Digitalisation, hiring and personnel policy: Evidence from a representative business survey

In this paper we examine how employment and hiring processes develop in the course of digitalisation in German establishments. To this end we use a large representative business survey - the IAB Job Vacancy Survey - that was extended in 2015 to include special questions about the state of digital development in each establishment surveyed, thereby permitting a direct link between the topics of digitalisation and employment/hiring. We distinguish between different forms of digitalisation and enquire about both the development in the past and that expected for the future. Regression analyses show that digitalisation is already having noticeable effects on both the quantitative developments of hires, separations, vacancies and abandoned search processes and on the structure of labour demand in terms of qualifications, requirements and working conditions of new hires. The duration of the recruitment process, too, is influenced by digitalisation, though the wages agreed at the time of hiring are not.