In the midst of a global labour shortage, employers around the world are doing away with drug tests in a desperate bid to attract more job applicants, fill more roles and retain more workers.

A survey, conducted by staffing firm ManpowerGroup and released this week, indicated that 9 percent of more than 45,000 employers worldwide were eliminating job screenings or drug tests as an incentive to “attract and retain in-demand talent.” That equates to some 4,050 employers, from 43 countries, who are willing to turn a blind eye to workers’ recreational drug use if it means filling vacant positions.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have already cottoned on to this, and started to adapt their hiring protocols accordingly. In June, Amazon, the second-biggest global employer based out of the U.S., announced that it would no longer test for marijuana in its pre-employment drug testing screening for jobs not regulated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. This was a substantial change that would allow the company to move closer to its long-term vision of becoming “Earth’s Best Employer,” according to Dave Clark, Amazon’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer.

As Clarke suggested, Amazon’s shift was partly motivated by changing legislation around the use of marijuana in the U.S. – and other studies have highlighted the ways in which these changes have impacted employers and forced them to review and update their drug screening policies. An employer drug testing survey released last year by Current Consulting Group found that 36 percent of poll respondents who were planning to remove marijuana from their testing panels were doing so because they were “experiencing delays and/or cannot fill positions due to high marijuana positives.”

With talent shortages plateauing at a 15-year high, many employers around the world are deciding that something has to give – and for several thousand of them, that’s drug tests. Other popular incentives to attract workers and close the labour gap involved offers of more flexible working hours (offered by 39 percent of polled employers), increased wages (offered by 31 percent of employers) and non-financial benefits such as extra vacation days (offered by 20 percent of employers).