the futile search for the goldilocks employee

Say you’re an employer in today’s economy and you’ve reached a point when you need to hire more people to meet demand. Considering the current high unemployment rates and the most educated workforce on a quest to either get hired or advance their careers, the absolutely last thing you could ever complain about would be a lack of potential employees, right? Surely there must be plenty of people you can hire, many of them with the kind of skills you can use, out of a job through no fault of their own. And yet, the biggest complaint that some 52% of businesses constantly voice is a supposed lack of employable candidates with the right skills, and this complaint sent many a politician and activist looking for a solution to an educational crisis.

But a new book by Peter Cappelli, an expert in management at one of the nation’s top business schools, lays out a case that it’s not the employees who are the problem, it’s the employers’ unrealistic expectations and a stunning lack of vision and imagination that are to blame for their hiring shortfalls. And it’s a strong case…

We all know people who have impossibly high standards for their romantic partners. We’ve all met the guy whose insistence that he dates professional, doe-eyed underwear models with doctorates in particle physics from an Ivy League institution had us rolling our eyes. And we’ve heard the girl whose daydreams of a tall, but not too tall and handsome, but not too handsome modern day knight in shining armor made us doubt she’d ever even manage to have a relationship. Cappelli argues that from what he’s seen, many companies today behave just like those characters, seeking only the perfect employee and refusing to either train a new generation of workers, or raise the wages to attract the employees of their dreams.

And since they either want an employee who’s been doing the exact job for which they’re hiring for at least three years at a competitor, or will train someone overseas how to do the same job for half the pay, they either end up competing over a very small number of people working for their competitors or hiring for the short term while plowing cash into new overseas ventures that can quickly become a massive liability due to many, many factors. This is not a gap in skills or a deficiency in education on the workers’ part, concludes Cappelli. It’s bad management.

And there’s more. There’s an ongoing boom in vocational schools and medical and tech related fields, so the supposed massive shortage of STEM workers may well be overblown, and we actually do have just enough scientists and engineers out there. However, employers are refusing to pay them adequately and expect them to have not just work experience in the field, but a very specific kind of work experience. Forget the much talked about “transferrable skills” from past careers. No one wants to hear about them. Even worse, while you might be the golden candidate now because you’re applying for the same job at company after company, you’ll have trouble moving up the career ladder because those hiring you want you to keep doing the same job that you’re doing now, not advance into new roles.

Or your job could fall out of favor and you’ll find yourself unemployed in short order, and you’re likely to stay unemployed because employers are now often discarding resumes from those who lost their jobs, often assuming that if you were a good employee, you would still have your job, and if you don’t, this means that you simply weren’t valuable or good enough to keep. How do you combat such an obsessive, all-consuming myopia? And why do we allow the employers who refuse to hire anyone but dream candidates get away with blaming the workers for not living up to their wildest hopes and dreams?

What if we were to continue to follow this asinine game of musical jobs? Employment wouldn’t grow much without an occasional economic bubble to prop up job creation, workers would constantly have to change careers in the attempt to keep up with the latest fad, amassing degree after degree and mountains of debt gambling on the latest major they undertake paying off into a job, wages would remain stagnant, and employers would still be complaining about a lack of qualified candidates, using the term “qualified” as a synonym for “perfect in every single way.”

They’ll keep outsourcing, creating economic bubbles elsewhere and spending billions on efforts to manage the liabilities of sending work thousands of miles away to a group of people they barely know, in a country that will more often than not employ protectionist measures that allow former subcontractors to build their own versions of the companies that once employed them with their bosses-turned-competitors footing the bill for their creation and growth. This is an unstable, unsustainable trajectory, but unfortunately, it seems to be the trajectory we’re following, assuming that the market knows best even when it never did…