07 Nov The IT Talent Shortage Debate
Talk to employers and job hunters about the state of the IT talent market, and you hear two words repeatedly: speed and pain. IT leaders must staff projects quickly, often requiring specialized skills that most job hunters — especially generalists or those looking to change tech tracks — don’t have.
As a result, hiring organizations see an IT talent shortage, while job hunters insist that employers are botching the hiring process, screening out too many good candidates. Both sides agree on one thing: They’re frustrated.
Third-party recruiters say that while IT leaders cry shortage and job hunters cry foul, the job slots sit empty for too long, hurting business results and team morale. But they doubt the picture will change unless hiring managers get more creative and realistic, and job hunters come to a fuller understanding of market realities.
Which brings us back to the question: Is there an IT talent crunch? It’s a simple question with no simple answer. InformationWeek asked the IT community: Do you see an IT talent shortage today in one or more technology areas important to your business? Yes, said 73% of respondents at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, and a whopping 88% of respondents at larger companies.
But is a botched hiring process aggravating this talent shortfall? Business technologists are sharply divided: About half of survey respondents at those larger companies see it as broken or too stringent, while 45% of the folks at smaller companies see things that way.
Any discussion of IT hiring must include what companies are willing to pay to fill open positions. Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University and a longtime critic of the H-1B visa program, recently called the IT talent shortage “imaginary,” a front for companies that want to hire relatively inexpensive foreign guest workers. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis who collaborates with Hira, takes the argument a step further: “The biggest single problem, as I’ve said before, is age discrimination,” Matloff says. “The employers typically define job openings to be entry level, automatically rejecting those at the midcareer level.”
Another disliked hiring tactic is a “purple squirrel” hunt, whereby companies seek a job candidate whose mix of skills and experience is impossible to find. “The ‘purple squirrel’ job postings arise in many cases because HR needs a way to thin out the mountains of applicants that they have,” Matloff says. “So again, the claimed shortage is actually an embarrassment of riches.”
Talk with employers and recruiters and you hear a more nuanced story. It’s not just about how many IT job applicants are in the US talent pool, or about salaries, but how the IT hiring process has changed in recent years. Like them or not, would-be applicants need to know the rules of today’s employment game.