The talent shortage we created!!

I was speaking to a friend of mine who is a recruiter. He was complaining about the shortage of talent. I asked what he was looking for, he told me and we searched. We found a lot of candidates. We started looking at them and he proceeded to come up with every excuse in the world why they are not a fit.  They had been at the wrong company, not long enough, too long, to many companies, not enough companies, wrong school, wrong degree, wrong part of the country, I heard from someone who heard from someone, and it went on and on. I asked him about it, he said his hiring manager (hm) had a lot of strange predispositions about things, people, companies, schools, etc. I was amazed how they would over look some possibly great candidates for some of the reasons they had. So I asked another friend of mine at the same company, he said there is a lot of HMs like that at his company. I said well what happens to all these candidates. He said some recruiters go behind and tag them and talks with them and a lot get hired. So basically 80% of the recruiters and HMs were coming up with excuses not to talk to candidates. I decided to do a little impromptu survey. I contacted 200 recruiters I knew at various companies, as well as 200 HMs at varying companies, and was amazed that over 92% of them had some weird predisposition about something that resulted in them over looking candidates, that otherwise looked great. Think about that 92% out of 400 that is 368 recruiters and HMs overlooking candidates for reasons that in most cases make no sense. The conclusion is that this “Talent Shortage” is in part our own making, are own predispositions and excuse driven reasons to overlook candidates has helped to create this shortage and until we start looking at things differently we will always have a shortage. Want to help change this, change your and your HMs thought process from finding reasons not to talk with candidates to finding reasons to talk to candidates. If you do that then this so called shortage will not seem so bad.