Business media and survey results in LinkedIn seem to suggest that there is a huge digital skills and talent shortage. At the same time there appears to be more than enough digital tech talent looking for work. There is obviously some mismatch going on but what’s behind this?
Digital tech talent and candidates with digital skills is a broad description that can mean different things to different people, it could mean performing simple tasks online, understanding digital marketing or complex coding and data science work for example. According to recent research from LinkedIn 150 million new technology jobs will be created in the next five years yet 40% of the UK’s working population lack digital skills, similarly a report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2020 found that 61% of the active population in the UK had digital skills.
These reports and numbers can be somewhat misleading and should be digested with caution. The real skills and talent shortage most likely occurs in coding developer roles and to some extent digital marketing roles too. Recruiters that complain they cannot fill open roles are likely targeting a very limited market by focusing on candidates with between 3 and 5 years’ experience along with the lower salaries that reflect that experience level. By using this narrow-visioned approach for a candidate specification the recruiting organisation has created its own talent shortage. There are tens of thousands of capable candidates with more than 5 years’ experience willing to accept salaries being offered who are currently looking for work.
The problem is less about a shortage in digital talent and lack of digital skills but more likely the nature of the recruitment and selection process. By creating a person specification that limits potential candidates the recruiter creates a candidate shortage themselves. Open roles and person specifications should be much broader when considering experience and salary level and just changing experience required from 3 – 5 years to over 3 years can open up access to previously excluded candidates. Recruiters and human recourses should place more emphasis on the skills required rather than a range of years’ experience required for example. Using hiring tool technologies can assist in the recruitment and selection process for digital tech talent where talent can be matched on skills in a more intelligent way.
One such company who are game changing the face of recruitment by providing a robust process to ensure more efficient recruitment using any channel is Hire Digital, a start-up recruitment company with a global presence that has invested heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage the digital tech recruitment process. Their talent management software platform gives digital talent recruiters a strict criterion for posting job adverts and descriptions and their AI works in such a way that it generates a much smaller more targeted candidate list by using up to 40,000 attributes. They key to this is efficiency, recruiters spend less time generating job advertisements and trawling through hundreds of CV’s to get their shortlist, Hire Digital tech can rapidly access up to 1bn talent globally.
Hire Digital is an AI technology with a human touch that is completely revolutionising the recruitment and selection process. It’s two times faster, 50 % cheaper and ten times more accurate than traditional hiring tech. To find out more speak to Robin Brohl at Hire Digital he is a real person and would love to engage with you and help you streamline your recruitment processes.