Outsourcing Toolkit

Story: Microsoft warns of 'acute' UK skills shortage

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I wonder if the issue is more to do with the way folks are recruited. In the proverbial "Good Old Days" you went to a recuitment agent, who interviewed you and worked out who you were and what it was you were good at. It was actually quite a skill. (S)he then went out on your behalf and tracked down jobs that fitted. To do this, the agent had to actually understand the field they were recruiting for.

Now it is completely inverted. The employers go to the agent who bids the lowest. They then trawl up a pile of random CVs and do a text pattern match on the trawl. The ones that look to have the same characters in the same order get sent on. They need have no clue about the fields for which they recruit. In fact the less they know, the cheaper they are and the more likely they are to get the gig.

The new breed have no way of crossmatching between comparable skills. No way of spotting that someone has a huge field of expertise and many similar transmutable skills. If it says MegaWibble Version 3 in the spec and the same in the CV you're in.

The end result here is that the newcomers don't stand a chance as they have no text sequences to put on their CVs. The Oldies also don't get much of a look in, as they know KiloWibble Version 3 backwards and haven't yet had a look at the Newly rebadged MegaWibble .... which is pretty much identical, but sadly uses different characters in its name.

When you have been in the industry for a while, you will realise that pretty much all products in a given field, work in pretty much the same way. The learning curve for someone already skilled in other members of the group will be minimal, plus they will have a more complete view of the field in general and may well be able to suggest better ways of doing stuff, inspired by the way other products in that field work.

In an industry that mutates as blindingly quick as ours, we need a far more intelligent recruitment methodology. If we don't, we will end up with one side saying they can't find people to do the jobs and the other saying they can't get a job, even with good skills ... Oh, wait a minute !

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