It is quite common to hear employers talk about a phenomenon known as "talent shortage." I believe this is a myth; in the real world, there is no such thing as a talent shortage. Instead, there are two real problems. The objective one is the ratio between the number of job vacancies and the number of candidates available in the labor market. The subjective one is the inability of specific employers to find, attract, and hire employees. The results of candidate selection can be improved by learning how to formulate job vacancies in line with the principles of creating persuasive texts. I outlined the main principles in the second part of this article.
This article contains my subjective opinions. I do not provide evidence. Heated comments are welcome.
About Me
My name is Igor Sheludyko.
I have been an entrepreneur in the software development and sales industry since 2000. I have a higher technical education. I began my career as a programmer and also led small teams. About a year and a half ago, I began engaging in commercial recruitment of IT specialists—not just for myself and my projects, but for outside companies as well.
In 2018, I successfully filled 17 rather complex vacancies for 10 employers. There were quite a few companies to which I had to decline my services for various reasons. Some of these reasons I disclose in this article.
Why is the "talent shortage" a mythical phenomenon?
This is usually understood as the difficulties in hiring specialists with the necessary qualifications under conditions that are favorable to the employer. The statement that "it is not possible to hire suitable specialists under conditions favorable to the employer" contains several variables that can vary widely.
"It is not possible to hire" does not necessarily mean that specialists are absent in the market. There may be genuinely few specialists available, or perhaps the employer simply does not know how to find and attract them.
"Necessary specialists"—which specialists are truly needed? Do HR professionals correctly understand the production needs of the employer? Do production specialists properly understand their needs and consider the opportunities in the labor market?
"Under conditions favorable to the employer"—what kind of conditions are these? How do they relate to the labor market? How do these conditions align with the wishes of the "necessary specialists"?
When talking about ordinary hunger, when people have nothing to eat, we can see many individuals dying from hunger. In the case of staffing hunger, we do not see piles of corpses from companies. Employers adapt and find ways to cope if a real threat of death arises. Thus, according to observations, staffing hunger is not really hunger but rather a 'somewhat limited diet.' If a manager starts talking about 'staffing hunger,' it is critical for the owner to intervene and pay attention to what is happening within the company. Most likely, there are significant issues with management, or theft could be occurring.
We could end here, but I want to discuss two real issues regarding staffing. The objective problem is the ratio between the number of vacancies and the number of candidates in the labor market. The subjective problem is the inability of a particular employer to find, attract, and hire employees. Let's delve into these problems further.
Labor Market – The Number of Vacancies and Candidates
Overall, there is currently no acute problem with job availability in Russia. On average, the country has a low unemployment rate. There are very unpleasant difficulties stemming from a significant disparity in wage levels between capitals and regions. In most professions, regions pay patently low wages, and the population lives on the edge of poverty. The wage level barely covers the subsistence minimum. For most professions, there are fewer vacancies than candidates, giving employers a choice. Thus, there is no staffing hunger at all; rather, the likelihood of traditional hunger exists.
There are cities and regions where production facilities are closing, leading to concentrations of qualified personnel, while in neighboring regions, there is a shortage of such personnel. The typical response to this challenge is population migration. However, Russians are still not accustomed to migrating for work and careers, often preferring to live in poverty, scraping by with occasional earnings, justifying this with the need to care for their families (everything is familiar and close here, while there is the unknown). Personally, I find this motivation incomprehensible – life in poverty hardly symbolizes caring for family.
Employers are generally not yet prepared to support migration. It's rare to find employers offering relocation support programs for employees. Instead of seeking talent in other regions, creating attractive conditions, and supporting migration, employers are more likely to complain about a talent shortage.
Sometimes, when discussing talent shortages, employers acknowledge that there is no shortage of personnel, but claim that "the qualification of the workforce is insufficient." I believe this is disingenuous, as other employers (those who don't complain) simply train their employees to improve their qualifications. Thus, the complaint about "insufficient qualifications" is merely a manifestation of a desire to cut costs on training or relocation.
In the IT sector, the situation is noticeably better overall than in other fields. For certain IT specialties, the demand for personnel is so high that salaries in IT in many regions are significantly higher than the average salary. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the average salary in IT is also higher than the regional average, but not to such an extent.
From the perspective of a typical HR professional, the situation looks like this – the needed people simply aren't available in the market or they demand significantly higher salaries. This mainly applies to programmers and DevOps specialists. For project managers, analysts, designers, testers, and layout specialists, there is generally parity – it's possible to find a competent specialist fairly quickly. Of course, it's not as easy as hiring a cashier at a supermarket, but it's noticeably simpler than finding a front-end developer.
In this situation, some employers complain (that's their choice), while others restructure their work processes. A typical solution is to implement training and skills development, internships, and to organize tasks in such a way that more work can be delegated to less skilled personnel. Another good solution is the introduction of remote work practices. A remote employee is less expensive. This is not only due to lower wages but also because of savings on office rent and workplace equipment. The implementation of remote work certainly carries risks, but it also offers significant benefits in the long run. Additionally, it immediately expands the geography of the search for employees.
Therefore, there is no significant problem with a lack of personnel in IT; rather, it is the management's unwillingness to restructure work processes.
The inability of employers to find, attract, and hire employees
When I receive a request for a specialist search, my first step is to understand the real reasons why the employer cannot solve the staffing task independently. If there is no HR in the company, and the team, project, department, or even company leader is responsible for recruitment, then this is an ideal client for me, and I can take this request into work. However, this does not mean there won't be issues, as leaders often suffer from a disconnect from the real world and the labor market.
An in-house recruiter or HR is usually an unnecessary intermediary that distorts information. If HR is responsible for recruitment, I dig deeper into the reasons. I need to understand HR's attitude—whether they will hinder my work or assist me.
About half of the requests to recruiters or staffing agencies come from employers who have everything they need to find the right employees independently. They have staff who have enough time to search and hire. They have the budget for posting job ads and buying access to resume databases. They are even willing to offer candidates fairly competitive terms. However, their attempts at recruitment are unsuccessful. I believe the most likely explanation for this situation is that the employers themselves do not know how to find and attract the right employees. This does not always mean they are entirely incapable of hiring. Typically, problems arise only for certain positions where there is not a large influx of candidates wanting to work for that company. In cases where there is a queue of candidates, the employer manages on their own, but where candidates are few, they struggle. A typical explanation from the employer's side is, 'We are very busy and don’t have time to search ourselves,' or 'There are no worthy candidates left in open sources.' Very often, these justifications are false.
So, the situation is this: the employer has an HR department and resources for searching and hiring employees, but the task cannot be solved internally. External help is needed to draw candidates out of the dark corners where they hide from employers.
I highlight 3 real reasons for this situation:
- Lack of ability to properly formulate job postings and search tasks.
- Lack of motivation to make every possible effort.
- Unwillingness to accept market conditions and adapt their offer to the situation.
First, if the second issue is addressed, the first can be fixed. For this, I will provide my recommendations that can enhance the efficiency of recruitment. Typically, if the HR is reasonable, they do not mind direct interaction between the recruiter and the request author for selection. A 'good' HR simply steps aside, and everything works out. The company finds the right person, HR alleviates their problem, and the recruiter earns their fee. Everyone is satisfied.
If there is no motivation to put in the effort to recruit specialists, even a recruitment agency (RA) will not be able to help. RA recruiters will find good candidates for such an employer, but in the absence of motivation, the employer is likely to miss out on these candidates. In my experience, such cases have occurred repeatedly. Typical reasons include: HR and managers forgetting about interviews, not providing feedback within the agreed timeframes, taking weeks to decide whether to make offers, wanting to see at least 20 candidates before choosing, and many other reasons. Truly interesting candidates often accept offers from other employers. This is a deadlock, so if I diagnose a lack of motivation among employer representatives, I simply do not work with such clients.
The unwillingness to accept market conditions and adapt their offer to the situation can be diagnosed quite easily and quickly. I also do not work with such employers since the problem lies in the working conditions being inadequate for the labor market. Candidates can be found, but it takes a long time and is genuinely difficult. The second issue is that candidates often flee from such employers within the warranty period, and replacements have to be sought without additional payment. This results in double work. Therefore, it is better to refuse right away.
Now we turn to the issue of job vacancy formation, which can be solved both by the recruiter and by the employer independently.
Main rules for creating job vacancies
First, it must be acknowledged that hiring is a sales act. The employer needs to strive to sell the candidate on the opportunity to work with them. Employers often find it hard to accept this idea. They tend to prefer the notion that the candidate should sell their professional services, exerting themselves while employers, like selective buyers, observe, think, and choose. Very often, the market is indeed oriented this way — there are more candidates than good job vacancies. However, for in-demand and highly qualified specialists (such as programmers), the situation is completely the opposite. Employers who accept the idea of needing to sell their vacancies to candidates are generally more successful in hiring top talent. The texts of job vacancies and messages you send to candidates should be written according to the rules for creating persuasive texts, as this significantly increases their effectiveness.
What distinguishes a good persuasive text in the ocean of information that bombards people today? First and foremost, it focuses on the interests of the reader. The text should immediately answer the question — why should I (the reader) spend time reading this text? Furthermore, the vacancy must answer the question — why should I work for this company in particular? There are other essential questions to which candidates want clear and straightforward answers. What will I be doing? How will I realize my potential in this job? Where can I grow and how will the employer assist me in this? What compensation will I receive for my work? What social guarantees will the employer provide? How are work processes organized, what will I be responsible for, and to whom? What kind of people will I be surrounded by? And so on.
In the ranking of the most annoying shortcomings of job vacancies, lack of informative content ranks at the top. Candidates definitely want to see your salary range, a description of job responsibilities, working conditions, and details about the work environment.
In second place on the list of annoying factors is companies' self-importance. Most candidates are not interested in reading about the prestige and market position of the company in the opening paragraphs of the job listing. It is sufficient to provide the company name, field of activity, and a link to the website. If your job offer piques their interest, candidates will read more about you — including both positive and negative aspects. You need to not just copy the 'selling' content from your company's marketing materials but create similar materials with the aim of selling the opportunity to work for the company instead of the company's products.
The next important idea that not everyone understands is that you need to have job texts, letters, and offers formatted in several ways. Each information delivery channel requires its own format. Very often, job listings are met with rejection and aversion due to a mismatch between the text format and the channel format. Your message may go unread; instead, it could be ignored or sent to the trash simply because of the format mismatch. If you just take the job description from the website and throw it into a personal message on VK, it's very likely to lead to a complaint and a ban. Just like with other advertising messages, it's sensible to test job texts (collecting and analyzing metrics) and refine them.
There’s another common misconception that lowers the chances of finding an employee even with a great offer. Some employers believe that if they require good knowledge of a foreign language, the job posting should be written in that language. As if "our candidate will read and understand it." If they don’t understand it, then they’re not the right fit. Then they complain about the lack of responses. The solution is quite simple – write job postings in the native language of your potential candidates. Even better – write in the primary language of the country where the vacancy is posted. Your candidate will understand your text, but first, they need to notice it, and for that, the text must catch their eye. Search tools usually depend on languages. If a candidate’s resume is in Russian and the job posting is in English, the automatic assistant is unlikely to connect you. Even in manual searches, similar mishaps can occur. Many people, even those who speak foreign languages well, nonetheless have difficulty processing messages in a foreign language when they are in a relaxed state. In my opinion, it’s better to check a candidate's language proficiency in some other, more traditional way after they respond to the vacancy.
Thank you for your attention! I wish everyone to not go hungry and find what they desire!
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Since I have already learned to "somewhat" port QEMU to JavaScript, this time it was decided to do it wisely and not repeat past mistakes.
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