Government statistics released last week showed that the nation’s unemployment rate was 4.27 percent last month, the lowest in 33 months, as local companies continued hiring to meet the strong demand for manpower in many sectors.
Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) said earlier this month that the government’s goal was to bring the nation’s unemployment rate below 4 percent by the end of the year on the back of continued hiring by companies and government efforts to promote employment.
However, just because Taiwanese employers now have more job openings for jobseekers, it does not mean these employers are able to fill their openings apace.
This is a key point in global human resources firm Manpower Inc’s talent shortage report released last week, which indicated that 54 percent of Taiwanese employers have had difficulty filling critical company positions this year — 13 percent higher than a year earlier, and exceeding both the Asia-Pacific average of 45 percent and the global average of 34 percent.
Among the 39 countries polled, the report found Japan to be the country where employers have experienced the largest mismatch between the skills needed for their positions and the employees available in the labor market, with 80 percent of Japanese employers having difficulty in finding the right people to fill vacancies. This was followed by India (67 percent) and Brazil (57 percent), with Taiwan and Australia (54 percent) sharing fifth place.
Exploring the main reasons why employers in Taiwan have difficulty filling positions, 41 percent of the survey’s respondents said it was simply because nobody applied for the job openings. Another 29 percent of employers said it was applicants’ lack of experience and 24 percent blamed candidates’ lack of technical competency as the main reason they had difficulties filling vacancies.
Another 14 percent of respondents attributed the problem to applicants’ lack of business knowledge or formal qualifications.
Other reasons cited by Taiwanese employers included candidates lacking interpersonal and communication skills (7 percent), not possessing the right personality and intelligence (3 percent) or not possessing the right values and mindset (2 percent), according to the report.
Taiwan has participated in Manpower’s global talent shortage survey every year since 2006 and this year’s results show that sales representatives, technicians and researchers have remained the most difficult positions to fill over the past few years. That implies it is time for local companies to re-evaluate their recruitment strategies as old methods seem to fail to help them locate suitable candidates. It is especially true for companies that survived the 2009 recession — experiencing the economic downturn having taught them to do more with less.
However, companies are unable to solve the talent shortage problem alone. They need help from the government. Businesses can provide extra on-the-job training for staff, expand talent searches outside of the country and increase salaries and benefit packages to deal with the job-skill gap, but they would do even better to close that gap by partnering with educational institutions and government employment agencies to transform the unemployed into candidates who possess the necessary experience and skills for new jobs.
Therefore, in spite of the nation’s improving jobless rate, the government needs to continue investing in the job-training programs it set up during the recession. Moreover, as many employers complain about the professional skills students learn at school failing to meet their expectations, the government needs to step up coordination with educational institutions to develop curricula that meet job descriptions in the post-recession era.
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