Frustrated Entrepreneurs
Begal, founder of Begal Enterprises Inc., is among a half dozen entrepreneurs who said during interviews that they are having a hard time landing new employees in the Washington, D.C. area, which has an unemployment rate of 6.2 percent, the second- lowest for a large U.S. metro area after Oklahoma City.
Some candidates lack the “right set of skills”; others fail to meet the “most basic of qualifications,” such as proper spelling on their applications, the business owners said. So even though the pool of potential employees “has gotten deeper,” the “top talent searches remain as challenging as they were before the recent market conditions,” said Julie Rakes, a spokeswoman for bank and credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp. [[COF) in McLean, Virginia.