Reinventing Employer Signaling in a Rapidly Changing Talent Marketplace

September 27, 2017


A new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation calls for a suite of employer-led job registry services.
The business community can transform how it organizes and communicates its hiring requirements.

Employers continue to struggle with finding the talent they need to grow and compete in today’s economy. Much of this is blamed on a “skills gap” and lack of adequate supply to meet employer demand. However, others have argued that at least part of problem is the inability of employers to be consistent in communicating their hiring requirements in a rapidly changing economy and labor market. 

Solving the “employer signaling” challenge should no longer be viewed as an employer engagement problem, but as a technology problem that requires a correlated solution, and one that can be solved if employers adopt and widely implement the solution. Prior attempts to improve employer signaling have been met with limited success. It will remain elusive and the skills gap will continue to grow unless employers have the tools needed to provide faster, better, clearer signals to their preferred and trusted education, training, and credentialing partners.

Today the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (USCCF) released a new report titled Clearer Signals: Building an Employer-Led Job Registry for Talent Pipeline Management. This report explores how, through advancements in technology and data standardization, the business community can transform how it organizes and communicates hiring requirements for the jobs it relies on most to compete and grow. Through creating more structured data around job profiles, employers can better convey to talent providers and job seekers what the skills and qualifications are that define a highly-qualified job candidate.

Through clearer employer signaling we can improve how to connect the skills people have with jobs that are available more quickly and more accurately. This is further accomplished by linking the data employers produce to credentialing data systems and learner record systems in ways that allow for employers to better find and connect with talent suppliers and the most highly qualified talent.

To make this work, the report calls for the development of a suite of new job registry services that can be integrated into existing Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) and related HRIS vendor services (e.g., applicant tracking). These technology-based services are designed to help employers:

1)      Develop more accurate and comparable job descriptions including information on competency requirements;

2)      Provide employers access to open-licensed resources, including competency frameworks and taxonomies for improving how they describe competency requirements; and

3)      Maintain a job data repository composed of dynamic and comparable competency and credentialing data organized by employers themselves based on their ever-evolving hiring needs. 

In addition to releasing the new report, USCCF plans to organize a pilot demonstration of the job registry services and test whether employers—large and small—will produce structured and dynamic data on their hiring requirements. The pilot will explore the unique benefits a technology solution can unlock, including how employers improve how they search for qualified job candidates, engage in competency-based hiring, and signal competency and credentialing needs faster and clearer to education and workforce partners.

To learn more about the proposed job registry services and plans for an upcoming pilot, please contact