Are Businesses Creating Their Own Skills Shortages?
Skills shortages remain one of the biggest workforce concerns facing employers.
Recent global workforce research found 63% of surveyed employers identified skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation.
That is a genuine business problem.
But another question deserves more attention: how much of the shortage is being created or intensified by the way organisations hire?
A business may say the market lacks suitable candidates while requiring applicants to have the exact title, exact industry, exact system exposure and exact number of years' experience, all at a salary below what established candidates can command.
At some point, the distinction between a skills shortage and an overly narrow talent pool becomes important.
Skills shortages are real, but so are self-imposed constraints
Some capabilities genuinely are scarce.
Specialist technical knowledge, professional accreditation or years of hard-to-acquire experience cannot simply be manufactured through a different job advertisement.
But many vacancies contain a mixture of true necessities and inherited preferences.
A hiring manager may ask for industry experience because the previous employee had it.
A specific software package may be listed because that is what the team currently uses.
Five years' experience may appear because four feels insufficient and six feels excessive.
None of these criteria is automatically wrong.
The question is whether the requirement predicts success strongly enough to justify excluding everyone who does not meet it.
Exact experience can become an unnecessarily narrow filter
Requiring someone to have already performed almost the identical job can make recruitment easier because it reduces perceived risk.
It also dramatically reduces the available pool.
Consider a candidate with strong account management experience moving between adjacent sectors.
Or a property professional who has managed complex residential portfolios but wants to transition into another part of the sector.
Or a finance candidate who understands the underlying process but has used a competing software platform.
If the transferable capability is strong and the missing knowledge can realistically be learned, rejecting those candidates may turn a manageable training gap into an apparent market shortage.
Skills-based hiring is partly a response to this problem.
Recent workforce research shows growing employer interest in skills-first approaches that identify talent by capability rather than relying only on traditional credentials.
Training changes the size of the available talent pool
One of the contradictions in modern recruitment is that organisations frequently report skills shortages while trying to hire people who need almost no development.
Recent workforce research expects 59 out of every 100 workers to require training by 2030. Employers also continue to identify productivity and competitiveness as major expected benefits of training investment.
If skills are changing that rapidly, hiring only people who already possess every requirement becomes less sustainable.
The more useful question is what the employee must know on day one and what they can reasonably learn in the first three or six months.
Training does carry a cost.
So does repeatedly advertising a vacancy that cannot be filled.
Slow hiring can turn availability into scarcity
Recruitment criteria are not the only self-imposed limitation.
Approval processes can also shrink the pool.
An organisation interviews an appropriate candidate.
A second stakeholder needs to meet them.
Then salary approval is required.
Then senior leadership wants comparison candidates.
Three weeks later, the original candidate has accepted another role.
Employers can then interpret the outcome as evidence of a candidate shortage when the problem was partly process speed.
Recent employer research found that the majority of surveyed organisations had experienced candidates declining offers during the previous year. Competing offers, compensation and lengthy or impersonal recruitment processes were among the reasons identified.
Talent availability is affected by how quickly businesses can act on it.
Redefine what must be hired and what can be learned
Before describing a role as difficult to fill, challenge the specification.
Which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable?
Which are teachable?
Could experience from a neighbouring industry transfer?
Could an internal employee step up with development?
Could responsibilities be redesigned around the skills that are realistically available?
What would the organisation need to invest to turn an 80% match into a strong performer?
The objective is not lowering standards.
It is distinguishing standards from familiarity.
The labour market will continue to contain real skill shortages, particularly as roles and technologies evolve.
But organisations cannot control the entire external talent market.
They can control how narrowly they define talent, how much capability they are willing to develop and how efficiently they make hiring decisions.
Before concluding that the people do not exist, it is worth checking whether the recruitment process has made them unnecessarily difficult to find.
