When a vacancy remains open, the easiest explanation is that there is a talent shortage. Sometimes scarce skills are genuinely involved. Often, however, the role has been priced, designed, advertised or assessed in a way that makes suitable people difficult to find or unwilling to continue.
Calling the market the problem too early prevents the hiring team from improving anything it controls. Treat a hard-to-fill role as a diagnosis: locate the stage where viable candidates disappear, test a focused change and measure what happens next.
Define what “hard to fill” means
Start with evidence. Record how long the role has been open, how many relevant people saw it, how many applied, how many met the essential requirements, where candidates withdrew and why offers were declined.
Compare the vacancy with similar roles filled by the organisation. If applications are plentiful but almost nobody passes screening, the issue differs from a vacancy receiving no credible interest. If finalists repeatedly decline, sourcing more people will not repair the offer.
Agree on the actual problem statement. “We lack qualified applicants in this location” or “Candidates with the required experience reject the working arrangement” is more useful than “Nobody wants to work.”
Separate essentials from habits
Ask the hiring manager to justify every requirement by naming the task it supports. Divide the list into:
- Essential on the first day.
- Learnable within the first three months.
- Helpful but not required.
- Unrelated to successful performance.
Years of experience are often used as a substitute for defining capability. A degree may remain in an advert because the previous employee had one, not because the job depends on that field of study. A long list of software tools may describe the current team rather than the minimum entry point.
Keep genuine legal, safety and professional requirements. Remove inherited preferences that screen out people who could learn the work within a realistic period.
Inspect the offer as a whole
Salary matters, but candidates also assess transport, location, hours, contract length, schedule predictability, remote-work expectations, equipment, benefits, growth and manager quality.
Benchmark compensation against the market that actually competes for the person. An employer recruiting a specialist remotely may be competing beyond its immediate town. A role requiring daily travel imposes costs that a nominally similar hybrid position does not.
Give candidates enough information to make a reasoned decision. Hiding salary, shift patterns or location constraints can create more applications while producing fewer viable conversations. If the budget cannot move, consider whether scope, seniority, flexibility or development support can.
Map the recruitment funnel
Create a one-page funnel from advert view to accepted offer. Add conversion rates and average waiting time between stages.
A low advert-to-application rate points towards the title, channel, reputation, requirements or offer. A sharp fall after recruiter screening may indicate poor targeting or unclear criteria. Repeated failure at an assessment may mean the exercise is badly calibrated. Withdrawals after interviews may reveal delay, weak communication or an unattractive manager experience.
Speak to candidates who withdrew or declined. Ask one neutral question: “What most influenced your decision not to continue?” Record themes without pressuring the person to reconsider.
Widen access to capable people
Search for adjacent skills rather than only identical job titles. Someone from another sector may already perform the underlying analysis, customer work, maintenance or coordination the role requires.
Consider returners, career changers, people with disabilities, candidates outside the usual location and employees already inside the organisation. Review whether shift times, transport assumptions, inaccessible applications or unnecessarily narrow language requirements exclude people before capability is assessed.
Use public employment services, recognised training institutions and professional bodies where relevant. For repeat vacancies, build relationships with training providers instead of buying the same urgent search every few months.
Redesign the entry route
If a capability can be developed, create a supported route into the role. This could include a learnership, internship, supervised junior position, structured conversion programme or staged responsibility plan.
Be specific about the support. “Training provided” is not a plan. Name the skills, learning activities, supervisor, protected practice time and milestones. Make sure the manager has capacity to coach before hiring someone on potential.
A redesigned role can also be more realistic. Two unrelated specialist jobs combined into one vacancy may need to be separated. A senior title with junior pay may need to be rescoped. A role carrying every task the previous employee accumulated may need duties removed.
Run one controlled hiring experiment
Change one major variable at a time so the result can be interpreted. Examples include publishing the salary range, removing two non-essential requirements, offering a realistic flexible schedule, changing the assessment or targeting an adjacent talent pool.
Set a short review window and decide the success measure beforehand. Track qualified applications, stage conversion, candidate withdrawals, time to decision and offer acceptance. Do not celebrate a larger applicant count if the number of suitable candidates stays unchanged.
Write down what the experiment taught the team. Even an unsuccessful test narrows the diagnosis. The objective is not to prove that the market is easy; it is to ensure the organisation has fixed avoidable barriers before paying for another search.
Sources and limits
Labour-market context can be checked through Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey. Employers can also review the Department of Employment and Labour’s Employment Services of South Africa portal and the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations’ official occupational qualifications information.
National data cannot prove the cause of one employer’s vacancy, and a broad unemployment rate does not show whether a particular skill is available at a specific salary and location. Diagnose the organisation’s own funnel and use current, role-relevant market evidence before changing workforce plans.