Jul 21, 2014

Jobs Go Begging for Lack of Skills

Posted by Wendy Weber

There was recently an article in the Wall Street Journal about employers finding it difficult to fill positions, because they could not identify qualified candidates. “About 33% of 848 small-business owners and chief executives said they had unfilled job openings in June because they couldn’t identify qualified applicants”.

One technology company was even quoted as saying, “We’re stunting our growth right now because there’s a limit to the number of projects we can handle at one time”.

Here is a link to that article.

But what has prompted me to write this blog post are the letters written in reaction to that article. I found them to be spot-on:

“The skills shortage cited by employers in the article “Jobs Go Begging for Lack of Skills” (Marketplace, July 10) has less to do with an untrained labor pool and more to do with companies that don’t know how to post job openings. On job-search boards just about every opening has a laundry list of duties and often uses terms and acronyms specific to that company to describe them. Then software screens every application and rejects those not meeting the strict criteria before a person capable of a judgment call can review the candidates.

Another problem is improperly titled openings. I find that most duty descriptions listed under the title “marketing manager” are web-design positions. If you want a programmer to develop front-end architecture, the job should be listed as such. Finally, if you cannot find what you need in external candidates, promote from within and train a current employee for the job.”

John McLaughlin
Austin, Texas

“The problem isn’t that one cannot get qualified people but that one can no longer get them on the terms that seemed reasonable in the past. To be successful, one has to keep up with the times. That might mean paying more to people who do certain tasks in order to retain them. It might mean becoming more efficient in order to deliver a product that the market needs at a price it is willing to pay.”

Sailesh Kapadia
Wexford, Pa.

In