that can be used for self-employment. According to Kremer, this is an approach that creates legal certainty for all parties involved without creating bureaucratic hurdles.

© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, Frankfurt. All rights reserved. Provided by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Archive