One former employer, with (guessing) a median employee duration of 15 months, would complain endlessly about how hard it was to hire. It was frustrating to see really good employees already trained on a very complicated internal hadoop variant walk out the door; somehow, the dedicated team of 7-9 recruiters (including managers) costing probably on the order of $1mm/year fully loaded; countless hours of engineering time phone screening and interviewing; and the opportunity cost never made management pay people what they could get elsewhere.
But instead they just give no raises, or even insult their high performers with a "generous" 3% and cause resentment and lower morale.
But you get useful results if you (a) ask people how happy they are (even if they exaggerate and understate, the ranking is generally accurate), and (b) ask people if they're getting X in the company, and then measure the correlations (and do a bunch of tricky adjustments for factors that are interrelated).
I.e., you don't ask "is a fair boss important for you? are office conditions important for you?" - but, if for example, on average the people who think they have a fair boss are feeling happier than those who think they have an unfair boss; but those who think that the office conditions really suck are just as [un]happy that those who feel that the office is okay - now, that's useful signal.
In tech, on the other hand, it can be $70k for a fullfilling job vs $200k for a boring grind in say finance...
Median(1,2,3,3,3,4,5) = 3
Meh, not really the problem. Every company realizes there is a buyers market (sans Technical) for every position, and can interview 20+ people for a help desk role.
No training is available because, what is the ROI? I know several companies (this is SLC) who don't train even for automated testing. After the testing, the employees find a better job.
Symptom or syndrome? Symptom is employee skills > company re: new job, vs higher position in company (or, in better English, training leads to employees finding better companies, vs staying with a current company and building that company.)
There is no loyalty amongst most companies for training or career development, as the ROI is not there (under utilization, a fallacy of implementation).
Should your company be based on ROI metrics per-project, and per-resource? Do you call your employees resources?
Utah (which has a large influx of Silicon companies trying to find cheap labor (typically they do) at lower cost of living thus for salary (typically they do) can look at 20+ candidates with marginal requirements met (experience/projects), but, it is a buyers market. Its not panacea like Silicon Valley, and SLC is rated very high for business, tangentially, you should be able to find top talent for top dollar.
Talent shortage, there is not, but training / development there is, and no company wants to take that on, because companies realize loyalty exists at a quarter-quarter statement (worse with a PE firm), so how do employee's progress? Change jobs every 2-3 years for a 10k+ raise.
I realize I am ranting, but skill matching to a position is broken, and no automated ATS system will fix a resume/pubic facing publication.
/end: The "problem" at a symptom level is companies holding out for "best of best" when they probably do not need such candidates, and could train for such. Given, a SharePoint admin at $20 / hr (case study), they found it, after I placed them, and they left after six months when they realized their skill set warranted a $20k raise.
Companies can under pay undergrads and mid-level candidates (who are not ivy/target/"rock star guru beer whatever") and do so, only to find a high turn-over rate.
Fix turn-over rate? Or just keep filing the desperate mid-esque level folks who just need work and would fulfill Senior level demands of work fulfillment?
/ranting