Job market

The challenges in the Nigerian job market is enormous. It is like the two sides of a coin with job seekers on one side and hiring managers/recruiters on the other. From the lens of hiring managers, the rate of unemployment in the country can be reduced if applicants develop the necessary soft and hard skills needed on the job.

Highlighted below are some of these challenges;

1. Dearth of requisite skills

One major challenge faced by hiring managers is the dearth of requisite skills in job applicants. They think that most job applicants lack the requisite skills needed by employers of labour. A hiring manager once said “the challenge is finding applicants who have the basic skills for the job.”

2. Skills mismatch

Some hiring managers have opined that there is usually no alignment between vacancies advertised and applications received. That is to say that “the right candidates are not going for the right jobs.”   

Probably because of the high rate of unemployment, job seekers plunge at job vacancies whether they have the advertised requirements/skills or not. 

3. High number of applicants

The unemployment rate in Nigeria increased to 23.10 percent in the third quarter of 2018 from 22.70 percent in the second quarter of 2018 and it has been projected to trend around 31.4 percent in 2021 and 32.0 percent in 2022. This increasing unemployment rate has resulted in high numbers of job applications.

Although the unemployment rate is high there are still huge numbers of job openings advertised even as the country joins the rest of the world in battling the Coronavirus pandemic.  

4. Invincibility of the skilled

Most hiring managers are of the opinion that “highly skilled individuals are often viewed as incompetent due to their inability to write effective CVs”.

Due to the high number of applicants, most hiring managers pass CVs submitted for job openings through Applicant Tracking System and recruiters complain that of hundreds of applicants only a handful have CVs that effectively pass through the system.

Many hiring managers underrate highly skilled applicants due to poorly written CVs.  

In my experience, the major challenges faced by job applicants are finding their desired career path, the patience to stay on their path, the knowledge of skills needed in their chosen path, and the right mentorship.

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