It’s the skills gap, stupid!

by Dave Hall

Almost every econ­omy is expe­ri­enc­ing a well-documented skills gap due to the short­age of IT pro­fes­sion­als. But there’s another skills gap that poses a poten­tially big­ger prob­lem: the abil­ity to iden­tify skills and map that avail­abil­ity to a company’s hir­ing needs.

In very small com­pa­nies the founder(s) is usu­ally deeply involved in build­ing the team and can usu­ally iden­tify tal­ent when they see it. Some very large com­pa­nies keep tech recruit­ment in spe­cial­ist tech recruit­ment teams with input from hir­ing man­agers. This helps.

The prob­lem is that a lot of peo­ple in a lot of com­pa­nies, includ­ing some recruit­ment agen­cies, some­times don’t know what they’re actu­ally look­ing for.

I was con­tacted a few weeks ago by a can­di­date look­ing for work as a Java devel­oper in Dublin. He has 1.5 years expe­ri­ence. He has an under-grad and a post-grad in com­puter sci­ence. He is flu­ent in Eng­lish and Ger­man. His salary expec­ta­tions are real­is­tic. He’s a great com­mu­ni­ca­tor and a nice guy.

Why doesn’t he have a job yet? It’s the skills gap, stu­pid! The skills gap to iden­tify his tal­ent and map it to the hir­ing needs of a com­pany. We need to be hon­est about this and we need to fix it. It’s the weak­est link in the chain and if it’s bro­ken then the whole recruit­ment process will remain broken.

Con­tact me now if you want to talk to the Java devel­oper. John (at) makeitinireland.com