It's good to talk, or so the saying goes. So, why aren't candidates for IT jobs talking to their recruiters, and vice versa? Recent survey statistics suggest that the two factions aren't on the same page when it comes to job requirements -- and that it is creating a skills gap.
The data, which came from a survey of 1560 IT professionals and 38 recruiters by CWJobs.co.uk, found a marked lack of communication between recruiters and candidates. That's going to hurt everyone, including the clients, in the long run.
The problem, according to recruiters, is that job candidates don't have the skills that they need. But job candidates feel that the recruiters are not very good at explaining what they want. 59.6% of candidates said that employers are not clear enough about the skills they expect when recruiting for technology roles. And, surprise surprise, 65.8% of recruiters felt that candidates are not clear enough about the skills they have when they apply to jobs.
This is leading to a mismatch in skills. Six out of 10 employers want C# skills, according to the survey, but 74% of technology professionals said that it wasn't an integral skill in the current market. 84.5% of them also said that ASP.NET wasn't an important requirement, and yet half of all recruiters want it.
So, in addition to some better communication skills, there clearly needs to be some retraining. IT professionals say that they need to retrain in SQL, .NET, Java, Oracle, and Linux. Recruiters said that SQL, .NET, and Java will be important skills over the next one to two years, in addition to C#, and PHP (which still didn't feature highly on job candidates' lists).
One interesting snippet is that recruiters cited soft skills such as business acumen and understanding user requirements as an important skill in the future. Perhaps this would also enable job candidates to communicate their skill sets more effectively. But recruiters need to do the same, and learn how to articulate what they want.
This is something we clearly need to fix. This IT skills gap has arrived just at the point when the economy is beginning to recover (if the Bank of England is to be believed). Companies are starting to invest in new projects, and will need the technical expertise to implement them. The jobs are apparently waiting to be filled, but the whole situation is like a bad date; although each party is looking for someone else to be with, they can't seem to hit it off, because they are not on the same wavelength.
"The problem, according to recruiters, is that job candidates don't have the skills that they need"
as someone who has used agents (ok, recruiters) extensively over a 15 year period for getting development work, and for hiring developers/team leads/BAs, it would help a huge amount if the agents learned something (even a little) about the IT area they recruit for. they don't have to know a huge amount, they just need the basics. i.e. if you are a recruiting specialist for Java/JEE, take a week long JEE course. it's a sunk cost, but it will pay big benefits when you actually find you know something about what you are hiring for...
perhaps then we can avoid the silly agency postings like "needs 10 years experience in X" when X has only been announced a year ago...
Andrew,
Thanks for the comment. I agree. I used to write a column about IT recruitment back in the nineties, and it was just the same then. Obviously we can't hold a whole industry accountable for the actions of a few, but there were certainly many agencies back then who clearly didn't understand the sector, and who regarded the skills as largely fungible. For years, the industry has been filled with rhetoric about the need for IT experts to understand the business. That's true - they do - but more recruiters need to reciprocate.