My favorite was the one where they wanted:
someone with a “superior engineer” degree (in Spain this would require being at least 25, and that’s if you’re better than the Clockmaker God, and if you’re that good your teachers will grab you and nail you to the floor until you finish your PhD and join the faculty),
plus an MBA in Marketing from a specifically-named, super-expensive school,
Spanish, English and German all native (the job was for a firm based in Barcelona, so assume that Catalan will be at the very least a plus),
to accept a “training contract” (rate 70% of minimum wage, must be under 25),
and the job description was
“implementing SAP in our Chinese subsidiary”. What, all of it? Or would you be satisfied with, say, the most “basic” modules/functionalities? (FInance, COntrolling, Materials Management which includes purchasing and warehousing, Sales and Distribution).
My current client is in a situation where on one hand they need more people for their support team, and qualified in modules for which so far they hadn’t had anybody with experience (some of these modules are in use and were put in by the method of “ok, if we do this… it doesn’t seem to have exploded, we’re good”), but on the other they’re afraid of hiring “permanent”* people and having to let them go whenever the next round of downsizing happens. We have contractors in positions which are way too key for a contractor.
I stopped believing in “permanent” contracts a long time ago. And for some reason, the client never seems to consider the possibility that one of their employees may jump ship, despite this being something which actually happens, something which is happening now and not sometime in the future.
HR personnel are only as good as their understanding of the position and the skill set needed to support that position.
I recall applying for jobs as I left college. It was not all uncommon to find positions that required 5 years experience with a particular biotech procedure when that procedure was only 2 years old. No qualified applicants indeed!
Yeah, I recall seeing an ad for 20 years experience in web design in 2001. That job was never filled. Although I always apply for jobs that I’m just underqualified for. Sometimes employers ask for the moon. If they need the position filled, they will fill it with whoever is available. They will either lower their expectations, or they will pay more. But the OP is absolutely correct, I think, with one exception: if there is an occupational licensing cartel in place, that can artificially lower labor supply for that occupation to the point where there aren’t enough employees to fill the position in the short term at any price. The most egregrious cartels will demand something like five years apprenticeship,so breaking in isn’t something you can just do.
Most people don’t work for large corporations, most people work for either small businesses - which frequently fail and operate on a shoestring - or the government in some form or another - and I think most government agencies are not rolling in revenue. And the small business/public sector salaries put downward pressure on the corporate jobs.
GOOD corporate executives are aware of the cyclical nature of business. In the dot com crash of 2000 more people needed to be laid off in order for companies to survive because each employee was paid more. If your employees are paid less, then when the business cycle hits a downturn, you can afford to hang onto more of them. Not all corporations think like this, but I had the privilege of working for one that did. It was acknowledged that they paid a little less than market, but they tried to keep layoffs to a minimum during down cycles (we still had some deep RIFs). Not all corporate executives are souless monsters who enjoy laying people off. Very few want to set their companies up to undergo large layoffs in a downturn because it really hits morale and productivity, even if you are a souless monster, you recognize that it means a huge hit to the company.
I also worked for a company prior to that which paid OK, but gave out HUGE profit sharing checks - half again your salary. When the company hit a down cycle, people lost houses. They were being paid enough to live perfectly fine on their salary, but with that bonus, they committed to big houses, or really nice cars. Then got mad at the company when the bonus didn’t got a lot smaller when the business climate changed. But under that methodology, they could get through even the worst downturns with no layoffs. I was working at the time for the person who would be the CEO three years later - they said they changed their mind on the bonuses off that experience - too many of their employees didn’t have the financial sense to understand the idea of a bonus - and since the company was in a company town, it had ripples throughout the town.
Sorry, son-in-law. Fortunately, my daughter has a very good job, in journal publishing (chief copy editor for a group of scientific journals). How long scholarly journals can keep going is another question.
Does it matter? For either statement the employer can’t hire the worker.
Except the employer may have more control over finding one worker who will accept the wage than he will finding many customers who will support the prices needed to pay higher wages.
So, you’re telling us you finally understand the concept of supply and demand? The supply of everything is a function of the price you are willing to pay for it, unless it is restricted in some way by an outside source (e.g., apartments in a rent control city) or there just physically isn’t enough of the stuff in the world.
Now, as a policy matter, does that mean you oppose Obama’s plan to subsidize Jr College tuition? What good is it to give people skills if they can’t use them? And how about the MW? Do you want to make it even harder to generate new jobs?
And less risk. Pricing yourself out of the market isn’t a good strategy for a company. Paying people at market rates instead of above market rates, works pretty well. Paying people below market rates won’t work well long term, but might work short term if you can find them
If you pay at, or below the market rate, you make your workforce more mobile - they will walk - that’s also market forces at work
That’s fine in some industries, but fatal in others - experience is utterly essential in certain fields.
I do know this though, if they were looking for a EE and offering 100k, they would have to fend them off with a shit covered stick. Instead in the UK they are taking on semi skilled Eastern Euros, and then having to pay twice as much to rectify all the cock ups.
I’ve also noticed one other thing too, its not usually the best that tend to remain when downsizing occurs, its usually the mediocre journeymen. Any tradesperson who is any good knows exactly what they have, and what its worth - and they have the confidence to take the termination money, because things will always turn out right for them. Been there, done that - nice fat little redundancy package and move to another company the following week - and if you are astute enough - you always have an option before you need it.
Here’s what the conglomerate that I work for does:
First the company breaks down North American jobs into a series of “steps”, removing all autonomy and analytical thought and turning the job into a list of tasks.
Then the company will find small overseas businesses and buys them cheap, and trains those employees to do some or all of the step by step tasks. Then the company outsources all or part of the tasks to the overseas business for a fraction of what it would cost to pay North American workers.
The company claims its not technically outsourcing, since the business in China or India or Chile is now just another branch of the larger North American umbrella company. Each year more and more of our jobs are being shipped elsewhere.
The quality of the products is eroding, so there’s an ongoing battle to hold on to our market share, which only seems to justify the company’s “outsourcing” business plan.
It’s disgusting and entirely unsustainable over the long term, but apparently the CEO is keeping the shareholders happy.
Has anyone taken account the role of Temp Agencies?
They skim off the top of every employee that they ‘run’ and make sure that their people don’t go full time so the position can still be rolled over onto the next W2-slave.
If we made employers act as their own temp agencies, imagine the costs they’d save & how much more would enter the economy through diverse and wide-spread employees hands?
Ripple effects of increased wages per hour w/o inflation ARE still good for the economy, right?
None of that is true. The fact of the matter is that business changes and fluctuates so quickly that companies cannot keep pace by hiring only permanent employees. If you are hiring to support a sustained operation, then permanent employees make sense. And they tend to be more expensive because you also have to pay their benefits. But for short to medium term projects, it makes much more sense to hire temporary workers. Keep in mind, a “temp” can represent anything from a $8 an hour office temp to fill in for a sick admin or an independent consultant earning $400k a year advising the CEO.
What I imagine is that lots of temp workers would not have the skill to run their own temp agency and would end up worse off. There is nothing stopping them from doing that now, so why don’t they just do it? And then the companies would have to deal with dozens of different “temp agencies” instead of just one.
This idea of “skimming off the top” is what every retailer does. Think how much better our economy would run if everyone was forced to buy everything directly from the manufacturer! :rolleyes:
The type of threads always crack me up. They’re full of “experts” on business who have clearly never run a business in their lives.
There is something that keeps you from “just doing it.”
We (my husband and I) are a high end temp agency - i.e. he is an independant consultant and we are an S Corp to enable that. To get him into basically any corporation, a MSA needs to be signed and you need to get through vendor setup. Its sort of a pain in the ass for one person, so usually what he does is pass through consulting. He gets himself placed, then works with someone with an MSA in place already set up as a vendor. They take a small cut (around 4% if he places himself, more like 15% if they find the placement for him). As an S corp, we bill the middleman and get paid by the middleman and pay all the necessary employment taxes. He gets no benefits.
It isn’t an onerous level of paperwork to do this. But there IS paperwork. Every quarter I’m filing tax paperwork for us. I have to make sure I keep enough cash on hand to pay those taxes. But honestly, the hard part of that business is finding the people who need the workers, then finding the workers that match up. That is a big part of the job - worth 15% of the take. The assignments are between four and eighteen months.
Lots of highly skilled IT people work like this, but it isn’t going to work so well for your average worker.
Maybe it’s changed since I was a professional temporary in the 1980’s, but I did, in fact, work full time hours while doing so. The “skim” was the cost incurred to find jobs for me, pay the administrative overhead, and things like taxes. I was earning about 2-4 times minimum wage, depending on the assignment. It was a good gig for the better part of a decade for me, got me a lot of experience in different areas and I learned to be flexible and adaptable.
Of course, not all temp agencies are equal - some really do exploit people.
What you’re describing is more closer to head hunter then the temp agencies we see today. And while there are certainly temp agencies that deal with skilled workers what you predominately see today is a method to avoid paying benefits.
Um, yes, that’s what I said - job value is simple math. Obviously what the market will pay for the product is a major variable, as are worker supply and ddemand, but neither changes the base equation. There are certainly some employers who are out to make as much as possible while paying as little as posible, but the majority are simply following the formula. A lot of effort and reserch goes into to determining exactly what a job is worth.