Attitude Makes the Difference
We keep on hearing from our clients that it’s hard to find qualified employees for their businesses and we hear from other recruiters that they are having trouble finding the “right candidate” for their open job orders. How can that be if the unemployment rate has held at or near the 7.8% level since September 2011?
Wouldn’t you think that with those unemployment numbers there would be more of a “supply” of people who want jobs than there is “demand” for jobs available? With 12.1 million Americans looking for work – and that’s not even counting the number of Americans that are “underemployed” – where are all the people that are looking for jobs?
In the Consulting Services Department we are constantly recruiting for qualified Senior Business Consultants and we have an extremely large number of people responding to our ads. We literally get thousands of resumes from people who want to work for us. I also work on searches for our clients through Recruiting Solutions and have experienced firsthand the trials and tribulations of finding that “qualified” individual that will meet all of our or our client’s expressed and unexpressed needs.
Why is this? What are recruiters and business owners looking for in their new hires? What makes a candidate “qualified”? Is it strictly experience and education? Let’s look at both of these factors and see just how they figure into the hiring process today.
Experience – This was the area that, when the economy was good, you could justify taking a chance on a someone who had not worked in the specific industry you were looking for because they had “such great skills” or “came from such a prestigious school”. In a situation where there is more “demand” than “supply” it was the employees’ market. But now with the situation reversed, in most cases there are more than enough candidates who apply that have the specific industry or functional experience that is required.
Education – Never before in the United States has there been so many highly educated people looking for work. According to a Census Bureau Report in March 2011, 30.4 percent of people over age 25 in the United States held at least a bachelor’s degree, and 10.9 percent held a graduate degree, that is up from the 26.2 percent and 8.7 percent 10 years earlier. In a weak economy this leads to lots of highly educated unemployed or under employed people – think of Baristas, Taxi Drivers and Waitresses – who haven’t even had the chance to work in their field of education yet.
If there are so many industry experienced, highly educated people in the job market, why is it still a problem finding that “right fit”?