Despite as I reported in my last posting at https://strategicsearch.com/technical-recruiting-blog/?p=1254 that only 142,000 new jobs were created last month (versus 6 straight months of 200,000 or more new jobs being created), some professions remain in high demand and short supply. In fact, a recent report by the Conference Board entitled, “From Not Enough Jobs to Not Enough Workers” shows a shortage in 464 occupations including AI (Artificial Intelligence) engineers, sea captains, librarians, occupational therapists and plant operators.
A major contributor to this shortage is there are simply not enough young workers training today to go into these professions. So when an existing worker retires, there are not enough qualified applicants to replace them. This has caused many engineering recruiters, scientific recruiters, technical recruiters and internal executive recruitment teams to butt heads fighting over the same limited sampling frame of talent for competing jobs.
Occupations at the highest risk of being unfilled are those that are either: a) growing the fastest or b) attracting the fewest new entrants. For example, healthcare employers continue to have a very difficult time finding skilled workers especially for those occupations that focus on older patients and require a lengthy training and certification process. For example, one primary care office near Christ Hospital contacted our executive recruitment firm earlier in the summer seeking a Hospitalist to serve a clientele mostly 70 years old and above. Unfortunately, their compensation package was very, very low and not in line with what it would take to attract this scarce profession. Regrettably, this is the norm, whereby employers have not significantly increased wages in recent years to compensate for these job scarcities. In our case, we turned down this search due to their meager compensation package, which was not enough to attract someone of the strong credentials that they demanded.
As a result, the Conference Board report concludes that with the retirements of many baby boomers and low replacement rates in many of these 464 scarce industries, such as wastewater treatment, due to young people are rejecting them for other professions, employers will have increasingly difficulty time filling many of these jobs in the future. This will mean that internal management recruiters and executive recruitment teams will need to significantly ramp up compensation packages and other incentives to keep up with limited supply and high demand.
What are your findings?
