Are You Qualified for the Job?

If you don't have a degree, there is no need to worry. If you don't have experience at a job, there's no need to worry there either. Since employers are struggling to find workers in the fast-growing labor market, many are beginning to hire candidates who might lack in both skills and experience that were essential parts of the white-collar and blue-collar job force a few years back.

Instead of going to every single factor on the job description, companies are beginning to look for 75-percent and even 70-percent of the job description and for people who are a great fit both potentially and culturally.

Marketing coordinators might excel in social media and digital media, but they might not be a good fit for content writing. A warehouse worker has no prior experience either, but they are aspiring. Even sales vice presidents who have worked previously for technology firms know very little about the industry of consumer products. This kind of people all have something in common, and that is applying for a job that they have no experience in.

Even bigger companies are looking for certain top executives to open the doors to different candidates that do not have experience in these global companies. To fill in these gaps, employers are starting to launch training programs to help train people with little experience to fill those jobs.

Still, other companies are beginning to pick and choose candidates that meet most of the qualifications while bringing on a second worker to handle everything else. This splits the job in two, though it does mean half the salary is paid to each employee.

Businesses everywhere are starting to come around to the idea that basic skills can easily be taught to potential employees. Job candidates for every company should have these innate skills, or soft skills, that often include working well with colleagues and dealing with customers in a professional manner. Companies do not want to sacrifice job requirements for a potential employee who doesn't have those necessary interpersonal skills.

Unfortunately, job candidates with rougher edges are becoming attractive to employers because they have little choice. The low unemployment rate just shows that there are very few workers that are uncommitted to a job. Since July opened up almost 6.2 million jobs, the Labor Department has shown that as many as 2,000 companies were unable to find qualified candidates for their specific job openings this entire year.

Since the job market for candidates is such a turnabout from those Great Recession years, businesses have begun to insist on job applicants that meet at least 9 out of 10 on the checklists. These requirements are starting to falter, however, and they are being waived in many companies. Instead, the companies are starting to target these job seekers who might not have all the experience needed, but they cover all the soft skills. This makes the job markets more available.

Many of the job seekers today are men and women who might have been out of the job force for awhile. Instead of turning them away, companies are looking at their skills and issuing training videos to see if the candidates are capable of doing the jobs at hand.

It often takes a few months to get the job candidates, and potential employees prepared to take over their position, but the process has begun to be trimmed because of training videos and other forms of preparing. This is also helping to save money since they can offer lower salaries to the unskilled hires, but the hires will earn more than they did at their previous places of employment. The attitude of the potential employees is a key, and firms are looking at these people skills.

Other employees are taking a little bit of a different approach to the situation. They start with candidates that have an education. They will hire assistant project managers for these managerial positions for projects, though they are taking a risk. The results of this new hiring deal are costing more money because of the training methods. They have to complete six-week courses in classroom training to get these new hires ready. The flexible hiring idea doesn't always work out the way companies hoped, but it is a success if even 75-percent end up working out.

Some employers are being stubborn and refusing to compromise on these job qualification. This labor market, since it is so tight, is causing people to hire managers that only oversee a few people. If the business deals with things like chemistry or other forms of science, it requires that the employees be skilled in their position and pass inspections by the government. Not everyone can do these jobs, posing problems for skilled labor in this tight labor market.