WORKFORCE TRENDS

IT Skill Sets Top Hard-to-fill Recruiting Challenges

by wpengine on July 8, 2014 in Staffing, Workforce

 

What skill sets are you having the most difficulty recruiting?

Staffing Industry Analysts conducted a survey to find out and discovered that IT tops the list for hard-to-fill recruiting challenges. This comes as no surprise to our resident IT staffing guru, Zach Werde.

Here’s what SIA found: “Across all occupational categories, the skills most-frequently cited as difficult to recruit were those associated with managing and modifying company-wide enterprise software –SAP was commonly mentioned, as were other enterprise software providers. It’s notable that this set of skills was the most-frequently cited recruiting challenge in both 2014 and 2013. The second most commonly cited IT skill recruiting challenge was Java, which was likewise frequently mentioned in our 2013 survey.”

To learn more, we talked with Zach who says, “I love working on SAP & Java roles. That’s kind of my bread and butter, especially SAP.” We asked him why these skill sets are so difficult to recruit. Here’s what he said:

“The short answer is supply and demand.

The long answer, there is simply a huge shortage of IT workforce in the United States — especially on the niche, complicated roles like SAP, Salesforce, Java, even .NET, etc.  For these types of roles, somewhere between 1 out of 10 and 1 out of 100 of the available candidate pool are Unites States born citizens that randomly decided to become an SAP Business Objects Consultant or something like it. And the other 90 to 99% of the work force are not US born citizens.  They are foreign nationals working in the US with an H1 work visa or EAD that allows them to live and work in the US — because the US has a shortage of available workforce.

After this, it gets really complex, but the bottom line is in order to successfully staff for these positions you need to understand the market and also how to navigate third party employers. Why? Because all of the people that have these skill sets are essentially “owned” by the people that hold the H1 work visa and you have to go through them to find the talent.”

So there you have it. You knew they were difficult roles to staff but now you understand more about why they are hard-to-fill positions. And why you need to connect with people like Zach. Are you having IT staffing challenges? Connect with us at Placers today.

Results are based on findings of Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2014 Contingent Buyer Survey, conducted in April 2014, and reflect the opinions of buyer respondents from 175 large (1000+ employee) companies.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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