The latest employment report showed U.S. payrolls increased just 69,000 in May, while the unemployment rate increased to 8.2 percent.
Meanwhile, ManpowerGroup released its annual talent shortage survey May 29, indicating 49 percent of U.S. companies are struggling to fill mission-critical jobs.
Is there a way to square these seemingly disparate circumstances? A Wharton School of Business professor believes so.
In the June 4 edition of TIME, Peter Capelli explains:
Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.
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Employers further complicated the hiring process by piling on more and more job requirements, expecting that in a down market a perfect candidate will turn up if they just keep looking. One job seeker I interviewed in my own research described her experience trying to land “one post that has gone unfilled for nearly a year, asking the candidate to not only be the human resources expert but the marketing, publishing, project manager, accounting and finance expert. When I asked the employer if it was difficult to fill the position, the response was ‘yes but we want the right fit.’”Another factor that contributes to the perception of a skills gap is that most employers now use software to handle job applications, adding rigidity to the process that screens out all but the theoretically perfect candidate. Most systems, for example, now ask potential applicants what wage they are seeking — and toss out those who put down a figure higher than the employer wants. That’s hardly a skill problem. Meanwhile, applicants are typically assessed almost entirely on prior experience and credentials, and a failure to meet any one of the requirements leads to elimination. One manager told me that in his company 25,000 applicants had applied for a standard engineering job, yet none were rated as qualified. How could that be? Just put in enough of these yes/no requirements and it becomes mathematically unlikely that anyone will get through.
Given these challenges, we believe that the DMTalentNow approach – personal review of each candidate’s resume and individualized follow-up, matched with deep understanding of clients’ requirements and organizational culture – can make all the difference when it comes to matching skilled applicants with the right job.