The technology skills gap has been a hot topic in the recruitment and IT press lately, with research from CWJobs revealing that two-thirds of tech professionals do not have the necessary skills and experience required to deliver on mobile projects. With mobile IT roles set to be vital within business in just three years' time, this is a concern for the wider industry.
A newly launched “Creative Technology and Enterprise” Masters Course – a hybrid of computing, creativity and business –at Bath Spa University signifies a preemptive drive to fill the gap. However, while on paper such a move seems positive, a year long course is unlikely to be enough to meet the current high demand – not least because employers also want industry experience.
As well as affecting IT professionals’ job prospects and those businesses that need specialist tech employees, the skills shortage also presents a problem for the recruitment sector. Recruiters will be faced with the task of filling vacancies with only a finite number of suitable candidates available. The challenge for recruiters will be identifying those illusive few who possess the required skills and industry experience.
Current basic recruitment technology used by recruitment officers identifies candidates via a keyword match. In other words,if the employer specifies a competency in mobile projects as a required skill in the ideal candidate, then the basic keyword search will present any candidate that mentions the word ‘mobile’ in a CV or application, irrespective of context. This often throws up a huge number of irrelevant applications that the recruiter has to manually sift through – an arduous task that doesn’t solve the problem that they had in the first place!
For recruiters to truly combat the skills gap,they must implement intelligent technology that goes beyond a basic keyword match. CV search tools that utilise natural language semantic meta-search technology enable recruiters to accurately identify those candidates to have held a role that has exposed them to the relevant skills and competency. These intuitive tools also score and rank job seekers according to their level of skill. By automating the search and match process in this way, recruiters can significantly reduce the time spent finding suitable candidates, enabling them to present a shortlist of the best applicants to the employer before anyone else.
A skills shortage shouldn’t hinder the recruitment process – with the right technology, it is a matter of finding those hidden gems!