Why getting the first job is harder

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Why getting the first job is harderThe growing gap between demand for workers and supply of jobseekers is a paradox seen across the world today. Corporations complain about lack of employable talent and job seekers complain of lack of jobs in the market. The reason for this lies in what economists refer to as ‘information void’ or ‘information asymmetry’.
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The paradox seems to get more complex in the entry level scenario. In this context, the most common argument we hear is that we need as many new jobs each year as the number of students entering the job market. At the same time, we need to ensure that the students passing out of college are employable or job ready i.e. they have the knowledge, abilities and skills to perform well in the jobs in the industry. While there are concerted efforts directed towards training and skilling of the young workforce, there are two fundamental challenges that make these efforts misaligned.

Inefficient entry level hiring: There can be two instances here -

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Firstly, even if a candidate is employable for a given job, he/she does not end up getting it. This is often the case with a student from a tier 2 or 3 college who remains invisible to recruiters despite being job ready. The Aspiring Minds National Employability Report (NER) 2014 highlights that an applicant from a tier 3 campus has 25% lower odds of getting a job.

For instance, Ankit Pansari, a B.E. in Electronics and Communication from Chhattisgarh was unable to find a job for over a year. He was struggling with walk-in interviews when he decided to give the AMCAT test. With the help of a good score, he got the opportunity to showcase his skill set to potential employers and eventually got hired by Mindtree. The scores here acted as an objective assessment of his skills thereby allowing him to get past barriers like tier of city or college.

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The second instance is where candidates who are unfit for a particular job role still get employed for that role. Though uncommon, this occurs mainly because recruiters are not able to distinguish between a good and not–so–good applicant.

For an experienced candidate, the employer can look at the employment history, past work or the kind of companies he/she was associated with to distinguish a good applicant from the rest. However, the resume of a fresher does not have relevant professional history and is not the best benchmark for judging employability. The skill indicators here include college grades/GPAs, college name, project work done etc. The validity of these parameters, in predicting skills or performance at job, is however, in question.

Skill information gap: Fresh graduates entering the job market have very little information about the skills they need to get hired or be successful in a job of their choice. They also do not have any feedback around their employability and ways to improve job readiness.

Another reason for this widening information gap is the lack of feedback from recruiters. It is a norm observed for most jobs that employers do not share reasons for rejection which leaves the students as well training organizations unclear about the kind of training to be imparted. It is also evident that educational institutions have no standardized or scientific way to get this information and in the absence of this information, students end up making wrong choices.

The fast changing job market powered by rapid growth of technology and new business models has created demand for new roles and profiles which the current curriculum of educational institutions is unable to train for.

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There is an immediate need to plug these voids and the key lies in creating an ecosystem based on standardized assessment of employability skills. Standardized assessments will add objectivity to the entry level recruitment ecosystem by creating scientific and reliable benchmarks of employability thereby benefitting all major stake holders – job seekers, educational institutions and organizations and the nation at large.

(Himanshu Aggarwal is co-founder and CEO, Aspiring Minds, a global leader in job-skills credentialing and matching)

(Image: Indiatimes)