Yahoo Finance: Small Business Owners Struggle To Find Qualified Job Applicants

America’s small-business owners have gotten slightly more optimistic recently but still have a number of business worries, according to a new report from a small-business trade group.

High on their list of concerns is difficulty finding qualified applicants, according to that report from the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). Another recently released report, this one from Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass., found the No. 1 challenge business owners face when hiring qualified applicants is finding employees with the appropriate skills.

The Babson survey looked at a pool of 1,800 small business owners across the US, which included owners from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and a comparative random sample of businesses, and found the so-called skills gap was their biggest hiring challenge.

Meanwhile, the NFIB report analyzed 700 responses from small-business owners, 48% of whom said they could find few or even no qualified applicants for the jobs they were trying to fill.