I know I am tired of failed searches. :mad:
Why not hire entry-level (i.e. recent college grads with no experience) and train them up? Supposedly there’s a glut of them these days with lots of debt who would be willing to work for a reasonable salary instead of being a barista.
If not, then you’re part of the problem. How do you think people get that experience you’re looking for?
I listed a wide-gamut of position types and we do hire recent college grads for the appropriate positions: The lower IT tech positions, the junior sysadmin and junior Linux admin, etc. However, even these positions are tough to fill since there are so many jobs available and we cannot afford to pay what industry does (this is higher ed).
Sounds like the problem isn’t with the job market, unless you expect there to be some population of qualified people out there to work for less than the market rate.
If I were you, I’d see about getting concessions made in terms of vacation time, work hours, dress code, etc… and beat that stuff to death in your recruiting pitch- quality of life type stuff, and point out how much better their life will be if they work for you, even if they’re not making quite as much in terms of salary.
Those two statements seem to contradict each other.
For the majority of these positions, we have nothing to do with the pay or benefits: They are state jobs with set salary scales. We do have some flexibility on the “professional” positions, but it is still fairly restricted. You don’t know how much we would love to be able to better compete!
Have you considered getting Wastewater Operator In Training certification? My dad grew up during the Depression and went into what was then called Sewage Treatment because he figured that if anyone was eating, they had to flush and it had to go somewhere.
I’m inclined to agree with the OP. Look, I have an MBA and a degree in engineering from two top schools. A PMP project management certification as well as other certs. I have 20 years of experience working for some of the top companies in their field (including Silicon Valley and Wall Street). I have extensive programming and data science experience. I’m conventionally handsome. I’m charming and outgoing enough that people either assume I’m in sales or should be. I’m good at writing, presenting and public speaking. I have a vast network of friends and former colleagues who work at top companies and have shown themselves inclined to help out. I live in a major metropolitan area.
And I’ve still been looking for a job for six months with no luck.
Forget 60 years ago. There just seems to be something happening these days where job hunting is a lot more terrible than it was even 5 years ago. I don’t think it matters what level you are looking at. Companies want to spend forever picking through dozens of candidates just to find what they think is some sort of “super star”.
Meanwhile, when I used to go into these companies as a consultant, the people actually working there seemed like morons. Like how did this idiot from second rate school ever get their job and how did they manage to coast there for 15 years, working their way up to VP of doing nothing?
Yeah, I hear that’s going to be a growth business in the coming decades.
Pffft! Can’t be all that good at it. Hell, there are over 54,000 ahead of him. 
:D:D:D
msmith537, sorry to hear about the unemployment.
Something is definitely awry, if on one hand, we hear about all the millenials and Gen-Z types who can’t find jobs other than rinky-dink hourly jobs after college (even the STEM ones), and how they’re drowning in student loan debt, and on the other, we hear about this serious STEM job shortage where companies literally can’t find candidates of even marginal qualification.
Something’s fishy- either the entry level college grads are expecting too much, or the companies are looking for purple squirrels/unicorns or bargain-basement rock stars. I don’t know which, but my suspicion is that the companies are probably where the problem lies. I’ve seen way too much hiring bullshit and shenanigans in my 20 year career to believe that this anything but rank stupidity on the part of the companies, or a really cynical attempt to hire more cut-rate foreigners.
My thinking there is that at six employers over that period, only two of them actually hired entry level, essentially untrained recent college grads. And one of those was my first employer out of college in 1997, and the other was a mid-level consulting firm whose business model relied on hiring new grads and working them like rented mules. The rest all stuck to hiring experienced people with the expectation of slotting them into a role straightaway with minimal adjustment and training.
It’s basically a symptom of a larger problem- companies seem to have moved to a more… disposable(?) employee concept where they refer to people as “resources” and then think/treat them as something much the same as a copier or other fungible object. There’s not the culture where they hire a set of promising young people, train them, and promote them if they pan out, under the thinking that at worst, you’ll end up with decent lower-level people. Instead, it’s more of a mindset that if your software development manager quits, you go hire another one, rather than promoting a promising development team member.
It’s almost as if once you’re in a job category (developer, BA/PM, management, etc…) then you’re stuck there- you can move laterally between companies, but getting that hop to the next category up is the most difficult thing.
I think it’s the expectations of new graduates. Just a quick googling shows some studies that new graduates think their salary should be higher then what is offered. Some thought a new job right out of college should be paying them $80K a year.
I’m sure a lot of companies are trying to pay the least amount possible as well. But to hear stories of “I can’t find a job!” that really means “I can’t find a job that pays what I think I’m worth” is kind of strange.
Okay. I train the new cashiers for the store, and I ask them “What are the three things you have to do to keep this job?” They can usually get the first two, but fail at the third.
- Do the work
- Be reliable
- Get along with people.
More people are fired for failing at the third than the other two combined.
You have to have people skills to keep a job. You start at the bottom to see if you are reliable and can deal with people. Hell, there are millions of people who can do the job, but will they show up on time and get along with people?
At least at my current company, it’s the latter.
Now that we’re past an industry downturn, we need more people. But the company doesn’t want to hire very many people. But when they are forced to, they advertise a list of would-likes and must-haves that only purple unicorn employees can match. But they also aren’t willing to pay for that kind of quality employee and complain they can’t seem to attract them.
Note that some of these positions are really for lower level staff where entry level personnel can be trained or less experienced personnel are perfectly acceptable and potentially a solid investment - if they can be developed or trained properly, they represent a cost savings not now but 3 or 4 years down the road.
At a different company I used to work for, it was also definitely the latter. While there’s limited explicit evidence, they took advantage of H1 visas and such to get foreign employees and essentially keep them chained to the company for 2-3 years while paying 20-30% below comparable salaries for US graduates. Those employees would leave as soon as they transitioned to a different visa status (and better paying jobs). They also hired some US employees and did some other things to stay off the radar.
I think this “hop to a new company” every 2-3 years mentality has hurt job seekers overall.
If a company thinks that a new hire will only stay with them for 3 years, they can’t hire someone with less than perfect experience and “train them up” for a year. If the hire is only going to be there 3 years, there is no incentive for the company to invest in them. They need that person working at 100% after a two week ramp up period.
I work in a company that has made a serious effort to really retain people. This has had the effect that they are more willing to “take the long view” and hire smart graduates straight out of school because they are planning on keeping them.
I’d say it was the other way around, at least in my corner of the world. Most employees, even millennials, want to stick around for longer. But compared with 30 years ago, companies are less willing to train and more willing to layoff. When the employer isn’t willing to train, won’t give raises, and will layoff employees at the drop of a hat, employees pick up on that and reciprocate. Finding jobs is hard enough. It’s not like people hop around companies for the fun of it.
Conversely, the companies that make the extra effort seem to hold onto their employees longer.
Big tech companies pay that and more, but that’s about it.
But all the grads think that’s what they should get because they heard that’s what someone else got. And that’s how they think people should be paid, like all their friends, not on their value as an employee, because that would be difficult and they just graduated from school which was really difficult and they only did it to make a lot of money not to work hard.
junnerstan now?
Fair enough, but that’s more a consequence of people getting paltry raises if they stay (0.5-3% is about normal from what I can tell), but can make double digits easily if they jump to a different company. I myself got between 1% and 3% at my old job for 9 years, and then when I switched jobs, I got a 18% pay jump to basically do the same exact job with a little less stress and a little more responsibility (as odd as that works out). And that’s not uncommon or unusual in IT.
It’s like companies feel like they only have to dangle carrots for the new employees, and the rest of us should be happy to have jobs. Fundamentally, they need to start treating them like **Hermitian’s **company does (I suspect they probably have reasonably generous raises), and prove they’re in it for the long haul. If they treat employees like they’re temporary, employees are going to reciprocate.