Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

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.

The unique power of evaluating job candidates as a group (Harvard Business School & Kennedy School Research)

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

If you have never considered evaluating job candidates as a group (rather than one at a time), read this article published by the Harvard Business School: Better by the Bunch: Evaluating Job Candidates in Groups. The first paragraph says it all:  "New research suggests that organizations wishing to avoid gender stereotyping in the hiring or promotion process-and employ the most productive person instead—should evaluate job candidates as a group, rather than one at a time."

The article summarizes a report resulting from the collaboration between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS): When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint versus Separate Evaluation. HKS Professor Iris Bohnet, doctoral student Alexandra van Geen, and HBS Professor Max H. Bazerman coauthored the document. The report is supported by a thorough scientific analysis whose parameters have been carefully thought-out.  

So now, how can you leverage this? By simply using TalentCircles. With TalentCircles, you can, of course, perform one-on-one interviews with candidates, record these interviews, take notes and send the link to hiring managers, who in turn will be able to give you immediate feedback. What you can also do just as easily is to perform group video evaluation. Here is how you proceed:

1) You send an invitation to members of your TalentCircles network, a subset of this network (that we call "circle"), or to people who have not yet joined your network. You can invite up to 20 candidates for a group video live (inviting more people could be impractical — so you may want to switch to our webinar mode).                  

2) Once the candidates are in the video booths, they can interact via video and also send text remarks. Meanwhile, the recruiter can write notes on what he/she sees.

Candidates in the video both

3) As the conversation unfolds, the recruiter can also check the participants' live profiles in the network and include work history, education, and any other information they have added.

Checking profile information

4) During the conversation, participants can discuss documents that have been communicated to the candidates, as well as documents that are presented in real-time to the participants for instant discovery and analysis.

Discussing a document with the candidates

5) The entire conversation can be recorded and sent to a hiring manager for evaluation.

Joint evaluation is a powerful tool: it encourages judgments based on people’s real-time performance and attitude — both how they answer questions and how they behave within a group. Incidentally, it's also a very cost-effective way to evaluate lots of people at once! Of course, after your group interview is done, you can choose to conduct thorough one-on-one video interviews!

Job Candidate Experience: Treating people well is excellent business

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

How many times have HR Professionals heard Gerry Crispin discuss the importance of providing an outstanding candidate experience? How many companies truly act on his recommendations? Not enough. To evaluate how your company fares, check one of Gerry Crispin's presentations or make sure to catch one of his talks. If you believe that your company is ahead of the curve, apply for the Candidate Experience Award.

The HR Copernican Revolution: Caring about Candidate Experience is not just "nice to do." It's mission-critical for all of a company's departments. Look at it as a mandatory HR Copernican Revolution: Your company is no longer the center of the universe — candidates are. While companies may still believe that it's a privilege to "offer" a job to a candidate and that candidates should abide by whatever rules companies decide to set, Gerry Crispin opportunely reminds that "candidate experience is what THEY say it is, not how you think you've designed it."

Many companies still have the mindset that people should just be happy to get a job, especially at times of significant unemployment. Sure, unemployed persons will see the opportunity to land a job as a godsend. Will a positive result make them necessarily forget about their painful experience to get it? Unlikely. They may just leave for another company at the first opportunity, simply because they never had the personal feeling of being truly valued and desired in the first place: companies spend fortunes hiring, but the costs of talent churn are outrageous!

Candidate Experience is even more important for candidates that do not have the right profile for the job at a given time. It's key to send a courteous rejection letter; however, not all companies do. That's a huge oversight:

• Over 50% of job applicants are unlikely to buy from or recommend a company that mistreated them.
• Even more importantly, candidates have all the capabilities to tell their stories, and not all of them are just disgruntled creeps. They are human beings, and may become the talent that will make your competitors shine.

Embrace the universe! Keep your candidates informed at all times in the process and go even further, welcome the universe onto your own planet! Welcome candidates into your "TalentCircles." The candidates for whom you don't have a position today may be people you need tomorrow. Why "re-source" them when a little bit of forward-looking thinking might drive your time-to-hire to almost nothing down the road. Candidates that you will never hire are valuable: they can still admire your company and refer people that are more useful to you! Even at a time when everybody is high on "big data," the world is actually small if you look at it from a network standpoint.

Candidates are people. Just as customers expect a good experience when a company cannot accommodate an immediate need, candidates demand a good experience even when they don’t land the job. A rejection letter is great. Giving the opportunity to a "rejected" candidate to remain in your circles and still help you is even better: candidates will forget about the disappointment and, instead, feel empowered with a purpose. They can become your ambassadors and eventually find you better people than who they are without feeling belittled. They may even be enchanted: as Guy Kawasaki likes to say "nobodies are the new somebodies."

In fact, treating people well is not just good business, it’s often excellent business!

The New Relationship Marketing by Mari Smith: High Tech and High Touch

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Mari Smith, probably the ultimate Facebook guru (see my review in March 2011), is also the author of The New Relationship Marketing that came out last October.

Social networks tend to be perceived as channels, or as conduits that enable us to broadcast information in order to attract attention, and more often than not we may forget the key premise of social networking that Mari Smith's book reminds us of: "People do business with people they know, like and trust." So the whole point is: how do you get to be known from people, how to you get them to like you and how to you earn their trust? It's all about building a relationship that matters to both parties. It's precisely what "the new relationship marketing" is about.

Mainly targeting "a business person feeling the pressure to shift to using social media marketing to better understand the new soft skills required for success on the social web," the book is also extremely reassuring and designed to overcome apprehension. The social web is not going to eat you up: anyone can carve up his piece of the always-on society on his own terms. After all, the operative word of the social web is ultimately conversation. Strike it when you want it and how you want it. It's up to you to decide.

Like Erik Qualman in Digital Leader: 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence, which I reviewed earlier this year, Mari Smith dispels the threat that social networks still signify to many people. You don't need to turn into social media addicts to survive. You need to know what you want to accomplish and work at it in a consistent fashion — as well as leverage key real world social values, and traditional soft skills. High tech is ultimately high touch — i.e. the ability to communicate your core values, to structure the relationship circles that matter to you, and incrementally build on these relationships. Nobody is expected to become an influencer overnight, but it's up to each of us to create the environment that enables us to create the flow (flow into is the latin root of influence) that others will want to join. In the end, to understand social media, try to forget about the Rolodex metaphor. It's not so much about who you know as it is about who knows you!

This book is just as endearing as its author — enchanting by all accounts to use one of Guy Kawasaki's favorite words.

  

Originally posted on my personal blog.