Study shows many employers are raising requirements for new hires & hurting everyone in the process:
Bottom Line: I remember first reporting on this problem during the Great Recession. The problem. Companies/organizations ratcheting up the requirements on even entry level positions. During the mist of the recession many companies and organizations had the ability to somewhat successfully execute on attracting highly, perhaps even over, qualified individuals for a multitude of positions. So many highly skilled professionals lost work and needed employment that it worked until it didn't.
To be clear it never worked for those who're perfectly capable of performing the requirements of jobs available but being overlooked due to jacked up requirements for many positions. But it stopped working for the companies and organizations as well as gradually the employment picture improved. By having elevated the hiring standards substantially during the recession, many organizations either never reevaluated qualifications for positions in their organizations or felt like they couldn't because of those who were employed for similar positions with those requirements. The result has been that many organizations have been and are faced with a skills-gap. Often a self-created skills gap. A recent Harvard study released some of these revealing details:
- Existing factory supervisors with college degrees: 16%
- Recent factory supervisors job postings that require college degrees: 67%
- That's a self-imposed skill gap of a stunning 51%!
As part of the research 26 million openings were studied and found that even people who had years of experience successfully working in the capacity the opening posted for were instead being overlooked for people with no work experience but a matching degree. The most common way this occurs is computer automated programs that weed out applicants without the self-imposed education requirements. The final, and incredible takeaway is that today there are 6.2 million jobs that that didn't require a degree prior to the recession that generally do today.
The "skills gap" has received a lot of attention in recent years but it looks like it's often na organization hurting themselves through arbitrary requirements rather than people who really can't do the work. Consider that today Mark Zuckerburg wouldn't be hired by Facebook. Bill Gates wouldn't be hired at Microsoft and were he still alive Steve Jobs at Apple. Any questions?