Why is it so hard to find good talent?

Evan Le
Evan Le
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

It’s not that good talent doesn’t exist.

There’s plenty of good people out there who are really good at what they do… but still have trouble getting a job.

I have many friends who are in this position.

Pretty successful in their careers or college, yet unable to translate that into moving to another work place.

Are there really a shortage of jobs, or are people just getting worse at the skill of getting a job?

Let’s look at the numbers:

The number of jobs available has seen a trend of going up every year, yet I hear people say that there are no jobs.

Image from Bureau of Labor Statistics (source).

So it doesn’t seem to be the problem that “there are no jobs”.

They exist.

But people are having trouble finding the right one.

So where is the disconnect?

It’s that both sides — companies and job-seekers — do a terrible job at communicating what their needs are.

Companies put up stock-standard job descriptions with barriers like “college-degree required” or “3 years of Y experience required” and block out candidates with great potential.

Job-seekers stand stifled, and intimidated at this wall of “requirements”.

  • What if there’s a marketing expert who has 3 years of experience building multi-million dollar campaigns, but he doesn’t have a degree?
  • What makes that person less than the person with a marketing degree but with 3 years in the same junior role they got when they first started?

These ideal Franken-candidates don’t exist.

And companies are losing out on great candidates by listing out so many requirements.

This isn’t a dating site.

Stop trying to intimidate your soulmate/candidate by listing the requirements of who you think the ideal person should be.

How do we improve the synchrony of this process?

Companies: be vulnerable and post what you need help on.

  • Maybe your marketing has only been generating leads at 25% of their quarterly goal and you need someone to fix that.
  • Maybe your HR department needs a more robust way of increasing communication in the workplace and you need someone to fix that.

When job-seekers don’t know what the problem is — they can’t craft a solution to fix it.

So give them something to fix.

(I think engineering job placements do a good job of this actually, with coding assignments.)

It’s not all the company’s fault.

Many job-seekers also do a terrible job at approaching the hiring process as well. They’ve been trained to send out 100’s of cookie-cutter resumes.

That’s not a good thing either.

But until companies start being more open to their “requirements”, they’re going to continue to miss out on Prince Charming.


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Evan Le

Written by

Evan Le

Founder and CEO at GrowthLion | Growth and video marketing

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