A refreshing short book
by Peter Cappelli, Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources! This is a
must read for any HR Professional, of course, but even more for anyone who is
in a management position and has the power, or simply the will, to put an end
the current "crippling employer-employee standoff." The purpose of
Peter Cappelli's book is to get "America's job engine revved up
again."
We are all familiar with the litany
of complaints: Companies can't find skilled
workers, schools are not providing the right kind of training, the government
doesn't let in enough highly skilled immigrants, prospective employees don't
want jobs at the wages that are offered, etc. If perception and scattered
research might give some weight to such complaints, Cappelli demonstrates that
they don't add up when looked at holistically, and that they come across as
urban myths.
Are we a nation of un-qualified
people? In a market with a lot of job
applicants, companies tend to look for purple squirrels or unicorns. Are job
seekers unqualified for not fitting a paranormal job description? Does it allow
us to jump to the conclusion that "there is a skills gap" when the
hardest-to-fill jobs appear to be those that often require the least skills? In
reality, lots of job seekers are overqualified: "When applicants far
outnumber job openings, the overqualified bump out those only adequately
qualified... And the proportion of overqualified has more than doubled over the
past generation." Cappelli sees very little evidence of an actual supply
problem and asks a valid question: Isn't it a paradox that the US would rank
seven among 39 countries (survey performed by Manpower in 2011) in terms of
employers' complaints about an inability to fill jobs, while in China, the new
global rising power, these complaints are half as frequent? Does China have a
larger pull of "qualified" people? No — simply millions learn on the job and do so very quickly,
just as generations of Americans have. In the end, the analysis shows that
skills aren't the issue, but market-determined wages are...
Are your kids less intelligent that
you were at their age? Nobody wants to
believe this, but businesses are quick to assume that today's workforce is more
flawed than 20 years ago. There is no evidence to support this "good old
days bias" either. Cappelli indicates that US student performance has
actually improved over the past decades. In addition, studies by the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation (OCDE) do not show any absolute decline
in US scores. Emerging countries are simply catching up — and they do not
belittle their workforce nearly as much as we do. Another great point: the history
of Russia "reminds us that an economy's success is not related to
education in any simple fashion."
So what's wrong? Job seekers and employers talk at cross purposes. Is it
reasonable to expect job seekers to have done the work before because companies
don't want to train people? While it's certainly valid to fear that a newly
trained employee might go to the competition, it's equally logical to wonder
why a newly trained employee would leave... Maybe this was not the right hire
in the first place... Maybe the very culture or a non-existent culture of the
company is the problem. Is it reasonable to assume that filling a job vacancy
is akin to replacing a part in a washing machine — what Peter Cappelli calls
the "Home Depot Syndrome" — and assume that people are mere cogs in
the industrial machine? This may not be the safest angle to increase a
company's productivity or creativity, or to even motivate people to join a
company.
Cappelli mentions two major problems:
The first one is the automated software used to filter job seekers — it
allegedly complies with the mandate of equal treatment of all candidates, yet
ends up generating pervasive unfairness: people can't find jobs even though
there are millions of open positions. How long will the legal requirements be
an excuse for using antiquated software? The second one is the loss of power of
the HR function: "Not coincidentally, the United States has the weakest
human resources in the industrialized world." The ultimate call is
certainly to re-empower human resources, and re-empower recruiters —give them a
strategic role. Brain drain is the death of companies, and so is brain blindness:
"Millions of unfilled jobs are costing the economy billions of dollars in
lost business," reminds Cappelli.
This little book is a powerful
eye-opener. As I was reading through it, it seemed to me that what is initially
presented as a sort of standoff between job seekers and employers may not be
that willingly created by employers, and may raise a broader question about the
ability for established companies to realize that economic survival in a global
economy is more about building and nurturing talent and less about "filling"
positions. The vast majority of the people who look for the perfect match
today would not be hired in their own company. They benefited from a system
when trust in people and intra-entrepreneurship mattered, which is the
deep history of this country: the US started the modern industrial revolution
thanks to millions of "unqualified" people — and Cornelius
Vanderbilt left school when he was 11.
