Employers are increasingly challenged in finding qualified applicants with about 84 percent of job-seekers lacking needed skills, according to a new survey.

“Many manual and processing jobs have been replaced by creative innovative jobs,” said Diya Obeid, founder and CEO of JobDiva. “Job creation, outsourcing, automation and rejuvenation is a helix cycle.”

A Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study indicates that the industries reporting the highest levels of recruiting difficulty are in the health, social assistance and manufacturing industries.

“This is putting more emphasis on both the need for investing in employee training and education and in working in partnership with other leaders in business, education and government to improve the talent pipeline in their communities,” said Jen Schramm, manager of SHRM’s workforce trends and forecasting program.

In fact, some 47 percent of American jobs may be automated within 20 years, according to Oxford University.

“By boosting our creativity, we make ourselves more valuable and hirable,” said Mike Ferry, author of Teaching Happiness And Innovation. “Creative people will be more likely to support themselves regardless of how many jobs are lost due to technological changes.”

Although more than one-in-three American workers today are between the ages of 18 and 34 years old, the Millennial generation’s workforce consists of a disproportionately large share of immigrants, according to a  recent study by the Pew Research Center, and immigration to the U.S. will continue to disproportionately enlarge the ranks of the Millennial labor force.

“Hiring talented yet unskilled labor could be the best and only route to fill new jobs whose functions never existed” Obeid told Newsmax Finance.

Reasons for a more difficult recruiting environment include a small number of applicants, candidates without the needed work experience, competition from other employers, candidates’ lack of technical skills and the local market not producing enough qualified candidates.

“From all industries, they report a highly competitive market for talent with recruiting difficulty reaching levels not seen in years,” said Schramm.

Some 78 percent of millennials are tech savvy, according to UXC Professional Solutions data, which is likely why leveraging social media is the most common strategy human resources professionals reported using to deal with recruiting difficulty.

“Nowadays, most jobs expect right-brain talent,” Obeid said. “Left-brain skills have been already automated by our robotic algorithmic tools.”

Human resource professionals will need to build strong cases for greater investments in securing talent, according to SHRM findings.

That may be because the trend of implementing algorithmic systems to replace manual workflows started in the mid twentieth century and gained speed with the introduction of the Internet.

“The rate of change is creating jobs that require skills and know-how that did not previously exist,” said Obeid.

Juliette Fairley is an author, lecturer and TV host based in New York. To read more of her work, Click Here Now.