When my colleague Laurence Stevenson retired a few years ago, CBC Radio lost one of a kind. He was a pioneer in the use of digital audio, a technical wizard with an unbridled imagination. As a sound engineer, and then as a documentary producer, he carted home an immodest number of international awards.

Laurence started in the CBC mailroom in the early 1980s. A year later, he landed a job in “tape reclaim,” which involved spooling through used quarter-inch recording tape, cutting out sections with too many splices, and erasing the rest for reuse. It was drudgery, but Laurence used it as a stepping stone.

For its part, the CBC trained him so that he could take on more demanding roles.

Today Laurence’s career path is as much of a relic as the analog tape he once recycled. CBC has not employed mailroom staff for years. It outsources mail, printing, building maintenance and even some production to other companies, as does the rest of corporate Canada. There have been savings gained from outsourcing, no doubt. But something has been lost as well.

Chief executives in Canada consistently report that the country has a skills shortage. And the suggestion is that many young people can’t find work because they lack appropriate training. That may be true sometimes, but it is not the whole story. Corporate hiring practices are at least partly to blame for the skills shortage. It is a self-inflicted wound.

Rather than develop their own talent, companies now recruit already trained, experienced employees on a just-in-time basis. This shift has stymied young people trying to get a start in the workplace.

Gracen Johnson, a 23-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in international development from the University of Guelph, told me “entering the job market is really disheartening for someone who doesn’t have a lot of tangible skills — something that you can only really pick up by having the job for three years already.”

It is a lament of the young and the jobless: employers want experience, but how can I get experience without a job?

To be sure, there is a shortage in some sectors and in some places.

A 2012 survey of the Greater Toronto region found that for every seven engineering and IT jobs, there was only one qualified recent graduate of a related post-secondary program. The booming economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan are experiencing shortfalls in skilled labour, too. The boom has forced employers to recruit beyond their borders. So, yes, there are real shortages.

But in his recent book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It, Peter Cappelli debunks the skills shortages as reported by executives.

Cappelli, a professor of management and the director of the Wharton Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania, cites an employer survey by ManpowerGroup, the international staffing agency. “When pressed for more evidence,” Cappelli writes, “roughly 10 per cent of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won’t accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That’s not a skill shortage; it’s simply being unwilling to pay the going price.”

The labour market operates like a, well, a marketplace. If I am willing to pay only 50 cents for a kilo of lobster or an hour of labour, and no one will sell it to me for that, I can hardly complain of a shortage. If farm labourers were paid like doctors, we would never hear about the unwillingness of some to fill those jobs. Wages, benefits, incentives and security are always part of the picture when it comes to scarcity or abundance of labour.

Cappelli goes further. He accuses employers of being too picky, of not filling a position for a year because they are waiting for just the perfect fit.

This arises from a historical change in hiring practices. In recent years, human resources departments have been downsized, their role outsourced to recruiting agencies. The agencies encourage employers to pile on a wish list of qualifications. Then they post the jobs online, which casts a wide net. This leaves employers dazzled by the array of candidates. Cappelli likens executives to the teenager who thinks he has many possible dates for the prom and keeps delaying inviting one of them.

Online recruiting has another unintended consequence. Many firms rely on software to filter the high volume of applicants. Resumés that don’t fill every qualification get shunted aside, even if some of the qualifications are non-essential.

Cappelli says the skills gap is really a training gap.

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On in-house training, Canada’s record is dismal. According to the 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook, Canada had slipped to 25th place among 59 countries ranked on the importance organizations placed on workforce training. It was a drop of five places in just one year.

For every dollar American organizations spend on learning and development, Canadian counterparts spent an average of 64 cents.

But according to Andrew Cardozo, executive director of The Alliance of Sector Councils, an umbrella group for employers for all sectors of the Canadian economy, “If there is a critical mass of employers who are training, then they’ll poach from each other and it will cancel out and they’ll stop poaching.

“But we certainly haven’t got there yet.”

Cardozo says he’sslowly bringing employers around to the idea that training is not solely the job of the education system.

Cappelli writes that “to keep good people, employers need to take a bit of a risk on them by giving them jobs that they haven’t already done. The employer should be able to take that risk; first, because they should have inside knowledge about who is promising and, second, because if they are right, the bet pays off by filling jobs more cheaply than outside hiring. The end result is that companies would be able to retain talented employees who are more committed to the organization.”

In an interview, Cardozo invokes an old saying: “The only thing worse than training your staff and having them leave is not training your staff and having them stay.”

In other words, a business pays a price for untrained staff.

“Some employers are getting that.”

Neil Sandell spent a year writing and researching the issue of youth unemployment as part of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. Follw Sandell on Twitter: @youngnjobless. His website is youngandjobless.com