As a managing partner at M&A Executive Search, we specialize in hiring high level leadership talent for clients. In our experience, we have seen a high demand for healthcare and tech professionals. Rising competition for top talent is increasing the need for proactive strategies in recruitment. Companies have started utilizing AI for candidate sourcing and skill matching. Furthermore, AI predictive analysis helps identify spikes in demand in the market. This allows companies to stay proactive in the midst of changing market conditions. It ensures quick adaptability and companies are able to retain their talent, especially in growing sectors like technology and healthcare.
I've noticed something interesting running a digital agency in Winston-Salem--the talent competition isn't just between tech companies anymore. Local plumbing companies, investment firms, and even aviation businesses I work with are all scrambling to hire the same people: anyone who can manage their digital presence, understand analytics, or handle basic web systems. When I worked with Eastern Airlines on their recruiting website, they told me their biggest challenge wasn't competing with other airlines--it was competing with tech companies for developers and data people who could build their internal systems. They ended up having to completely rebrand their recruiting message and double down on unique perks because salary alone wasn't cutting it. What's really changed in the last two years is that every business now needs mini tech teams. The private equity firm Skylark came to us because they couldn't find someone who understood both finance and modern web systems. The wealth management firms I work with in the Triad are hiring "digital experience managers"--a role that didn't exist three years ago--because their clients expect the same online experience they get from Robinhood or Betterment. From the hiring side, I've watched small service businesses here lose good candidates to remote tech jobs offering $20k more. The ones succeeding are getting creative--offering profit sharing, four-day weeks, or letting people work hybrid even in traditionally in-person roles. The wage pressure is real even in Winston-Salem, which historically had a cost-of-living advantage.
I run an electronics repair shop in Mississippi with 20+ years in the field, and I'm watching the tech job market from a different angle--the massive gap between what bootcamps teach and what local businesses actually need. We're not hiring software developers or data scientists. We need technicians who can troubleshoot hardware, read schematics, and explain technical problems to non-technical customers. That middle-skill tier is being completely ignored in these growth projections. Here's what I'm seeing: I've published over 2,000 repair guides on our site, and the traffic data tells me thousands of people are trying to learn device repair on their own because there's no formal pipeline into these jobs. When someone walks in asking about work, they've usually got a YouTube education and zero certifications--but some of them can diagnose a charging port failure faster than my certified techs. The certification obsession is locking out people who could fill these roles tomorrow. The real hiring shift I'm experiencing is using AI tools to level up existing staff instead of hunting for unicorn candidates. I trained my team to use ChatGPT for building business plans and technical documentation--skills that would've required hiring specialists two years ago. We're expanding into parts sales and new revenue streams with the same headcount because we're amplifying capability, not just adding bodies. The jobs growing fastest aren't always the ones with "engineer" or "scientist" in the title. Mississippi passed Right to Repair legislation through the House, and if it clears the Senate, we'll see hundreds of repair tech positions open across the state within a year. Nobody's tracking that in labor reports, but it's happening whether economists notice or not.
Tech & Innovation Expert, Media Personality, Author & Keynote Speaker at Ariel Coro
Answered 4 months ago
I've spent nearly two decades bringing tech education to millions of Hispanics through Univision and CNN en Espanol, and what I'm seeing matches those labor market numbers--but with a massive twist nobody's talking about. The gap isn't just in hiring, it's in *who's getting prepared* for these roles. Here's the disconnect: Hispanics over-index on mobile technology adoption and usage, but we're dramatically underrepresented in tech careers despite being 19% of the workforce. When I worked with Capital One's Hispanics in Tech ERG and spoke at Penn State about diversity enriching innovation, the data was brutal--companies with diverse teams are 45% more likely to capture new market share, yet tech companies keep fishing in the same talent pools. The healthcare acceleration you're seeing? I've covered it extensively--from Baptist Health's careC2 military-grade data integration system to proton therapy machines at Miami Cancer Institute. These aren't just adding nurse jobs, they're creating entirely new hybrid roles that need both clinical knowledge and tech fluency. A radiation oncology team now includes data scientists analyzing treatment patterns in real-time. My take after consulting for Cisco and working at the Hubble Space Telescope operations: the labor shortage is actually a *pipeline visibility problem*. At my Tecnificate conferences, I met brilliant Latinos who didn't know these jobs existed or thought they needed Stanford degrees to qualify. Companies posting on traditional job boards are missing 20%+ of potential candidates who would crush these roles but never see the listings.
I've been hiring software engineers and data scientists for 20+ years, and what I'm seeing now is different than past talent crunches--it's not just about finding warm bodies, it's about finding people who can actually solve problems that didn't exist 3 years ago. When we were building Kove:SDM, I needed engineers who could think across disciplines (mathematics, linguistics, computer science) because the memory scaling problem we were tackling was considered impossible by most of the industry. The real bottleneck isn't in entry-level roles--it's in experienced practitioners who can work at the intersection of multiple domains. We recently needed someone who understood both AI/ML infrastructure AND low-latency systems, and that's maybe 200 people globally who have hands-on experience with both. Compare that to when I was at Open Software Foundation in the late 80s when you could train someone in 6-12 months--now the learning curve for cutting-edge work is 3-5 years minimum. What's driving this in tech specifically is that companies are finally hitting real infrastructure limits with AI workloads. One of our partners was running 60-day model training jobs that we got down to one day--but you need engineers who understand memory architecture, not just how to call an API. The gap between "can code" and "can architect solutions to novel problems" has become a canyon, and that's where I'm seeing salary premiums of 2-3x for the right person.
I run multiple digital platforms that connect independent contractors with work--everything from mobile diesel mechanics to roadside technicians--and the "labor shortage" everyone keeps talking about isn't real. The workers are there. The problem is companies are still recruiting like it's 2005. Here's what I'm seeing on the ground: when we launched Road Rescue Network's mobile truck repair side, we had certified diesel mechanics sitting idle because traditional dispatch systems require you to be employed full-time or nothing. We built an app that lets techs toggle availability on/off and accept jobs in real-time--suddenly we had hundreds of qualified people who were "unemployed" according to traditional metrics but were actually just locked out by outdated hiring models. The acceleration in tech and healthcare jobs is creating something nobody's measuring: *hybrid infrastructure roles* that don't fit old job categories. Our system needs people who understand WordPress, AWS, Airtable, and RingCentral simultaneously--not specialists, but infrastructure generalists who can duct-tape six platforms together. Every job posting asks for a unicorn when they actually need someone trainable with access to YouTube and Google. The real shift I'm watching is worker expectations around autonomy. Our rescuers earn $42-$64 per job and work when they want--many have nursing backgrounds, IT experience, or were driving for rideshare. They didn't leave their industries because of pay. They left because they were tired of being treated like cogs. Companies posting traditional full-time roles are competing against platforms that let people build their own schedules, and they're losing.
I run a digital marketing agency and also co-founded an AI training community, so I'm watching this from two angles: the talent we need internally, and what our 200+ contractor clients are scrambling to hire for. What I'm seeing isn't just growth in tech roles--it's an acceleration of *hybrid* roles that didn't exist three years ago. We recently hired what we're calling an "AI Operations Specialist" whose job is part data analysis, part workflow automation, part client education. That role didn't have a name in 2022. Now we've got five companies in our network hiring for similar positions, and they're all struggling because the talent pool is tiny and the salary expectations are all over the place. On the contractor side (HVAC, plumbing, electrical), the labor shortage is brutal, but I'm seeing something interesting: companies that invest in technology are having an easier time attracting younger workers. One HVAC client added route optimization software and field service AI tools, then rewrote their job posts to emphasize "tech-enabled trucks" and "AI dispatch support." Their applicant quality doubled in 90 days. Younger techs want to work somewhere that doesn't feel stuck in 1995. The biggest hiring mistake I'm seeing across both sectors is companies moving too slowly. They're still using 45-day interview processes while competitors are making offers in a week. In this market, speed and clarity win--candidates with options aren't waiting around for your third-round panel interview.
I left Intel after 14 years as an engineer and opened a repair shop in Albuquerque. What I'm seeing from the ground level is **retention getting absolutely crushed by device failures during critical work moments**. Remote workers in tech and healthcare are losing productivity to hardware breakdowns they can't afford--and companies aren't budgeting for it. Last month alone I recovered data for three separate healthcare workers who lost patient documentation to failed drives during system crashes. One was a nurse practitioner whose laptop died mid-shift with unsynced EMR notes. These aren't just inconveniences--they're compliance risks and job security issues that nobody's talking about in workforce planning. The talent shortage isn't just about hiring. It's also about **keeping productive employees from burning out due to tech infrastructure gaps**. I've had two data scientists come in after losing weeks of work because their employers didn't have proper backup protocols. When your $120K employee loses a month of analysis because of a $80 hard drive failure, that's a retention problem disguised as a tech problem. What's wild is companies are paying premium salaries but won't invest $200 in proper device maintenance or recovery planning. I'm doing same-day data recovery for remote workers who are literally between jobs because they can't access their portfolio or client files. The growth in these sectors is real, but the operational support infrastructure hasn't caught up.
I've hired across biotech, finance, and operations for 20+ years, and just built a company from garage prototype to lab-certified medical device in under 5 years. The labor dynamic that's hitting us hardest isn't shortage--it's *role obsolescence speed*. We needed mechanical engineers who could work with UVC LED technology that didn't exist commercially three years ago. Traditional job descriptions were useless. What's actually happening in healthcare-adjacent tech: we're hiring infection preventionists who need to understand photonics, engineers who need to grasp hospital workflows, and sales teams who must speak both clinical outcomes and facility operations. I pulled our VP of Engineering from a completely different industry because his systems thinking mattered more than his resume keywords. Our Director of Infection Prevention came from clinical practice--we taught him the technology side in weeks. The biggest hiring mistake I see companies make is writing job posts for the person who's leaving instead of the problems that need solving. When we needed to scale GermPass testing, I didn't post "Environmental Microbiologist, 10 years experience"--I called Dr. Charles Gerba's lab directly and said "we need to prove 99.999% pathogen kill rates on ten different organisms." They sent us Dr. Kelly Bright, who ran tests that no standard job description would have captured. Healthcare technology is creating roles that require clinical credibility plus engineering literacy plus regulatory knowledge. That combination doesn't come from traditional hiring pipelines--it comes from investing in people who have two of those three and can learn the third fast. We're competing with hospitals for infection preventionists while also competing with tech companies for product engineers. The winners are companies willing to build expertise internally instead of waiting for perfect candidates who don't exist yet.
I run a sexual wellness clinic in Texas, and the healthcare staffing crunch is hitting us from an angle most people don't talk about: specialized clinical training requirements. We need nurse practitioners who can perform advanced procedures like regenerative treatments, but finding candidates who are both clinically skilled AND comfortable in sexual health is nearly impossible right now. What's changed in the last 18 months is that we've stopped waiting for fully-trained candidates and started building our own pipeline. We brought on two RNs last year and paid for their specialized certifications in hormone therapy and aesthetic procedures while they worked with us. One of them is now handling patient consultations that used to require our medical director's time, which freed up capacity to see 30% more patients. The other shift I'm seeing: candidates care way more about whether they'll actually learn something new than about traditional benefits. When we interview now, nurses ask specific questions about what procedures they'll get trained on and how often they'll work with emerging technologies like our regenMAX system. The "professional development" piece isn't just a nice-to-have anymore--it's the deciding factor between us and the urgent care clinic down the street offering $2 more per hour.
I manage an executive suite center in Las Vegas, and I'm seeing something that backs up these labor trends from a completely different angle--the **explosion of solo healthcare and tech consultants** who need professional office infrastructure but refuse traditional employment. In the last 18 months, we've had a 40% increase in healthcare professionals (mostly nurse practitioners and telehealth consultants) renting virtual offices or part-time suites to run independent practices. They're leaving hospital systems where they're burned out, and going solo or joining small group practices that need a Las Vegas business address for licensing. The money and autonomy of independent work is pulling them out of traditional roles faster than I've ever seen. The tech side is even more dramatic. We used to get maybe one software developer or cybersecurity person a quarter looking for office space. Now it's weekly--and they're not startups, they're established professionals who landed remote contracts paying $150K+ and need a business address separate from their home for client credibility and compliance reasons. What's telling is that our attorney clients (we have tons of them) are now complaining about the **same hiring problems as tech companies**. They can't find paralegals or legal assistants because those folks are getting poached by compliance and data privacy roles at tech firms that pay 30% more. I've watched three law practices in our building lose their entire admin staff to remote insurance and healthcare companies in the last year alone.
I'm a family nurse practitioner who co-owns a medical spa in Arizona, and what I'm seeing in the NP job market is a massive shift toward hybrid clinical models that traditional hospital training doesn't prepare anyone for. I spent years at Mayo Clinic doing critical care and oncology work, but when I transitioned into aesthetics and hormone optimization, I realized my entire clinical toolkit needed an upgrade--nobody teaches you about bioidentical hormone protocols or Sculptra injection techniques in standard FNP programs. The growth projection for NPs makes sense on paper, but there's a weird gap forming between what healthcare facilities actually need and what newly graduated practitioners can do on day one. At our spa, we get applications from NPs with solid hospital backgrounds who've never touched an aesthetic procedure, managed weight loss protocols, or interpreted functional medicine labs. The clinical confidence is there, but the specialized skills aren't, so we end up doing months of in-house training on things like PRP hair restoration and semaglutide management. What's keeping me fully booked isn't the nursing shortage alone--it's that patients are actively seeking practitioners who understand the connection between hormone balance, longevity medicine, and aesthetic outcomes. I had a patient last month who'd been to four different providers trying to address her fatigue and weight gain, but nobody ran comprehensive hormone panels or considered how her thyroid function was affecting everything else. That's the skill set driving demand now: NPs who can think across specialties instead of staying in one clinical lane.
I run two hair restoration clinics and we've felt the healthcare talent crunch directly--but from an angle most people don't talk about. When I was hiring another physician last year to join our Fort Lauderdale location, I finded that experienced doctors who could have specialized in hair restoration were being pulled into telehealth companies and urgent care chains offering sign-on bonuses I'd never seen before. What surprised me most was the competition from non-clinical roles. Dr. Siegel, who now works with me, came from Emergency Medicine like I did--but before joining us, he had recruiters constantly reaching out about "physician advisor" and "clinical consultant" positions at tech companies building healthcare apps. These roles paid comparable money with zero patient care stress and full remote work. The staffing pressure has forced us to completely rethink retention. We've had to get surgical (pun intended) about creating ownership over techniques--Dr. Siegel now has full autonomy over refining our HUE Method applications, and we budget specifically for conference travel and advanced training that most small practices would never consider. Our lead medical technicians have similar arrangements because losing even one trained team member sets us back 6+ months given how specialized follicular extraction skills are. We've served over 6,000 patients since 2014, but the last two years have been the first time I've worried more about staffing than patient demand. The work is there--we have a waitlist--but finding and keeping qualified medical professionals who want to stay in hands-on clinical work instead of jumping to tech-adjacent healthcare roles is the real bottleneck now.
I run multiple physical therapy clinics in Brooklyn and our hiring challenges look nothing like traditional healthcare recruiting anymore. We're competing with tech companies and corporate wellness programs for the same therapists, and honestly, the PTs with any data analysis skills or digital literacy get snapped up immediately by telehealth startups offering equity packages we can't match. What's shocked me most is watching new grads choose corporate "movement specialist" roles at Google or Amazon over clinical positions. These tech companies are building internal PT departments and paying $95K+ for new grads versus the $78-85K range in traditional clinics. One candidate I interviewed last month took a "musculoskeletal health analyst" position at a Fortune 500 instead of our clinical role--same degree, completely different trajectory. The therapists we do successfully hire now expect things that didn't exist five years ago: full control over their schedules via app, CEU stipends that include online learning platforms like MedBridge, and honestly, cryptocurrency bonus options (we added "Crypto Bucks" to our incentive program just to stay relevant). When I started Evolve in 2010, offering health insurance was enough. Now candidates ghost us if we don't have a clear tech integration story. We've had to completely rebuild our value proposition around clinical autonomy rather than salary. The PTs who stay are the ones who want hands-on patient time instead of documentation quotas--but that's maybe 40% of graduates now versus what felt like 80% a decade ago.
I've been running an MSP for 17+ years, and the cybersecurity hiring pressure is unlike anything I've seen. We needed a CISSP-certified consultant last year and it took us 4 months to find someone qualified who wasn't already fielding multiple offers--roles that used to take 6-8 weeks are now stretching past 90 days. What's really changed is clients are now poaching talent directly from service providers like us. Two of our mid-sized manufacturing clients in PA have tried to hire our security engineers in the past 18 months, offering 30-40% bumps plus full remote. We've had to get creative with project ownership and professional development budgets just to stay competitive. The demand side is being driven by compliance requirements that didn't exist five years ago. We're seeing a 3x increase in requests for CMMC, SOC2, and penetration testing services since 2022--every DoD contractor, healthcare provider, and financial services firm suddenly needs dedicated security staff or they can't operate. There literally aren't enough qualified people to fill these mandated positions, which is why salary expectations have disconnected from traditional IT pay scales.
I'm CEO of a biomedical data platform and have a PhD in computational biology, so I'm watching this talent crunch from both sides--we're hiring these roles AND our pharma clients are desperate for them too. The biotech/healthcare side has a specific bottleneck nobody's talking about: **hybrid expertise**. We can find data scientists, but finding ones who understand clinical trials or genomic data? That's maybe 1 in 50 candidates. Last quarter we needed someone who could build federated AI models for patient data--took us 6 months and we ended up training internally. The skills gap isn't just "more developers needed," it's that healthcare tech requires domain knowledge you can't learn in a bootcamp. What's driving growth in our sector specifically is the explosion of real-world health data that needs analysis. Electronic health records, wearables generating continuous monitoring data, multi-omic datasets--every hospital system and pharma company suddenly needs bioinformaticians and ML engineers who understand HIPAA/GDPR. One of our NHS partners told me they have 47 open positions for clinical data analysts they literally cannot fill in the UK market. The only thing keeping companies afloat is aggressive upskilling programs. We're taking computational biologists and teaching them MLOps, taking software engineers and training them in clinical research workflows. It's a 6-9 month investment per person, but hiring "ready-made" candidates just isn't viable anymore--they don't exist in sufficient numbers.
I run a B2B software company selling to schools and nonprofits, and I'm seeing the talent squeeze hit us from an unexpected angle--our clients can't find the people to actually use what we sell them. Three districts in Massachusetts told us outright in Q4 2024 they're delaying software purchases because their IT coordinators are stretched so thin they can't onboard new systems. We've adapted by building what we call "tech-free" implementation--our recognition displays now require zero IT involvement to update content, which became a massive selling point. That shift alone helped us close 40% faster in districts facing staffing shortages. When your customer's internal team is underwater, your product either becomes part of the problem or the solution. On our own hiring side, I stopped filtering for "5+ years experience" and started hiring for raw capability instead. Our best sales hire in 2024 came from retail management with zero software experience--but she had consistently been a top performer and proved it with metrics. In a tight market, looking for transferable excellence instead of industry tenure opened up a completely different talent pool that our competitors were ignoring.
I've launched tech products for everyone from Fortune 500s to startups, and here's what nobody's talking about: the job categories themselves are becoming obsolete faster than HR departments can rewrite them. When we worked with Element U.S. Space & Defense on their rebrand, we couldn't hire "a web designer" or "a content strategist"--we needed people who could simultaneously think like engineers, procurement specialists, and quality managers because that's how their actual customers think. The real acceleration isn't just *more* tech jobs--it's that every job is becoming a tech job in ways that break traditional hiring. We built campaigns for Robosen's licensed Transformers robots where the "marketing role" required understanding robotics engineering, Disney IP licensing, social algorithms, and how to talk to both 40-year-old collectors and their kids. Try finding that job title on LinkedIn. Here's the disconnect I'm seeing with clients: when we rebranded Syber from their legacy black aesthetic to modern white, the biggest challenge wasn't the design--it was that their team needed people who understood gaming culture, VR technology, Intel specs, *and* why minimalist design matters to Gen Z. They kept interviewing specialists when they needed translators who could move between all those worlds. The companies winning right now aren't the ones hiring for the projected growth roles in those reports. They're the ones hiring for *adjacent skills* and building internal bridges. When someone understands brand strategy and can also parse technical documentation, they're worth three specialists who can't talk to each other.
Senior Vice President Business Development at Lucent Health Group
Answered 4 months ago
I lead business development for a home health agency in North Texas, and what I'm seeing in healthcare hiring is this: the growth isn't just in clinical roles--it's in people who can do *both* clinical work and steer the operational chaos behind it. We need nurses who understand payer authorization workflows, therapists who can document to Medicare's exact specifications, and care coordinators who speak multiple languages while managing EMR systems. The job descriptions haven't caught up to what we're actually hiring for. The biggest gap right now isn't bodies--it's people who can handle the regulatory complexity that's exploded in post-acute care. When I hire a nurse, I'm also hiring someone who needs to understand OASIS-E assessments, Value-Based Purchasing metrics, and how to communicate with case managers across six different insurance companies. We've had clinically excellent candidates wash out in 90 days because they couldn't adapt to the administrative load that didn't exist five years ago. What's keeping positions open longer isn't salary competition--it's that we're essentially asking for two jobs in one without calling it that. At my previous role, we reduced turnover by 30% when we split some positions into clinical-only and clinical-plus-operations tracks, letting people choose their complexity level. Most healthcare growth projections ignore that the *job itself* has fundamentally changed, not just the volume of openings.
I'm not in HR, but I've worked with 20+ healthcare and tech clients over the past five years building their websites, and I'm seeing this demand shift play out in real-time through their hiring pages and messaging changes. My healthcare clients are completely revamping how they present careers on their sites. One HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform I worked with in 2023 added a dedicated "Benefits & Culture" section that takes up 40% of their careers page--that didn't exist two years ago. They're now highlighting remote flexibility and professional development budgets before even listing the job requirements, because that's what gets nurse practitioners and data analysts to click "Apply." On the tech side, I rebuilt websites for three SaaS and AI startups in 2024, and every single one asked me to make their "We're Hiring" section more prominent than their product features. One AI client told me they lost two senior developers in final rounds because competitors had better remote work policies listed on their sites. We ended up creating an entire page just explaining their distributed team structure and home office stipends--it's now their third most-visited page after homepage and pricing. The gap between what companies are offering and what they're communicating online is costing them talent. If your careers page looks the same as it did in 2020, you're already behind before candidates even read the job description.