A LOT has changed since the 80s in this area. The administrative overhead is their own office overhead and taxes would just be a duplication of what the main employer already does. And before anyone says I’m totally wrong again,
when you earn a wage, payroll taxes must be taken into account no matter Who you work for.
(unless you get the old “yeah, we forgot to list you this week, so this periods pay you’ll get 2 weeks from now”)
Yes, they find jobs, but there are a Lot fewer jobs and more applicants and the wages are so far below industry standard as to be a joke. Also, they Don’t find find jobs for you… its not anything at all like the movie “Dave”.
You apply to them for one job and after that contract ends, the rest is on You. The next job might be through them or it might not.
I should have been more clear. We do find plenty of competent people, but these people also have offers from every other big name in the area. Apple, Google, etc. pay more and we can’t really match their salaries, and so the applicants reject our offers. We mostly get the ones that like our company for other reasons and are willing to accept that as a cost, or those whose experience is more specialized to our industry and so isn’t quite as attractive to other companies.
Also, the 3/4 that I mentioned is just one (semi-arbitrarily) chosen point in the pipeline. It’s more like 1/2 for applicants that make it to the in-person interview, and perhaps 19/20 for raw applicants (people showing up to the job fair, say). In between there are several filtering stages with progressively higher selectivity.
We haven’t gone up against Google, but we have gone up against Apple. The pay may be similar but we’d lose in coolness (though I have heard bad things about working there.) And my group has to go up against other groups in our company, some of which do stuff that the average grad thinks is cooler. I make up for it by selling the hell out of the job.
We had one job fair - 0 resumes of interest. If 1/2 of people you bring in aren’t acceptable (scary waste of your time) you need to phone screen better.
I work for an NPO and I work as a social worker and we try to find people jobs and teach them interview skills and life skills for people at the state aid office.
It’s very complicated as I’ve seen so much change in the 25 years I’ve been doing this.
First about 2/3 of my clients come with criminal backgrounds. That puts them last on the list, but we don’t teach that anymore. In fact it’s more and more taboo now to suggest anyone with a criminal background is somehow less desirable.
Second, employers have come to realize they only need to employ people at minimal acceptable levels. For instance in hotels, many jobs there are taught in a day or two, so there’s no need to treat employees well or offer anything because there’s always more waiting.
Third, the job market really changed. Probably the overall number of jobs stayed the same, but the type of jobs shifted. I can see just how many more jobs are automated now. Of course this is a grief going back past the days when knitters protested being put of work by knitting machines.
Finally, employees don’t understand how things work. We’re being taught things from both sides, employer or employee that don’t hold up. We follow up with people, and I’ve seen ladies who come off aid and get a job at Walmart and three years later are still there.
They’re very proud of the fact they are still working but are scared to ask for a raise or even look for another job. Because it’s their first job at 35 years old.
On the flip side, I get repeat people in, who won’t pull their up their pants or take off an earring as that is disrespecting their culture. So they’d rather lose the job.
I see plenty of fault on both the part of employers and employees but I do strongly believe we are still teaching people like it was 1950s America and it hasn’t been that way in a long long time.
Job fairs are very hit or miss. It’s very dependent on the school, and not in a way that’s strongly correlated to the school’s overall rankings.
I dunno; I think a 1/2 rejection rate is a reasonable target for in-person interviews. We’ve had marginal phone screen candidates that actually did really well in person. It feels like tightening that up would be a loss. If the average person stays for 5 years, and a full interview takes 6 hours, and there’s a 1/2 success rate, then only ~0.1% of the time is spent interviewing on average (more for managers; less for new hires).
And your solution for jobs geared toward high school educational levels that cannot be filled because students holding such a diploma can’t do basic math?
Really? Is there a problem with filling high school level jobs? Hard to believe since the unemployment rate at that level is so high. Not to mention that a tiny increase in pay would probably get all the “skilled” employees needed.
This doesn’t help those who don’t know math get jobs, but that isn’t the issue here. My wife taught practical math skills at a school for nannies, half of whom were quite ignorant of them.
ETA: In any case, when people talk about skills mismatches they are mostly talking about skills to get a middle class job, not a minimum wage job.
Yes, that’s your entire thread. You’re calling shenanigans on companies who can’t find skilled labor. We have manufacturers in my area who cannot find basic skilled labor. Some of them are paying commercial time advertising for people to apply.
OK, what level of education are you suggesting (above high school) for factory jobs?
That is exactly what the issue is.
Jesus frickin Christ, no. You’re not listening. These are factory jobs that start above minimum wage.
I was responding mostly to the high school graduate who can’t add problem. Certainly most high school grads are not going to be skilled by any definition of that term.
It depends on the skill needed. To go to a higher level of skills, during the bubble everyone and her brother took computer science in college. When it collapsed, enrollments plummeted. If the skill needed is something no one has hired for for a decade, it is going to be scarce. Supply and demand. That may not be from the laziness of the work force, just self interest. Could the company maybe train people? Can’t do that for electricians and plumbers, but you can for lots of factory jobs.
This might be another case of what I mentioned above, which is the perhaps understandable desire of employers for a workforce just waiting to fill whatever needs they just came up with.
Are there programs at the local high schools training people for similar jobs? Maybe this factory owner could drop in, and even offer part time work when things are slow. When the economy improves everyone wants to hire, and it gets tough. It is good to have an edge. I know this involves thinking ahead and stuff.
But as I said I was thinking more of “skilled” representing being able to do simple arithmetic. I have a hard time believing there is such a shortage of that skill that someone offering some reasonable money can’t find enough people.
This. I work in the IT department of a medium-big company that’s owned by an even bigger company, and yet we don’t have any new college graduates that I’m aware of, except possibly in the IT inventory/PC deployment group. They’re the only under-30 people here anyway.
It seems like TPTB around here are too busy fixating on the projects and their administration to actually worry about the people and their development. I have a standing gripe about that actually. They budget training money, but I can’t get a straight answer from them about what the career paths are for my role. If they’d tell us that, I’d engineer a training plan to get me there. But so far, it seems like they filled a org-table slot when I got put in this position, and there’s no clear path forward. I know that if I don’t know where I’m going, any road will do, but I also don’t want to be perceived as having wasted the company’s money on non-pertinent training classes either.
Elysium is what I’d call the Worst-Case Scenario at its max. My suspicion is that corporate greed will prevent it. If the middle class starts to collapse due to widespread unemployment, it’s going to affect a lot of corporate bottom lines very negatively, and that means rich people are going to be very unhappy. Result: corporations will clamor for Basic Income to be instituted so they’ll have a customer base for their products and services.
Well punishing people endlessly for committing a crime is probably one of the reasons for high recidivism rates. Trying to integrate them back into society seems the saner approach.
I’m not sure what you mean by “minimal acceptable levels” here. Are you simply saying there is no training or career path for (I’m assuming) minimum wage employees hired through your agency?
Exactly how did the job market for your clients change? From what to what? What jobs are now available, what sort of jobs used to be available?
Is their fear of looking for other jobs all that unreasonable, considering what you just said about employers knowing there’s always another employee out there?
There’s a culture for not pulling up your pants?
I’m not sure what you meant by that. Are you saying teaching methods for students are wrong, or that teaching methods for people like yourself are wrong, or that the NPO culture is kinda stuck in the 1950s?
Yeah, and retail markups are an “unnecessary” expense that lowers buying power during a time when buying power is “artificially” deflated “far enough”.
My personal story: we had a new manager come in to my company and offered me way more money than had ever been paid for a data entry position and I took it. It wasn’t an obscene amount or even really out of market ranges, just a lot more than had been paid before. Her philosophy was you get what you pay for. I killed it. I was really, really good. I went on vacation and the people who covered for me made $3000 worth of mistakes, mistakes I would not have made. And that was just one week. The same thing happened every time I took a scheduled day off, and had happened because of the people who had the job before me. I was worth the money.
Then economic factors changed and my position was deemed too expensive. I was let go and they went through hell trying to replace me (lower salary, no benefits). No one lasted and everyone was pissed I was gone.
Now, on paper they “saved” money by paying someone less money for fewer hours, but the work was not being done well. So I have to agree that some “entry level” or low-skills work is in fact very important and if you start to screw with it, you might irreparably destroy everything.
(My company is barely hanging on. It has nothing to do with my exit, but the poor managerial decisions were a huge symptom of bigger problems. The biggest of which to me was not being able to properly assess value of employees and their time.)
I just got a mail from a headhunter. It’s for a SAP QM position, English-speaking.
It requires a degree in “business IT management” I don’t think that even existed when I went to college. Sorry, my degrees are in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Labor Safety and Translation; nothing in IT, and none of the SAP QM people I’ve ever met had degrees in either IT or business management. Since it’s a module where you’re more likely to encounter people who learned it “on the job” than from a class, the background is usually Engineering, Chemistry, Physics or Biology; that is, the same backgrounds which are likely to produce Quality Technicians and Quality Managers in non-IT contexts.
There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t be interested in that particular posting even if I happened to be available, but if that degree is a pass-fail requirement, whomever came up with it has reduced the possible targets to zero or almost.
Recently I met a nice lady while waiting for a train, and a middle-aged guy who was “ironing her ears” about his job issues. Primary school dropout, he refuses to take orders and refuses to take tests. The nice lady suggested setting up shop as an under the table handyman: he immediately shot back that the amount you get paid for a handyman job is very little, it’s “nowhere near what you get paid for being a master builder.” “Well, they’re small jobs, they come with small pay. Are you qualified as a master builder?” “No! Of course not!” “Through clenched teeth Then you can’t work as one. Either you do the work you can, or no, you won’t be doing work.”
His girlfriend works as an independent cleaner. “Maybe you could work for her; you could help with the more heavy-duty jobs, and then she’d be able to take more of those; those pay more.” He wanted to be the one organizing the job… “NO! SHE is the cleaner, you would go as her helper, that means YOU do what SHE says.” “But I am the man!” “I’d take that as meaning you can’t clean worth shit, you see… Since SHE is the expert, SHE is who organizes. But evidently better not.”
I just want to fifth this: I see it all the time. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect the market would correct, but apparently not as it’s such a common and entrenched way of thinking.
And on the skills front, I think it’s fine for contract jobs to just list a set of desired skills and leave it at that. But permanent jobs should generally allow for employees to bring some skills and learn/improve others on the job.
Many employers advertise for a role with apparently the desire to find someone super-skilled and experienced in every conceivable area with any association with that job. But someone like that would likely have been promoted out of that role.
Barry Boehm in a classic paper measured 10 x differences between the best and the worst programmers. I’d say paying slightly more to get that best programmer is a lot better idea than saving money by getting the worst one.