Employers stumble over own biases in looking for talents

Companies are doing a disservice to themselves by increasing requirements for entry-level tech positions, the CEO of an education and skilling NGO told Euractiv in an interview.

Companies all over Europe are complaining about a skills shortage. Part of it is just an economy working as it should – one would expect companies to be short of workers in an economy with low unemployment.

Of course, especially for tech roles that need specialised digital skills, companies could absorb many more recruits than are available.

However, as a recent study by the education and skilling NGO Generation found, many employers are making their own lives harder than they should be.

In a survey of more than a thousand employers across eight countries, 61% of respondents said that they had added education- or experience-related hiring requirements for entry-level tech roles in the past three years. Moreover, the report finds that true entry-level jobs are a thing of the past, with 94% of employers saying that they required prior work experience in a related field for entry-level tech positions.

But why would employers increase the hiring requirements if they are already short of skilled labour?

“That’s the paradox,” Mona Mourshed, Generation CEO told Euractiv, saying that, even though there has been “a very big push on skills-based hiring” in the past year, this movement had not yet won the day.

The data, however, suggests that this should change.

According to the report, 62% of employers see a need to overhaul the entry-level tech hiring process.

Moreover, companies that have moved towards a skills-first hiring process and who have reduced requirements for entry-level tech positions seem not to have regretted it: 58% of companies that have removed work or education requirements have received more applicants than before. Also, 84% of the companies that have reduced the requirements say that applicants performed the same or better than peers.

However, Mourshed said, “change can be daunting”, arguing that the idea that applicants need a certain degree and that they needed a certain amount of work experience was deeply ingrained.

“Some employers do have a perception bias that a university degree means you’re going to learn faster on the job, or if you have work experience you will learn faster on the job,” she said. And with all the changes that are likely to come due to AI, many companies now think that this skill is all the more important.

“It’s a bias, but it’s a powerful one,” Mourshed said.

Middle management

An additional reason for companies to have higher requirements is their lack of middle managers, according to Mourshed: “Employers are saying, ‘no, I need someone with three years of work experience for this entry level role because they can’t need excessive management.'”

Asked whether she thinks companies will change their recruitment strategy, Mourshed remained cautious.

“In general, companies do things for a reason,” she said. “It is only when the talent crunch becomes significantly severe that it adversely affects growth or it adversely affects productivity and quality, whatever it might be. That’s when you have the real motivation for many companies to do something different than what they had done in the past.”

She stressed that a minority of companies had already changed their hiring policies towards more skills-based recruitment.

“But for a majority of companies external factors and also just internal growth factors are likely what is going to really drive a change in behaviour.”

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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