When does “Now Hiring” mean “Not Hiring”?
It’s when millions of Americans need jobs at the same time that many employers can’t fill their job openings.
That time is now.
That’s the situation recently discovered by an online career agency, which surveyed the job market and looked ahead to next year. With unemployment still running high, close to half of the people who do the hiring say they can’t find the right candidates, according to CareerBuilder.com.
“Even with more than 11 million Americans looking for work,” says CareerBuilder.com CEO Matt Ferguson, “45 percent of resource managers say they can’t find qualified candidates for their open positions.”
CareerBuilder.com, along with its sister company Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. (EMSI), used federal and state resources to find the dozen job areas that have been hiring the most. Each of these hot job groups, from software developers to event planners, grew by 7 percent or more a year between 2010 and 2013 and pay at least $22 an hour, according to EMSI.
“And these are all areas that not only had a lot of growth in 2013, but they are also where we expect the growth to continue for some time,” said Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder.com.
Employers are “still cautious about hiring, but where they can find people with the right skills, they will hire,” Haefner adds.
Ferguson, the author of the book “The Talent Equation,” writes that 80 percent of American employers are worried about “an emerging skills gap.” However, only about half of the companies, he adds, are doing anything about it.
In the meantime, unfilled jobs often have a common theme: All have some relationship to information technology or require some of the skills of IT, Haefner said.
“Companies should be looking to invest in their companies with training, although not every company can afford to do so,” Haefner said. “People should take every advantage to gain more skill, learning software programs and PowerPoint. Anything [candidates can learn that] increases general business acumen can also help.”
Haefner added that workers can sometimes improve their skills by volunteering for nonprofit groups.