Employers Struggling to Find the Skills to Accelerate Agility

Gulf emerging between the skills firms need and those available on the job market

Firms are searching for new team members with the skills to help them accelerate agility and meet the challenges of a changing world. But they are struggling to find recruits with the right skills to fill job vacancies.

Assessing people’s skills during recruitment can help ensure they find the right ones, says online assessment provider Questionmark.

The skills firms need are changing. Companies listed 33% more skills on job adverts in 2020 than they did in 2017.¹ And job seekers are not always honest about what they can deliver. Some 78% of job applicants admit to misrepresenting, or considering misrepresenting, their skills during the application.²

The United States government recently reported 9.2 million unfilled job vacancies. A similar number of people are searching for work.³ This suggests a mismatch between the skills employers need and those available.

The new Questionmark report, “Skills, Culture, Vocation: Finding the Right Recruits” encourages employers to improve their recruitment decisions by:

1. Checking the skills of job candidates – assessments give real information about a candidate’s current skills base. Questionmark provides the platform to build and deliver bespoke tests for a wide variety of needs.
2. Testing for judgment – situational judgment assessments (SJAs) are a way of measuring if a candidate can make considered decisions.
3. Measuring potential – Questionmark Thinking Skills by Cambridge Assessment enables employers to measure critical-thinking abilities which can indicate how a candidate might develop throughout their career.

John Kleeman, Founder of Questionmark, said: “To accelerate their agility and thrive in a changing business environment, employers are seeking more skills than ever before. By testing the abilities of candidates during the recruitment process, hirers may discover that a potential employee has more skills than their resume suggests.

“Candidates won’t always tick all the boxes, but by measuring potential, an employer can identify who has the aptitude to learn and develop.”

Read the full report: “Skills, Culture, Vocation: Finding the Right Recruits”.

www.questionmark.com

Ends

Notes to editors

About Questionmark

Questionmark unlocks performance through reliable and secure online assessments.

Questionmark provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world, delivered with care and unequalled expertise. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. Questionmark enables organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible.

Questionmark offers secure powerful integration with other LMS, LRS and proctoring services making it easy to bring everything together in one place. Questionmark's cloud-based assessment management platform offers rapid deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, 24/7 support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited U.S., Australian and European-based data centers.

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¹ https://hbr.org/2021/01/9-trends-that-will-shape-work-in-2021-and-beyond

² https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/19/how-many-job-seekers-lie-on-their-job-application.html

³ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/07/12/the-great-jobs-mismatch-why-companies-arent-hiring-and-candidates-cant-find-jobs/?sh=67fbaecc276c

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210727005200/en/