VET News

How Do We Measure Difficulties in Recruitment?

The National Skills Commission measures recruitment difficulty through the Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey (REOS), an ongoing survey of employers across Australia, but what does “recruitment difficulty” mean? And what does it tell us about the state of the labour market?

The “recruitment difficulty” rate is one of the most cited outputs from the REOS, however it is also one of the least understood. This article steps through some survey data to explain what it is measuring and how it can be interpreted.

The 'recruitment difficulty rate' is the proportion of recruiting employers who experienced difficulty hiring. Importantly, the recruitment difficulty rate doesn’t relate to all employers, just those currently recruiting or who had recruited in the previous month. “Difficulty hiring” is a subjective measure for the employer to assess.

While recruitment difficulty is undoubtedly a serious issue for a number of employers, there is also an element of a silver lining to this cloud. That silver lining is that recruitment difficulty is not just a function of mismatches (e.g. employers seeking skills in short supply or employers and potential employees being located in different parts of the country), but that recruitment difficulty is often highly correlated to the general strength of the labour market.

That is, when more employers are seeking to hire staff, it quite naturally can become more difficult to find the right employee before they are snapped up by another employer.

Therefore, with the unemployment rate at a low level and job vacancies much higher than prior to the pandemic, at‑least part of the recruitment difficulty being cited by employers will reflect the strength in the jobs market.

For more information about the Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey, see the NSC’s Labour Market Insights page.

Read more here.

Date posted Mar 24, 2022