A Bloomberg Businessweek article, recently produced by Jordan Yadoo, touches upon an interesting development across job markets. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuously tightening labor market, many job sectors, including law and healthcare, are reconsidering job requirements, specifically licensing requirements for positions.
Job Requirements and Occupational Licensing
As the labor market continues to tighten, there’s a push to loosen the licensing requirements for active job seekers to help eager talent enter the fields that so-desperately need more workers. Workers can enter the labor force quicker without incurring some of the prohibitive costs, coursework, and exhaustive time to get various licensing requirements.
Some examples include of this include, but are not limited to,
- Washington state waived the requirement for would-be lawyers to pass the state’s bar exam.
- Government jobs in Maryland dropped requirements for employees to have college degrees to apply for positions.
- Colleges with dropping enrollment rates have reexamined the standardized testing requirement for admittance.
- Over twenty states have streamlined certification processes for inactive or retired physicians to aid with pandemic staffing shortages.
Even the Biden administration has addressed how occupational certifications hinder talented job seekers from entering/re-entering the workforce; they are looking for ways to help peel back some red tape.
Concessions and Strategic Recruitment Efforts
Without a doubt, employers in public and private sectors will need to be less stringent with job requirements and more lenient to the needs of the would-be employees if they want to attract talented prospects in this tight labor market. Time-consuming, costly, and sometimes socially discriminatory occupational licensing requirements will lose their significance as long as labor shortages continue.
Businesses cannot afford to go about their recruitment efforts haphazardly without direction or a clear understanding of what job seekers expect. Two of the most critical components of successful recruitment practices include open role visibility and clear and concise job-post messaging.
Visibility and Messaging
Jobiak has worked for years and spent countless hours developing, testing, and optimizing technologies to help businesses generate greater job visibility AND present information/content that job seekers are interested in without pause. First impressions are even more critical for recruiting efforts during a tight labor market, and companies without optimized, visible, and strategically placed job posts will be at a disadvantage.
If companies are making more concessions on the organizational licensing requirements for their opening roles, it would be advisable to optimize job data to reflect those concessions to attract more talented individuals eager to enter the labor market.
