Bosses do not know the skills of their employees well enough
As a boss, do you know the skills and experience of your employees from previous jobs? According to a study from Austria, not all managers do. This can be changed with software support.
Business associations were emphatic in warning of an increase in bottlenecks on the labor market. A study now reveals what the flip side of the shortage of skilled workers and the war of talent looks like. 250 HR managers and executives from a wide range of industrial companies in Germany and Austria were surveyed on the subject: "While companies are well aware of the skills a new employee should bring with him, their own existing employee is a rather unknown entity," analyzes Markus Skergeth, publisher of the study "Industriereport Fachkräftemangel 2022" and managing director of Skilltree, a European human resources software. Only six percent of bosses know between 75 and 100 percent of an employee's skills, 28 percent between 50 and 75 percent - and another 37 percent only between 25 and 50 percent. Twenty percent know no more than a quarter of an employee's skills. "This is frightening. While HR departments are profiling and spending tens of thousands of euros on external headhunters, their own employees obviously only regain value when they want to change companies and the red carpet is rolled out at a competitor," says Skergeth.
Parship for employee skills
The study proves what Skergeth and his team use as the basis for their business model: Bringing employees and the company together. With a software platform, both parties find each other - employees can maintain and add to their own skills in the database, and managers can match talent and technical skills with upcoming projects and tasks in a much more targeted way. "Basically, we have applied intelligent mechanisms that have long been used on singles exchanges to the job market. Only instead of character traits, we use professional qualities to do the matching," explains Markus Skergeth of Skilltree. In fact, according to the study, bosses don't even know all the previous knowledge an employee brings with them from a previous job: Only just under 30 percent know roughly, 31 percent have only a selective knowledge of skills from previous jobs, and for 16 percent, an employee's history is completely unknown.
HR planning with obstacles
Another complicating factor in companies is that different departments and functions are responsible for setting up and assembling project teams: In 24 percent of the 250 company representatives surveyed, responsibility lies with the HR department, in 38 percent with the team leaders - and in only 22 percent do team leadership and HR make joint decisions. "Such decisions - the competency-based formation of powerful teams - must be clearly regulated and structured internally. This requires a basis that must not gather dust in folders like a resume. We close this gap with Skilltree," explains software entrepreneur Markus Skergeth. A pleasant side effect for companies that already rely on Skilltree's software-based solution: The churn of dissatisfied and underchallenged employees is significantly reduced. "The interest in leaving a company is often driven by the subjective feeling of a lack of appreciation. However, when employers and employees work together to cultivate the skillset and desired capabilities, take advantage of internal training, and thus address the shortage of skilled workers from within, the satisfaction of individual employees also grows," according to the analysis by study editor Skergeth.
Source and further information: Skilltree
