After a sluggish first quarter this year (due, in part, to a prolonged severe winter), recent job growth has been robust, unemployment claims hit a seven-year low, and the Federal Reserve (Fed) announced it will officially end its quantitative easing program of bond buying in October, and is starting to express concern about the possibility of inflation rearing its ugly head. These are all signs of economic growth.

At the same time, the national unemployment rate remains above 6% (hardly full employment), and that figure doesn't take into account the thousands of Americans who have stopped looking for work or have settled for part-time employment.

It's surprising, then, that various sectors of the labor market are reporting that many jobs remain unfilled. The reasons vary across the board, but there appears to be a common denominator: a mismatch between job applicants and the required skill set for a particular job.

Manufacturing

In its monthly survey of manufaturersc released by the Philadelphia Fed in May, one-third of the respondents reported significant labor shortages with some positions remaining unfilled for months at a time.

Nearly half of them identified a skills gap between what their businesses need and the available labor pool. Although the manufacturers were overall bullish about the future – with many having expanded their payrolls and/or planning to do so in the next six months – they feel the mismatch in skill sets is holding back their progress, to some extent.

As a result, this group of employers is taking steps to alleviate the problem by:

* Stepping up recruiting efforts (including outside the region) and in-house training.

* Partnering with educational institutions to have school coursework more closely conform to their needs.

* Raising wages to attract prospective employees with the appropriate skill sets.

* Sweetening recruitment incentives and benefits packages

Small Business

Likewise, a similar percentage of small-business owners and chief executives reported unfilled job openings last month due to a lack of qualified applicants. That reflects a two-percentage-point increase from a similar survey two years ago (in both cases conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, a peer advisory group for executives based in San Diego).

In fairness, some of the shortage can be attributed to a "tightening" labor market: down to 6.1% in June from 8.2% two years ago, which represents a dramatic decrease. Be that as it may, more than 40% of these surveyed business owners around the country – in sectors as diverse as technology services and landscaping –say they'd be growing or expanding their businesses at a faster clip if they could hire qualified candidates to fill their openings.

A breach of etiquette?

Perhaps the strangest twist to this surprising story comes in the form of research done last year at both a community college in St. Louis and a non-profit in Seattle that point to a breakdown in job-search etiquette by potential employees. Survey respondents (mainly small-business owners) found applicants – especially of the millennial generation – unreliable, lazy about doing their homework on job applications, sometimes being no-shows at interviews; even taking jobs, only to e-mail their new bosses at the last minute to let them know they'd accepted another offer.

HR consultants interviewed for a story on the findings published on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website, www.stltoday.com, conceded that the "unreliability" factor is a problem among job applicants across the age and pay-scale spectrums, but that perhaps employers are also to blame for the bad behavior.

Representatives from CareerBuilder and staffing firm Manpower cited employers' tendency to not follow up with applicants they'd interviewed but not hired, as well as a perceived callousness in general toward job seekers during the economic downturn.

Prospective employees, in turn, suffered from burnout and a sense of exasperation from submitting hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes that went down the proverbial "rabbit hole."

Inexcusable as bad manners on the part of prospective employees or employers may be, the problem of a gap in skills that match the needs of manufacturers and small-business owners willing to pay competitive wages for the right candidate would appear to be a clear and present danger; not to mention a self-fulfilling prophecy of a failing national education system and a workforce not being properly retrained for a 21st-century global economy.

Perhaps it's time for a serious national dialogue about the job-skills deficit. As HR professionals, don't we have a moral obligation to weigh in?