The climate is changing, and I’m NOT talking about global warming. Our business climate is undergoing significant shifts. The talent pool is evolving, and businesses and individuals everywhere must adapt or face professional extinction.
What we’re experiencing is the cusp of a talent crisis, and we’re already seeing some major changes. And there are more ahead. It’s time for businesses—and recruiters—to deal with this new reality.
At its heart, the talent crisis means that organizations will not be able to find, attract, hire, and retain talent. This is due to five trends:
- More jobs than qualified people to fill them
- The increasingly multi-generational workforce
- The end of retirement as we know it
- Stronger demands for employer flexibility
- A big drop in average employee tenure
Taken separately, each of these trends presents a challenge. But now, as at no time before in our history, these trends are converging and strengthening.
We’ve all heard that according to government statistics, there will be more positions than people in the near future. Estimates vary, but experts agree there will soon be between three and 10 million more jobs than people. Those are daunting statistics, but as a recruiter you know we’re already facing a shortage: a lack of qualified individuals for specific positions.
A skill-set shortage is preceding the people shortage.
Below are three ways to tell your market has a skill-set shortage:
- Time to fill for some critical jobs lengthens to six months, a year, or more.
- Companies start lowering their standards to fill positions, refusing to hold out for top talent.
- Salaries are moving up. What was once the high end of a pay range will become the median income for hard-to-find skill sets.
The skill-set shortage is wide ranging. If it isn’t affecting you and your clients yet, it will, no matter the industry. For example, it’s estimated that 56% of unskilled laborers need to have the skills necessary to use some type of automated technology.
This isn’t your father’s workplace: most warehouse laborers on the shipping dock today use wireless hand-held computers to process transactions. Statistics indicate that to keep up with the jobs generated by current economic growth, the United States will need 18 million new college graduates. That’s 12 million more than we’re currently graduating.
Clearly, this dilemma isn’t going away anytime soon. But as a recruiter, you’re uniquely positioned to use this trend to your advantage. It’s Recruiting 101, but it’s more important to our industry than ever.
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Jon Bartos, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, is a premier writer, speaker, and consultant on all aspects of personal performance, human capital, and the analytics behind them. In 2010, Bartos founded Revenue Performance Management, LLC. The RPM Dashboard System is a business intelligence tool used worldwide for metrics management for individual and team performance improvement. In 2012, Bartos achieved national certification in Hypnotherapy, furthering his interest in learning the dynamics behind what motivates others to achieve higher levels of success. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.