Right. So a corporation gets up a second firm, that hires only H1B workers, posts the required docs, but who sees them ?
Behind 'Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy
Job Hunters Face Long Lists Of Requirements as Web Brings Flood of Résumés
The Wall Street Journal 11/16/05
author: Sharon Begley
Many companies say they're facing an increasingly severe shortage of engineers. It's so bad, some executives say, that Congress must act to boost funding for engineering education.
Yet unemployed engineers say there's actually a big surplus. "No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage," says demographer Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
What's really going on? Consider the case of recruiter Rich Carver. In February, he got a call from the U.S. unit of JSP Corp., a Tokyo plastic-foam maker. The company was looking for an engineer with manufacturing experience to serve as a shift supervisor at its Butler, Pa., plant, which makes automobile-bumper parts.
Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 résumés. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software. JSP brought in a half-dozen candidates for an interview, and by August the company had its woman.
To JSP, taking six months to fill the position confirmed its sense that competition for top engineers is intense. Company officials "struggle to fill" openings, says human-resources manager Vicki Senko.
But for candidates facing 200-to-1 odds of getting the job, the struggle seems all on their side. "Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association, which campaigns to prevent losses of engineering jobs.
Amid rapidly changing technology, the engineers employers want aren't necessarily the engineers who are available. And companies often create the very shortages they decry by insisting on applicants who meet every item on a detailed list of qualifications. With the Internet adding to the pile of résumés, company officials say a certain degree of mechanical weeding-out is unavoidable.
The dueling perceptions of engineer shortages lie behind some big policy debates in Washington, fueling emotional clashes over immigration policy and the future of well-paying jobs in America.
Under the H-1B temporary work visa program, U.S. employers are permitted to hire foreign nationals with knowledge and skills deemed to be in short supply. The visas are valid for up to six years and are currently capped at 65,000 per year. Business groups, led by the Electronic Industries Alliance, argue that they need the foreigners because they can't find enough skilled U.S. engineers and technical workers. American engineers, particularly those who are unemployed, complain that the H-1Bs take away their jobs.
At a forum on innovation and education held at the Library of Congress last April, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said, "There just aren't as many graduates with a computer-science background. [That] creates a dilemma for us, in terms of how we get our work done." Last year the National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation, warned that the U.S. faces "an emerging and critical problem of the science and engineering labor force."
In fact, the number of students graduating with a bachelor of science degree in computer science rose 85% from 1998 to 2004, according to figures compiled from universities by the Computing Research Association. The number of bachelor degrees in engineering rose to 72,893 in 2004 from 61,553 in 1999, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.
Unemployment among engineers was 2.5% in 2004, in line with the 2.8% rate for all professional occupations. In 2003, 4.3% of engineers were unemployed compared with 3.2% for all professionals. The figures don't include people who gave up looking for work in their profession. From 2000 to 2003 engineering employment fell 8.7%, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Despite the numbers, employers say they struggle to find the right person for openings. Earlier this year, Raytheon Co., Waltham, Mass., needed to find some systems engineers. Raytheon received 158 résumés. It eliminated 40 in the first pass because the applicants would not be able to get a security clearance, says senior vice president Keith Peden. Raytheon ruled out 90 more because the applicants lacked experience in the specific kinds of technology or markets the job required. That left 28. Ten dropped out because they would not relocate or had insufficient technical experience. Raytheon interviewed the remaining 18 in person, made three offers and hired two.
"What used to take two and a half to three months now takes five," says Mr. Peden. Raytheon's chief executive, William Swanson, says: "As a company, we are meeting our hiring needs. My concern is that the degree of difficulty in meeting those needs has gone up exponentially."
Some elite companies have an even higher applicants-to-jobs ratio. Microsoft received résumés from about 100,000 graduating students last year, screened 15,000 of them, interviewed 3,500 and hired 1,000, says a spokesman. The software maker receives about 60,000 résumés of every kind monthly, and currently has 2,000 openings for software-development jobs.
Filling Niches
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, N.M., hires only people with a master's degree or doctorate for positions in electrical, mechanical and computer engineering. They all need security clearances, says Kate Rivera, manager of staffing, recruiting and relocation. "We are seeing a good supply of engineers and are able to fill our positions," she says, "though filling niche positions can be harder."
Microsoft, too, hires almost exclusively Ph.D.s for its top research positions, says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "We struggle to fill positions for our most technical jobs, though last year and this the supply of Ph.D.s has been fantastic" because of the hangover from the dot-com and telecom busts, he says.
Linda Olin-Weiss, director of staffing services at Lockheed Martin Corp., says there are "pockets of niche skills where it takes longer to get that talent." Lockheed competes with Boeing Co. and other aerospace firms for the best load engineers and optical engineers, she says, "but our programs are fully staffed today and we're able to fill our engineering positions."
Companies often draw up extremely narrow job descriptions, recruiters and staffing managers say, causing searches to get drawn out. One cause: the rise of online job sites, which makes it hard for company executives to personally review every candidate. To screen out the hundreds or thousands of résumés that pour in to a posting on Monster.com or Yahoo HotJobs, companies use software filters to look for keywords. In engineering, those keywords typically describe machinery or computer fields in which expertise is sought, such as C+++, server/stepper and CAE schematic.
Exact Combination
Hiring managers often prefer to wait for the candidate who has the exact combination of attributes they seek, rather than immediately hiring someone who comes close and then giving that person time to get familiar with a new machine or software program.
Last April, Mike Sylvester got a call from Wabtec Corp., Wilmerding, Pa., which builds components for locomotives, freight cars, subway cars and buses. Wabtec needed a mechanical engineer to work on locomotive design. Mr. Sylveste