The engineering talent shortage is a screening problem, not a supply problem.

Everyone in South African engineering recruitment talks about the talent shortage. I want to push back on the framing, because I think it's misdirecting a lot of hiring effort.

The shortage is real at the very top of the market — for specific senior people with specific niche specialisations, in specific industries, the supply is genuinely thin and the market is competitive. That's true. But it's a small part of the overall hiring volume. Most engineering roles I work on are not at the top end of the market. They're mid-level — three to eight years experience, solid generalists in mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical, or software engineering, capable of leading a project or owning a workstream. And in that part of the market, the supply is not thin.

What's thin is the funnel.

How the brief creates the shortage

Here's what I see consistently in mid-level engineering briefs. The job description was written four years ago and never updated. It lists fifteen required skills and twelve preferred skills, of which maybe six are actually load-bearing for the role. The salary band was set against 2022 benchmarks and hasn't been refreshed. The job title is bespoke to the company and doesn't match anything candidates would search for. The hiring manager wants someone who has done exactly this role before — which by definition narrows the pool to candidates already doing exactly this role for someone else, which is the smallest possible pool you could draw from.

By the time the brief is on the market, the screening logic has filtered the candidate pool down to maybe ten percent of what it actually should be. Then the agency or the ATS narrows it further. By the time CVs reach the hiring manager, they're seeing five candidates from a pool that should have been fifty.

The shortage isn't supply. The shortage is the screening doing too much work upstream.

What we do when a client says "the market is impossible"

First, I ask to rewrite the brief with them. The fifteen required skills become five. The job title becomes searchable. The salary band gets benchmarked against last quarter, not the last cycle. Second, I run a wider initial search than the brief technically allows for and bring back two or three candidates who don't perfectly match but who I think would do the job well. The hiring manager interviews them. Sometimes they hire one. Sometimes they don't, but the conversation reframes what's actually possible.

The pushback I get on this is usually "we can't compromise on the requirements." Fair. But the requirement that's getting compromised on isn't the candidate's competence. It's the alignment between what the job description says and what the work actually needs. Most over-specified briefs are protecting against a hire the company is afraid of, not specifying for the hire they actually want.

A small admission. There are roles where the market genuinely is thin and we tell clients honestly that the brief will take longer to fill. The senior mechanical engineer in renewable energy with five years of utility-scale solar experience in southern Africa is, in fact, a hard hire. We don't pretend that's a screening problem. It's genuine supply. But it's maybe one in ten engineering briefs. The other nine are screening, not supply.

If you've been "trying to hire an engineer for six months," the question to ask isn't where the engineers are. It's what your brief is rejecting.

— Kern