Apparently, we have a talent shortage. We have had one for quite some time now. Can't find engineers. Can't find nurses. Can't find developers. Can't find leadership skills. Can't find people with AI skills. Can't find experienced people. Can't find young people with enough experience. Employers just can't find the talent. I hear this every year... from the mouths of employers I meet and across countless surveys (filled in by said employers).
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Meanwhile, candidates are applying for hundreds of jobs and hearing nothing back. Graduate vacancies are being hammered. Experienced workers are taking qualifications and years off their CVs in the hopes of getting a call back. Recruiters are drowning in applications. Employers are complaining about receiving too many candidates. How can both of these situations be true at the same time? Something doesn't add up.
Indeed recently found that 56% of employers who said hiring was difficult blamed having too many candidates. Thirty-nine per cent said they were receiving more candidates per vacancy than the previous year. So, just to be clear: we can't find anyone, but there are also too many people applying.
Of course, both things can be true. But perhaps we've reached the point where we need to stop calling every recruitment problem a talent shortage.
Some talent shortages are very real
Let's get this out of the way first.... there are genuine shortages of people with particular skills, in particular places. Absolutely, this is real.
The OECD's research across 36 countries found persistent shortages in areas including healthcare and ICT. Ageing populations are increasing demand for healthcare workers. Digitalisation is increasing demand for particular technology skills. Green industries need capabilities that didn't exist at anything like today's scale a decade ago.
Here in Singapore, the same thing is visible. The Ministry of Manpower found that while overall hiring conditions have eased, the proportion of professional, managerial, executive and technical vacancies sitting unfilled for six months or more actually rose from 14.4% in 2024 to 16% in 2025. Roles requiring specialist expertise, including data scientists and civil engineers, were among the difficult ones to fill.
So yes, talent shortages exist. I'm not trying to argue that every company struggling to recruit has simply cocked up its hiring. But... many have.
The OECD also found that labour shortages look quite different depending on which employer is doing the complaining. Higher-productivity companies were more likely to struggle because they couldn't find people with the specific skills they needed. Lower-productivity companies were more likely to struggle because they offered lower wages, poorer working conditions and weaker recruitment practices. We tend to call both of these things a talent shortage. But we shouldn't. This is what I'd called... an excuse.
Do you have a talent shortage or a salary shortage?
Imagine I put an advert online tomorrow looking for a senior AI engineer. I want ten years' experience, five days a week in the office and I'm offering $45,000/year. Nobody suitable applies. Then I cry about the talent shortage.
Clearly, in this comedy example, the AI engineers are not the problem. There is always a price at which scarce talent becomes considerably less scarce. Yet companies routinely set a salary budget, discover that the people they want cost more than that, and conclude that those people don't exist.
They do exist. You just don't want to pay what they cost. Just like when I walk into the Aston Martin dealership with $20,000, I haven't discovered an Aston Martin shortage.... I've discovered something about my budget.
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Or perhaps the job isn't very good
The OECD research gets even more uncomfortable here. Around 40% of transportation companies reporting shortages said long or unsociable hours contributed to the problem. In mining, 37% of employers experiencing shortages cited unfavourable geographical conditions. Accommodation, healthcare and other sectors reported shortages connected to poor job quality, strenuous conditions, low pay or simply a lack of candidate interest.
For sure, these are real recruitment problems. The vacancies exist and employers can't fill them. But when you unpack the reasons, what we're sometimes saying is that people don't want to work these hours, in this location, doing this job, for this amount of money. Again, that's quite different from there being a talent shortage.
And this is where the employer branding bit starts to matter. Sometimes the talent pool isn't empty. Sometimes the offer just isn't attractive enough.
Maybe you've made the talent pool tiny
We do this all the time. Must have a degree. Must have worked in our industry. Must have eight years' experience. Must already be doing essentially the same job. Must know this particular software. Must live here. Must be willing to come into this building four days a week. Must tick these 14 other boxes. Must be a "culture fit". Then we wonder where everybody is.
There's some wonderfully revealing research on this. Harvard Business School, Accenture and Grads of Life analysed 26 million US job postings and surveyed 600 business and HR leaders looking at what they called "degree inflation".
They found that two-thirds of employers agreed that requiring a bachelor's degree for a middle-skill job made that job harder to fill. You might reasonably expect the next sentence to be: so they stopped doing it.
But, no. Three in five employers were still rejecting experienced, qualified non-graduates in favour of recent university graduates.
Which is quite something. We've made the job harder to fill. We know we've made the job harder to fill. We continue doing the thing that makes the job harder to fill. Then we wonder why the job is so hard to fill.
What on earth happened to that fashionable move towards skills-based hiring, I hear you cry. I cry the same thing, too.
Thankfully, there are signs of change. Singapore's latest vacancy data shows academic qualifications were not the main hiring consideration for 79.6% of vacancies in 2025. Employers increasingly prioritised experience and skills instead, with the Ministry of Manpower reporting benefits from skills-based hiring including faster recruitment, access to a broader talent pool and improved employee performance. Make fewer people automatically ineligible and suddenly you can hire from more people. Who knew?
And then there's the perfect candidate
This might be my favourite version of the talent shortage. Five hundred people apply. The ATS bins 300. The recruiter rejects another 150. The hiring manager sees 50. Ten get interviewed. Four make the final rounds.
One has the right technical skills but hasn't worked in the sector. One has done the job before but wants too much money. One is excellent but would need to work remotely three days a week. One ticks nearly every box but the hiring manager isn't completely convinced they're the right "fit". Nobody is quite right, so the position gets reposted.
Three months later, we're really struggling with the talent shortage. Maybe. Or maybe you're looking for a unicorn.
We do need to be careful with raw application numbers here. Receiving 1,000 applications doesn't mean you've received 1,000 people capable of doing the job. It might not even mean you've received ten. AI has made applying easier and candidate spam is a real problem.
But the scale of what's happening is still extraordinary. Indeed CEO Hisayuki Idekoba recently described a hiring "vicious cycle", with applicants per job reportedly doubling between 2022 and 2025 while recruiter numbers fell 56%.
Candidates apply to more jobs because getting a response has become harder. Employers automate more because they're receiving too many applications. Candidates use more automation because they're being filtered by more automation. Employers receive even more applications. It's going brilliantly.
Even a vacancy doesn't necessarily mean what it used to
There's another wrinkle in all this. Posting a job used to cost money and effort. The internet made it cheap and easy.
Indeed's Hiring Lab has looked at the growing gap between US job openings and actual hiring. In the three months to April 2025, the hiring rate averaged 3.5%, while the job-opening rate was 4.4%. Go back to early 2014, when the hiring rate was also around 3.5%, and the opening rate was only 3%.
Indeed suggests one explanation is simply that advertising jobs has become easier and cheaper. Employers can leave opportunities in the market while waiting to see who turns up. I think this matters because a vacancy can mean "we need someone", but it can also mean "we'd hire someone if exactly the right person happened to come along". Those aren't quite the same thing, even if they both end up counted as an open job.
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And sometimes people simply don't want to work for you
Bringing us back full-circle to employer brand. Imagine two companies need exactly the same talent. They're in the same city, looking for the same skills and roughly the same level of experience. It's a common scenario. Company A gets plenty of good applicants. Company B struggles. Does Company B have a talent shortage?
Maybe. But the talent appears to be mysteriously available to Company A.
Perhaps Company A pays better. Perhaps its managers have better reputations. Perhaps employees recommend it. Perhaps candidates think they'll learn more there. Perhaps it offers flexibility. Perhaps its Glassdoor page isn't a crime scene. Perhaps people actually know what the company does and why they'd want to join. Or perhaps its recruitment process doesn't involve six interviews, a psychometric test, an unpaid case study and three weeks of silence.
At some point, this stops looking like a shortage and starts looking like an attraction problem. "There aren't enough software engineers" is a labour-market problem. "There aren't enough software engineers who want to work for us" is a very different problem altogether. Companies confuse these two all the time.
So what have you actually got?
Before declaring another talent shortage, it might be worth doing a bit of diagnosis. Maybe there genuinely aren't enough people with the capability you need. Fine. That's a real supply shortage. Maybe the people are there but don't have precisely the skills you've specified. Could you train someone who has 80% of them?
Maybe you've defined "qualified" so narrowly that you've excluded perfectly capable people before you've even met them. Maybe the people exist but your salary doesn't. Maybe it's the hours, workload, management, conditions or job security. Maybe you've decided that the human being doing the work must sit in a particular building in a particular city on particular days. Maybe good people are applying and you just keep rejecting them while waiting for someone perfect.
Or maybe the people you want have choices and they're choosing someone else.
The talent isn't always missing
The thing I find most frustrating about "talent shortage" is how conveniently it puts the problem somewhere outside the organisation. The market did it. Demographics did it. Universities aren't producing the right skills. Gen Z doesn't want to work. Experienced people aren't adaptable enough. Candidates have unrealistic expectations. There simply aren't enough good people.
Sometimes that's true. Sometimes there are simply too few people with a particular skill in a particular labour market and employers have to compete like hell for them. Sometimes. But "talent shortage" has become a catch-all explanation for far too many different problems, and some of those problems are entirely self-inflicted.
If the talent exists but won't accept your salary, that's worth knowing. If the talent exists but you've excluded it with unnecessary requirements, that's worth knowing. If the talent exists but your hiring process keeps rejecting it, that's definitely worth knowing. And if the talent exists, knows who you are, understands the opportunity and would simply rather work for somebody else, you don't have the luxury of blaming the labour market.
There's a big difference between a shortage of talent and a shortage of talent prepared to work for you, doing that job, in that place, for that money, under those conditions.
Before you declare another talent shortage, perhaps you should work out which one we've actually got.
Takeaways
1. Not every talent shortage is actually a talent shortage
Genuine skills shortages exist, particularly in specialist roles and specific locations. But “talent shortage” has become a catch-all explanation for all sorts of hiring problems. Before blaming the labour market, employers need to understand what is actually making the role difficult to fill.
2. Sometimes the talent exists. Your salary doesn't.
If qualified people are available but won't accept the salary you're offering, that's not quite the same as those people not existing. Employers need to distinguish between genuine scarcity and talent that's simply more expensive than they've budgeted for.
3. Employers can make their own talent pools unnecessarily small
Degree requirements, industry experience, arbitrary years of experience, location restrictions and endless lists of “must-haves” can exclude perfectly capable candidates. If you've defined “qualified” so narrowly that hardly anyone qualifies, some of your shortage may be self-inflicted.
4. Stop searching for the perfect candidate
Employers can receive hundreds of applications, interview several credible people and still repost the job because nobody ticks every box. At some point, the question isn't whether suitable talent exists. It's whether you're prepared to hire someone who can do the job rather than someone who perfectly matches the person you imagined.
5. “They don't want to work for us” is an employer brand problem
If competitors can attract the same scarce talent that you can't, the labour market can't be the whole explanation. Pay, flexibility, reputation, management, career opportunities, candidate experience and employer brand all affect where people choose to work. There's a big difference between “there aren't enough of these people” and “there aren't enough of these people who want to work for us.”
