Why are so many qualified candidates being rejected by modern automated hiring systems?

Is the reported skills gap actually a result of unrealistic employer expectations and low wages?

Analyze Peter Cappelli’s research on why the “skills shortage” is often a recruitment failure rather than a talent deficit. Learn how inflated job requirements, rigid screening software, and a lack of on-the-job training create unnecessary barriers for skilled professionals and employers alike.

Dive into the full analysis below to restructure your recruitment strategy or navigate the hiring maze with evidence-based insights from Cappelli’s findings.

Genres

Economics, Corporate Culture, Education, Career & Success

Cut through hiring myths to spot real fixes and boost your recruiting or job hunt.

Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (2012) argues that the so-called “skills gap” stems more from employers’ hiring practices than from a lack of qualified workers. It shows how inflated requirements, rigid screening systems, and cuts to training create talent shortages, and outlines pragmatic fixes such as clearer job definitions, investing in training, and hiring for potential.

Hiring shouldn’t feel like a maze. Yet if you’ve searched for a role or tried to staff one, you’ve seen the disconnect firsthand: overflowing applicant pools, automated hoops to jump through, jobs that never seem to close. Employers say they can’t find the right talent. Candidates say they can’t get a fair look. Schools are told to fix it while everyone waits. Beneath the headlines, the mechanics of how work is defined, how candidates are screened, and who pays to build skills shape what happens next.

In this summary, you’ll learn why “shortages” persist even with many jobseekers, how hiring technology and exact-match expectations filter out capable people, where pay and experience requirements do the real steering, and what practical training models actually work.

So why do vacancies linger while strong applicants line up?

Productivity gains and hiring habits explain vacancies despite abundant jobseekers

In the years after the financial crisis, company profits rebounded while many people still couldn’t find work. The headline blame fell on “missing skills,” but the basic math points elsewhere. By early 2012, productivity had risen about 6.7 percent since 2008, while the whole economy had grown only about 1.2 percent. That means employers could handle roughly the same demand with about 5.5 percent fewer workers. At the same time, the population – and typically the labor force – was about 4 percent larger, adding more job seekers to the mix. Start from a pre-crisis unemployment rate near 5 percent and you’d expect today’s figure to be much higher. It wasn’t, largely because many discouraged workers stopped actively searching, and the official rate only includes those looking for work.

How we picture hiring widens the mismatch between open roles and available workers. For many, a vacancy is treated like a replacement part; define exact specs, find a perfect match, snap it in. Real workplaces don’t work that way. Teams keep going with an empty seat, tasks get spread or delayed, and because firms track costs more than the value each role creates, leaving a job open can look frugal even when it slows the business.

There isn’t one perfect match for any job anyway. The same results can come from different mixes of skills, and requirements tighten or loosen with the market. Employers can buy fully formed talent or hire for baseline ability and allow time to learn. Whichever looks cheaper usually wins. Since the downturn, searching has gotten easier and cheaper, applicant pools are bigger, and recruiting effort per vacancy has dropped. That encourages waiting longer for an ideal – or cheaper – candidate.

Competition is relative, so overqualified applicants push aside those who are merely qualified. Degrees act as signals: finishing one pays off more than taking years of classes without a diploma, and GED holders earn less than traditional high school graduates. Overeducation has grown – about three times more common than undereducation – and has more than doubled over a generation. Put together, economics, fuzzy measurement of role value, and selective hiring habits keep the disconnect in place.

With that context in mind, you might be asking why those “shortage” claims keep popping up – are they real or a measurement quirk? The next section looks at what those surveys and headlines are actually counting.

Skills-shortage headlines reflect employer choices on pay, experience, and mobility

Turn on the news and you’ll hear that employers can’t find qualified applicants. That sounds clear until you actually look at what’s being measured and what firms are asking for. Surveys do capture frustration: about half of companies say recent hires aren’t fully prepared, and 52 percent report hiring is hard. Internationally, the United States ranks seventh out of 39 countries for the frequency of complaints – higher than several European economies and more than double China – while also having roughly three times more job seekers per opening than Scandinavia. Headlines are simple; the story underneath isn’t.

There are a few myths that keep this narrative alive. First is the belief that candidates lack the right skills. That weakens when you scan the roles labeled “hardest to fill,” which stretch from laborers and production operators to sales reps, technicians, skilled trades, engineers, accounting and finance, and office support – many learned on the job and not a single, missing capability that would explain widespread shortages.

Then there’s pay. Only about 11 percent of firms that report shortages admit wages are the snag, which likely understates the issue. When offers sit below the going rate, or ask for big trade-offs like relocation, the pool of qualified takers shrinks; that’s a pricing problem, not a skills problem.

Experience is another sticking point. Among employers who report shortages, lack of knowledge ranks below lack of experience. Many want someone who can contribute immediately, which often means someone who has already done the same job, narrowing supply and favoring yesterday’s methods over renewal.

Finally, mobility. Qualified workers aren’t always willing to move, and with good reason. By 2011, only about one in four job seekers was willing to relocate – roughly half the late-1990s rate – because uprooting families for uncertain roles is a big ask.

Put together, the pattern looks less like a sweeping shortage and more like employer choices about pay, immediate experience, and relocation expectations. The next section looks at the supply side to see whether workers really lack the basics.

Long-run data show basics are solid and pipelines broadly responsive

Let’s turn down the headlines and look at what the data actually say about the supply of talent. The familiar story claims job seekers aren’t ready for modern work, but employers mostly complain about something else. For decades, surveys have put punctuality, time use, motivation, and reliability at the top of the gap list, with academics far lower. A mid-1990s national employer census led with work attitudes, a 2009 business survey did the same, and a 2011 poll of hundreds of hiring managers named only communication as a top attribute tied directly to academics. That steady pattern doesn’t look like a sudden collapse in basic schooling.

What about schools overall? Long-run trends are more positive than the panic suggests. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading scores for nine-year-olds in 2008 were the highest since 1971, and math scores for nine- and thirteen-year-olds set records. Advanced math and science course-taking doubled from 1982 to 2004, and dropout rates for low-income students fell by half from 1972 to 2009. Internationally, the United States sits around the middle, but that average hides big local differences; raising the lowest-performing districts would move the national needle fastest.

Now, college. About 70 percent of high school graduates start four-year programs, 57 percent finish within six years, and roughly 42 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 hold at least an associate degree. Completion is a real efficiency problem, and countries like Korea now exceed that share. Still, the “wrong majors” narrative misses how students have shifted: business degrees have tripled since 1970, computer and IT degrees are about fifteen times higher, and health degrees have quintupled, while the physical sciences were flat and engineering rose only modestly.

A good case study is information technology. The field swings with the market, students follow those signals, and four-year lags flip from shortages to gluts and back again – so a perfectly timed pipeline at a preferred wage is unrealistic. Meanwhile, only an estimated 10 to 15 percent of those hit by the Great Recession faced a sizable mismatch. New technology often automates tasks rather than raising required skills, and employer choices ultimately shape how much skill most jobs actually need.

With that context in mind, the next section shifts from talent to process and shows how today’s hiring systems manufacture scarcity.

Automated, exact-match hiring creates artificial scarcity and keeps seats empty

Plenty of capable applicants apply, yet roles stay open because the spot where supply meets demand now runs on software and risk avoidance. Online portals made applying easy and HR leaner, so automated screens now do more of the sorting. Meanwhile, managers often can’t agree on what they want, post broad descriptions that attract floods of candidates, then tack on wish lists to guarantee a day-one performer. Pipelines fill up, and systems tuned to avoid mistakes default to “no.”

You see the same pattern across many searches. A single opening quietly absorbs work that used to sit in two or three jobs, and each extra task becomes a non-negotiable checkbox in the system. The bar rises because bundling looks efficient on paper – and because every added requirement can be encoded as a hard filter.

Once those requirements are in software, small items become gates. A temp doing the job well fails a personality screen. An engineer who could learn a simple tool quickly is blocked because the posting requires a specific brand name. A solid candidate is rejected because their past title doesn’t match an internal label. Pay screens add another trap. If applicants won’t click “yes” to a preset wage, the system drops them, turning a pricing choice into a supposed talent shortfall and nudging others to underbid.

This explains how no one qualifies. If an applicant has a 50 percent chance of clearing each requirement, two hurdles leave one in four; ten take you to roughly one in a thousand. It doesn’t take many narrow filters to whittle thousands down to zero. And when no one passes, legal pressure to treat everyone the same makes it risky to pull near-misses back for human review, so the process stays locked.

What looks like a skills gap is largely a process gap. Overstuffed requisitions, brittle algorithms, wage gating, and legal caution filter out people who could succeed after a short ramp-up. Simplifying requirements and putting judgment back in the loop is how seats get filled.

Now let’s look at how overfiltering and undertraining reinforce each other – and why loosening exact-match expectations helps break the stalemate.

Underinvestment in training drives the stalemate; flexibility and ramp-up beat delay

Employers say they need job-ready talent, yet many hesitate to create it. Surveys show the dominant reason for holding back on training is cost, cited by 76 percent of firms. Nearly a fifth worry that newly trained workers will leave. When every company wants someone prepared from day one and few are willing to invest, vacancies linger and frustration grows on both sides of the market.

A faster path exists: relax exact-match hiring and allow time for newcomers to learn the specifics. One small publisher did exactly that. A candidate with strong writing but little production experience was asked how he would run the magazine, then invited to start two days later on probation. The approach was simple – hire for drive and self-management, let skills build on the job, and keep salaries aligned with ramp-up. Most hires contributed quickly because the door to learn was open. Contrast that with teams that keep searching while admitting they lack the structure to bring new people up to speed; months pass, promising applicants move on, and the vacancy remains.

The economics favor flexibility. Take a role with a $90,000 salary and a total employment cost around $120,000. In lines of work where contributions are visible, such as sales, the value tied to that seat can run several times compensation. Leaving it open can cost more than filling it and funding a learning period. Without tracking the cost of open seats, organizations underestimate how much they can profitably spend on training.

Workers, for their part, are ready to meet employers halfway. In a related survey, 81 percent said they would pursue training outside work, though 41 percent were unsure which skills would actually pay off. That uncertainty is amplified by thin vocational pathways in the United States: enrollments have grown while funding has fallen, and strong work-based systems like those in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia are rare.

A few firms break the stalemate by hiring for attitude and continually upgrading skills, and they report little trouble finding talent. Most will need a broader fix: rethink how training is financed so investment makes sense when careers are mobile, or accept that the queue of unfilled jobs will keep stretching.

So, how can you make this happen? The final section lays out practical models that make development pay.

Close the gap by co-training with schools and investing on the job

When vacancies linger while capable applicants queue up, the problem often sits in how hiring is done. Employers chase “perfect fits” for loosely defined roles and lean on software that screens out people who could succeed with a short ramp-up. Pushing the gap onto schools sounds nice, but classroom courses don’t teach experience-based skills. Students are left guessing what employers will want next.

The practical fix is to build skills where the work happens. The gap is in abilities best learned on the job, after years of shifting from internal development to outside hiring. That raises a fair question in a mobile labor market: how do you make training pay? One real-world approach shows the math can work. A freight company short of drivers set up yard-based schools, promised jobs on completion, and asked trainees to learn on their own time while the company provided instruction. In 18 months, nearly 440 drivers graduated and retention was about 98 percent. Vacancies closed fast enough to offset program costs, and the firm got people it trusted.

There are many versions of the same idea – classic in-house programs, partnerships with community colleges and technical centers, employer consortia, and paid apprenticeships that blend classroom basics with supervised, billable work. The goal is the same: shorten the distance from learning to contribution. Evidence favors growing talent inside. In large companies, outside hires into the same managerial roles took about three years to reach the performance of insiders. Insiders needed roughly seven years to catch up to outsiders’ higher pay.

So why isn’t this everywhere? Many firms don’t manage talent like the rest of the supply chain. They don’t know what an open seat really costs, when to relax inflated requirements, or whether training would beat an endless search. Lean HR teams and years of easy “buy, don’t make” recruiting hollowed out that capability. Meanwhile, public debate is driven by employer groups that rarely ask members to fund training, and a for-profit market has grown where individuals now earn about half of all skills credentials. Either way, employers pay – through higher wages for ready-mades or through development.

The way forward is a practical middle ground: build closer ties between employers and educators through co-ops, internships, and integrated coursework, and invest again in learning on the job. The main constraint is participation; the reward is fewer open roles and better-prepared hires.

Conclusion

The main takeaway from this summary to Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs by Peter Cappelli is that skill shortages are largely self-made: exact-match hiring, underinvestment in training, and mispriced wages create empty seats despite ready talent. Streamline requirements, price roles to market, rebuild on-the-job learning with school partnerships, and matches improve quickly. Do that, and vacancies shrink, careers open up, and organizations get stronger. That’s proof that better choices can unlock opportunity for everyone.