Closing the Talent Gap: Innovative Public Sector Strategies
Posted by Lee Ramsayer
Lee Ramsayer is Vice President of Public Sector & Education Sales for Monster Worldwide.
Despite unemployment levels at an all-time high of 9.5%, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that many employers are struggling to find qualified applicants to fill open positions. With so many job candidates on the market, what is causing this discrepancy? Routinely, hiring managers face applicant pools that lack the experience or training necessary to perform specialized jobs.
Closing the talent gap is critical to getting Americans back to work and improving the regional economies that make up the U.S. market. State and local governments have begun to focus more resources on studying their region’s talent gap and addressing the problem with training, education, and online support initiatives that are focused on preparing workers for positions in growing industries.
3 Success Strategies From State and Local Governments:
Here are some strategies that state and local governments have tried across the country:
- Identify where the talent gap exists in your community. By comparing needs of businesses with the skills of the local labor force, communities are able to identify where to invest their training dollars. With an unemployment rate over 14 percent, the second highest in the nation, the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board in California recently partnered with Monster to create an online community that uses Monster’s Real Time Labor Intelligence to pinpoint industries with growing job opportunities in the region and develop initiatives to train job seekers for those industries.
- Focus on education. The Wall Street Journal quoted several hiring managers who are having trouble finding candidates with the experience or training for specialized jobs and noted that “the U.S. education system hasn’t been producing enough people with the highly specialized skills that many companies, particularly in manufacturing, require to keep driving productivity gains.” A study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute on the manufacturing industry’s talent gap discovered that 61% of people surveyed said their community’s school system did not offer curricula that would prepare them for a manufacturing job. After identifying where the gap in their region exists, communities can develop new training programs for specific skills by suggesting new curriculum to local high schools and colleges.
- Create an online community to link business with local job seekers. Regional job websites enable users to communicate and share educational or employment opportunities and also match job seekers and employers. Monster paired with three states to create the Kentucky-Indiana Exchange (KIX) and Ohio Means Jobs sites, which also draw skilled workers to a region in need of specific skills by allowing out-of-state job seekers to easily connect to businesses.
There are clearly innovative approaches to closing the talent gap that are guiding and connecting job seekers and businesses. Adopting these and other strategies will enable state and local governments to reduce unemployment in their regions and get Americans back to work.
To learn how the Federal Government is improving their recruitment and hiring process, click here.
Related Resources:
Monster Government Solutions State & Local/Education Resource Center
Unleash the Monster (Monster Government Solutions Blog)
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About the author: Lee Ramsayer is the Vice President of Public Sector & Education Sales for Monster Worldwide. Lee joined Monster in April of 2007 where he has helped to build a dedicated sales force focused on the development of the state and local and education markets and has created solutions specific to helping regional economies with workforce and economic development. Prior to Monster, Lee held the positions of Vice President at Intelliworks, Inc., General Manager of US State and Local Government Sales and Consulting Services for Microsoft and Vice President of Oracle’s sales vertical focused on the higher education marketplace.
Mon, Aug 23, 2010
Talent Strategies