The enterprise talent pool didn’t shrink this year. It got relabeled.

Oracle cut thousands of NetSuite people in March. ServiceNow cut about a thousand more. Salesforce partners have been trimming since last year.

So if the people are out there, why is your req still open?

Last week I read a job description line by line. The role had been open for months. The requirements listed a slew of certifications, and the ones that are hot right now are all AI. Salesforce already retired its first AI certification. The AI Associate went away on February 2nd because it was out of date.

Hiring managers are screening for certs that are already obsolete.

While people cycle through your interview loop and you hold out for the best person on paper, the work doesn’t stop. Your sole admin absorbs it. Architecture decisions get made by people with an incomplete understanding of the Org. Six months of technical debt compounds upon itself, and you end up paying someone to clean it up later.

The skill you need is experience in enterprise delivery including designing the landscape, connecting the integrations, translating between your business team and the build, owning system governance, and knowing when to say no.

That skill doesn’t belong to a platform. I’ve talked to architects who’ve done it on Salesforce and could do it on NetSuite or ServiceNow inside a quarter.

Certifications are nice to haves. I’ve hired people with no certs who knew how to get things built. They earned the ones the job needed within three or four months, and they went on to be valuable team members.

You’re not protecting quality by holding out for the exact logo or certification. What is it costing you to wait for the perfect resume instead of having the conversations that reveal your next hire?

If you’re hiring for enterprise application leadership and want to talk through what the role actually needs, grab 15 minutes: https://oakcresttalent.com/15mins