As reported on CNBC, there are about 14 million unemployed right now, and 3.2 million unfilled job postings.
Why?
With 4 applicants for every job, shouldn’t that number have quickly gone to zero, leaving about 11million unemployed?
With all the money and effort put into creating more jobs, why not just work on filling the jobs that are available? Bringing the unemployment rate down to about 7%.
Just a guess, but the majority might simply be temp agencies that are filling stables, they don’t actually have those jobs, but they want to be able to offer a workforce when called upon.
Declan
All sorts of possibilities Such as, people just aren’t available with the skills required. Or potential applicants with the right skills don’t know that job is available. Or it’s too far away to be practical/desirable. Or conditions & pay are so awful no one wants it even in this economy. Or they are going to be filled, and other people fired keeping the net jobless rate the same.
My BIL owns an engineering company in Oakland. He has several job openings, but it’s hard to find someone with the exact skills. He’s taken to hiring people without the skills and training them, but finds it takes about 3 years to get them all the way up to speed. He says he always has openings for the right people, but they are just hard to find.
I fill out applications all the time. Many of the companies I apply to are temporary jobs and part time internships. Other jobs I’ve applied to I’ve been told directly that they are collecting applications for “future full and part time employment”, which really means they’re not hiring.
I have noticed this. But the flip side is that Temp agencies are also flooded with positions to be filled.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44817459
So pretend Obama calls you tonight and anoints you the “job filler czar.” He then says instead of spending $400billion on his plan, you can have that to get that 3.2 million down 1 million in a year.
What do you do?
Here are the reasons you cited:
Couple reasons:
Some jobs require uncommon and specialized skills that few of the unemployed have. For example, there might be a demand for brain surgeons than exceed the available supply of such doctors, but very few of the millions of unemployed would have the necessary credentials for such a job, nor could those skills be easily and rapidly acquired.
Some of the job openings may be in highly undesirable and/or remote locations, like Barrow, Alaska, which are extreme enough even most unemployed won’t move there.
Many of the current unemployed are over 35 and/or may not have the health for some of those jobs.
Some of the companies looking for employees now categorically refuse to even consider someone who is currently unemployed, meaning they may desperately need an employee but are excluding every single one of those 14 million, so they’ll never tap into that pool of unemployed talent.
Likewise, a number of companies now systematically exclude anyone with a less than stellar credit rating, which is exceedingly hard to maintain when un- or underemployed. This, again, walls off the 14 million unemployed from those companies share of the open jobs.
Some companies post jobs without ever really meaning to hire people. Then, a year or two later, they can just eliminate those jobs, then crow about how they’ve cut staff to their shareholders and look good.
There are probably others.
Because people don’t invest in their skill set to make themselves employable. It isn’t enough to be ready, willing, and even eager to work. You have to have abilities that make other people money to be desirable to a future employer.
Because you are expecting 100% efficiency in matching jobs with applicants, and the job supply is not a static pool of either. New jobs and applicants are added each day, and it takes some time to conduct interviews and select applicants. That is why the structural unemployment level never drops below about 4%; the job market is a moving target.
Or more likely they did, but it turns out that’s not what employers want right now. Plenty of people train for X and it turns out instead that Y is the Next Big Thing.
This.
Also a number of those may be openings for which the hiring managers already have someone in mind or which they intend to fill internally, but that have to be posted anyway due to the company’s equal opportunity employment policies.
Investing in your skills is a continual process, not a onetime event.
A continual process with a built in time delay. You can’t just download a skill set Matrix style, which means there’s time for the job market to change. And then there’s the question of finding the time and money to do so.
Not at all, but is it reasonable to expect something greater that 0%?
The question, “why” is actually about that efficiency, why is it so much less than 100%? And how do we improve that efficiency so that the current job postings (if we assume they are job postings) can be filled thereby lowering the unemployment rate.
Simply put, we could either spend a lot of money and go through a lot of trouble to CREATE new jobs, or we could spend a lot of money and go through a lot of trouble to fill existing jobs. A lot of focus as been spent on the former, I’m curious about the latter.
Fine, but once they move that person internally, is the old job destroyed, or will it also need to be filled?
Why do you think it’s 0%? That 3.2 million is all the jobs that haven’t been filled, but there are a ton of jobs that do get filled. Where do those enter into your calculations?
0% would be no jobs being filled at all. Since that is obviously not true, the efficiency is much higher than 0%.
I don’t think it’s 0%, nor do I expect 100%.
The point is that there are a lot of unemployed people, and a lot of unfilled job postings. So how do we get the efficiency higher than it currently is?
It’s the free market. Why would you think it is a good thing to interfere with the free market?
Education would help. But really isn’t sufficient.
I’m in a strange spot right now. I might take one of those 3.2M jobs. I have a job. If I switch companies, my current position will not be rehired - there is a freeze. They’ll make due with the people they have, perhaps hiring overseas. The company I’m talking to has been looking for someone remotely qualified for months - its a specialized field, one which there aren’t going to be a lot of applicants with my qualifications. So me moving at this point in time means one less job, but not one less unemployed person.
I read an article a year or so back written by an HR person. It said in this market, employers are looking for the “purple penguin.” Someone with pretty exact qualifications for the job. An ordinary black and white penguin they aren’t interested in. Its a complete about face from 1997-1998 where if you were looking for a penguin, you were willing to take on an albatross that was willing to wear a bow tie figuring you’d train him.