Across the board, demand is outstripping supply and organisations holding out for dream local candidates have stiff competition.
If you’ve been experiencing challenges making a great hire, the problem could lie with your recruitment strategy. For great talent, cast a wide net.
There is an undeniable candidate shortage in the current market.
Across the board, demand is outstripping supply and organisations holding out for dream local candidates have stiff competition.
Pools of exceptional talent that are (a) local, (b) available and (c) skilled (whether with hard or transferrable skills) are already small.
But they become even smaller when you factor in competition from local direct and indirect competitors as well as geographically distant organisations that have embraced workplace flexibility and remote work.
So, if you are unable to source a candidate who ticks all three boxes, it’s time for a different approach.
When local, available, and skilled are not all on the table, it’s time to remove the least necessary requirement. In this case, locality.
If the position you are hiring for can be made entirely remote, you can effectively pull a candidate from any location, including internationally. If the position instead requires some time in the office (whether weekly, monthly, or quarterly), your candidate pool can still be at a national level.
To quantify just how much your talent pool can be limited by location, let’s look at some examples.
Take a Software Engineer.
It’s currently estimated that there are 30,600 workers in Australia in this pool, both available, employed, or underemployed. If you limit the location to just NSW, this pool shrinks to 12,760. It drops even further if you exclude metropolitan markets.
We can see the same thing happening for the positions below:
Again, keep in mind that these numbers are only indicative of all workers in the space, including those employed.
Not all jobs are suitable for remote positions. Positions most suitable for remote work include those with elements of:
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