The Skills Shortage has not gone away

I must be mad I hear you all cry! With the current desperate state of the IT and Technology markets surely the spectre of the skills shortage has been dissipated?

Well in my view the skills shortage is very much still with us, and whether you think there is a skills shortage or not largely depends on how you define the words skills and shortage.

There is still shortage of skilled candidates and the example below I think illustrates this:

Skills Screen recently undertook an assignment to fill some roles for a small telco. The skills required for the role were quite demanding:

A Cisco CCNA

A Microsoft MCSE in Exchange 2000

Mobile with a full driving licence

We duly set about the task and attracted over 100 applicants. A little as two years ago this would have been a very difficult position to fill so 100 applicants was a very good response and would tend to indicate that the skills shortage had in fact been banished. A reasonable position to take until you look at the detail of the applicants;

Skills Screen technically assesses all applicants for a role at the point of application and this is done prior to the CV even being read. Fir this role the validated assessment results made sober reading:

Over 50% of the candidates scored 30% or less in the assessment. This is a score achievable by anyone simply randomly guessing the answers. So they can be immediately eliminated even without looking at the CV.

Only 8 candidates scored 60% or higher with 75% being the highest score.

What can we conclude from this? Well I feel pretty sure that the majority of candidates applying for this role believed they had the required skills, but when these skills were objectively measured the reality was somewhat different. There is no skills shortage if your measure of skills shortage is the number of applicants you can attract for a role. If your measure is changed to candidate who can demonstrably show they have skills required the picture changes radically.

So is this good news for the skilled candidates? Again not really. The majority of practitioners in the recruitment industry and also within client organisations do not carry out rigorous skills screening of the type described, and screen based solely on the CV supplied by the candidate/recruiter. In this case many clients will find themselves face-to-face with candidates from the rejected 50% above.

In this case they had better hope their competency based interviewing techniques are up to date.