Having a job does not imply, in many cases, stopping the search for employment. A study conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB), using its statistical data and that of the U.S. Federal Reserve, concludes that in Europe, on average, 13% of those already employed continue to look for a job, compared to 19% of Americans. But beyond the percentage, the main difference between workers on both sides of the Atlantic is the motivation that drives them to maintain this active job search: while in the United States they clearly seek to improve their salary, in Europe they do so, as a precaution, due to a possible loss of the job they currently have.
Although the recently published study shows that most employed people do not dedicate themselves to looking for another job, their weight on the group that does explore it is high, given that there are many more employed people than unemployed. Thus, people with jobs represent more than 60% of all those looking for employment in the labor market.
The purpose of the research — carried out with data from the 11 main countries of the euro area and the United States — was to investigate what motivates people already employed to look for a new job and how this facilitates the change from one job to another. Thus, after confirming the two main motivations mentioned earlier (improving salary or seeking job security), the authors found that workers who look for a job while employed are about six times more likely to change jobs than those who do not, and almost half of all workers who start a new job were previously employed, rather than unemployed.
The greatest territorial discrepancies, however, lie in the reasons for continuing to look for work despite already having one. In the United States, the reason they call “career ladder” or, in other words, the search to climb the salary scale, is the main driver. In fact, salary satisfaction with the change has an impact three times greater than the fact of looking for a job out of fear of losing the one they have. On the contrary, among the vast majority of European employees, this latter fear outweighs the desire to earn more. Specifically, the search for job security surpasses salary improvements in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Finland, and Ireland. Both reasons are more balanced among employed people in Greece and Portugal.
The authors also concluded that these differences between the motivations that lead employed European and American workers to remain actively seeking employment are neither casual nor random, but respond mainly to the economic structures and labor markets of both territories. Thus, in countries with strong wage inequalities, as is the case in the United States, people are more prone to seek pay improvements and there is more room to climb the salary ladder by changing companies. Whereas in Europe, where many countries have a long history of long-term unemployment and where if a worker is dismissed it will take longer to find another job, employed people will actively seek a position preventively while they still have a job.
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Regarding Spain, the results indicate that the fear of losing employment motivates employees more than improving their pay level, as in most European countries. However, unlike the general European trend, where fewer women than men have a job and at the same time look for another, in Spain being a woman increases by two percentage points the possibility of being actively looking, compared to men.
Likewise, considering other reasons that lead workers to try to change jobs, in Spain the fact of working part-time involuntarily and wanting to work more hours stands out especially. This circumstance raises by 13 percentage points the probability that an employed Spaniard is actively looking for a job, one of the highest figures in all of Europe.
Finally, the researchers concluded that this attitude in a worker is very persistent, since between 50% and 60% of employed workers who decide to look for another job continue looking after several months; and 40% keep looking even after having changed to a new company.
Regarding the possibilities of changing, the research determines that in the United States workers who look have 7.5 percentage points more chance of moving to another job than the rest, and in Europe, 5.3 points more. This last case ranges among workers in the Netherlands, where actively looking for a job increases the possibility of changing jobs by more than 12 points, and southern European countries, where this probability increases only four points in Greece, Portugal, and Italy and five points in Spain.
