Blog with Rob: Still have open jobs? Here’s why you may not be able to fill them

With the unemployment rate slowly and steadily ticking downward, you’d think that open jobs would quickly be filling up. However even with the current unemployment rate at 6.1%, employers aren’t quite packing on the jobs.  This may not surprise you, as one of the common theme I hear from my colleagues is the lack of qualified candidates for their open positions.

MIT’s Sloan School of Management recently completed a nationally representative survey of about 1,000 manufacturing firms and found that about 25 percent of companies appeared to be having trouble finding workers, as measured by the company having a job vacancy for three months or more.

The staffing firm Manpower’s also recently released a survey which found that 39 percent of U.S. employers are having trouble finding employees who have the right skills, a drop from 49 percent in 2012.

So the verdict? 1 of 4 employers is having trouble filling a job. While some companies, like AT&T and Starbucks are rolling out low-cost plans to help employees get an education, a small business doesn’t have that luxury.  So what can we do? Find the best candidate who you feel will be a great addition to the team, and just accept that they will require more training than you had hoped. Is this unfortunate? Yes, it’s a drain on time and resources, but leaving a position empty can have the same effect. So good luck and happy hiring!