Skill Management and Candidate Evaluation: Bill Clinton's Take
On a recent episode of Meet the Press, President Bill Clinton was asked what the biggest contributor to poverty growth is in the USA. The obvious answer might be insufficent welfare or ineffective charities.
Instead, Pres. Clinton identified another root cause entirely: a mismatch between candidate skills and industry needs. In other words, America has one gigantic skill management problem.
Analyzing Skills Pays the Bills
Below is an excerpt from the transcript of President Clinton’s statements:
…Where are the jobs going to come from? Where's the money to finance them going to come from? And can people do them? For the first time in my lifetime, David, we are coming out of recession with posted job openings. …They're going up twice as fast as job hires in this horrible economy. Why? …way the biggest problem, is there's a skills mismatch. The jobs that are being opened don't have qualified people applying for them…There are five million people who could go to work tomorrow if they were trained to do the jobs that are open, and the unemployment rate in America would immediately drop from 9.6 to about 7 percent or 6.9.
A mismatch of skills and jobs is definitely a major problem. President Clinton suggests training new workers is the best means of addressing the problem...but this is only part of the solution.
Meet Your Match
The other part of the solution is what project teams do every day: candidate analysis and resource matching.
Why do job recs stay open for weeks or months without being filled? It's not because a qualified person didn't apply for the job. It's because after poring through the 20th jargon-laden resume out of the stack of 100, anyone’s eyes will start to glaze over.
In other words: hiring managers lack efficient tools to match candidates to tasks. In some cases, companies will simultaneously hire and fire because of a lack of visibility into their internal candidate skills and resource availability.
Training would address America's short-term need to develop a workforce for the current, technology-centric economy. But a streamlined, effective toolset to evaluate skills and candidates would become a sustainable competitive advantage for any company, in any country, in any economy.
We'd love to help you evaluate candiates efficiently and effecively -- simply Download our free resource evaluation tool and then try out our software for free.
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