Central Florida’s Record Number of Job Openings in All Sectors Challenging Employers and Recruiting Budgets

Hiring Challenges are Abundant in Central Florida.

 

OrlandoJobs.com just released the 2019 Central Florida Employment report. (To download at no cost, click here). We asked employers many questions about the state of hiring at their company in Central Florida. One of the questions asked employers to share their hiring challenges. There were many but here are some highlights.

The top five hiring challenges employers are facing in Central Florida:

  1. Unqualified candidates are applying to open positions. No matter what source is being used, all employers indicated they are just getting too many unqualified applicants. This has been the number one issue for the last ten years of this survey. We asked a few employers why they thought that the wrong people are apply to their jobs and found some interesting answers. The top response from employers was that no one reads the job description. Other reasons include record low unemployment and how it has decreased the volume of qualified job seekers. Unqualified job seekers have always applied to jobs but this year, very few qualified job seekers are part of the application pool.
  1. Retention of current employees. Companies indicated that they are losing employees to their competitors. This seems to be a trend not only in Florida but the entire country. The “quit rate” is 2.7% and is the highest it has been since the great recession. People are quitting for better jobs and compensation without the fear of being the “low man” on the totem pole. Employers surveyed that they are having a hard time increasing salary to stay competitive and keep employees. This is not only in the professional services sector but also in the hourly wage sector. Companies like Amazon ($15.00 hr.) and Universal ($12.00 hr.) have raised their starting minimum wages. Disney has already committed to $15.00 over the next couple of years. For employers who are still under $10.00 an hour, this is a huge issue. Especially since our service industry has over 270,000 employees.
  1. Budget and resources to recruit top talent. How do you find great talent if everyone is working? Just posting a job on the company career site isn’t attracting the talent at the pace necessary to grow businesses. Surveyed companies mentioned they need more budget so they can use multiple resources to find talent. Many companies also indicated they are spending money at live job fairs, social media recruiting campaigns and multiple job boards at the same time to fill open requisitions.
  1. Construction/Skilled Trade jobs in a huge shortage. Central Florida is growing and with that is a tremendous number of openings in the skilled trades and construction sector. These higher paying jobs are everywhere. Employers indicated finding skilled workers so difficult that many jobs go unfilled causing delays in projects and slowing down growth. Construction jobs are almost back to an all-time high.
  1. Time to hire. In extremely low unemployment, companies with drawn- out hiring processes are losing good talent before they can even get a chance to offer them the job. Initial contact, background checks, drug screens, multiple interviews, and scheduling are the main reasons employers indicated they could get qualified talent in their workforce. All employers understand the issues. They just have their hands tied with company policies that are not very flexible. Four companies indicated that they are giving more contingent offers based on passing the background checks and drug screens.

 

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