the cake is a lie. And so are those job postings.
As a General Manager with 9 current job openings for which I am recruiting…3 of which have been open for more than a year, I partially agree. But almost equally as important as training is attitude and cultural fit. A person can be appropriately skilled, in the narrowly defined sense of the word, but if they are not a good fit with the team it doesn’t really matter.
The top reasons why my job openings are currently unfilled have been mentioned in the posts above.
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I simply can’t find the people with the requisite skills for the jobs at hand. One example is a international logistics expert and production planner, with bi-lingual capabilities. It’s a 6-figure position. I know those people are out there, because I’ve hired them at other places before.
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Usually reluctance to move, or just plain reluctance to change jobs at all in this uncertain environment, has played a big part in keeping positions open. I’ve been close a couple of times on the position described above, but couldn’t close the deal. Once it was because the woman was underwater on her home by over $100,000+ and needed to sell it to move to my location. My job paid more than her current job. She wanted it. She just couldn’t make it work, financially.
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An unfortunate reality is that 100% of the currently unemployed people that have applied for the position described above haven’t even been close to the bar, in terms of skills required.
Unemployment for a signficant period of time does raise an eyebrow, and will prompt a few more questions than normal during an interview or screening process, but there are often good reasons for more senior, skilled people to be out of work for 6-12 months or more. Kids finishing up school in a particular town, someone moving back from overseas and getting re-settled, or just backpacking overseas for a summer. For my companies, this hasn’t been as big of a deal as I’ve read in the press.
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Unemployment for long periods of time at lower-skilled positions is more of a problem. For those positions, there are basic “life skills” that often start to erode with long stretches of unemployment. As in: getting up at the same time each day, and having the discipline to show up on time, clean and presentable, with your lunch and not being hungover. Not hitting on members of the opposite sex at work, who aren’t interested in your advances. Basic literacy and analytic skills, like reading a chart of numbers and writing a short report about what the numbers mean. Contributing to a team discussion without sulking, or being overbearing or hostile when challenged. Of course, we would expect some of these things to be taught in the public school system. If the caliber of the applicants for my lower-skilled positions is any indication, they aren’t. But that’s a topic for another day.
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I also have posted for 2 “phantom positions” to see what’s out there. There is an ideal candidate that exists on a whiteboard for each of those positions, but my team doesn’t really know if such a person exists. They might. Or they might not. We’ve kept the compensation open - “Commensurate with Skills and Experience” to see what we can get. Some of the candidates have been interesting, but none have matched exactly what we’re looking for. And all of the candidates have been employed elsewhere, so we would have needed to pry them out of their existing jobs anyway.
Hope that helps.
Before I comment on this practice, could you expand on what a “phantom position” is?
Experience from Mrs. Cad
Two jobs she was looking at were open for a year then closed. She never heard back from them and a little digging showed that the positions were eliminated. There are also a lot of fields that have very high turnover (hers is physical security) so positions for entry level positions e.g. security guard are always being advertised.
My own experience is that this is a buyers market and people with the required skills are more available than usual so employers can wait for the “perfect” candidate, not only skillwise but fit the culture of the company. The way I explained it to Mrs. Cad on my last job hunt was that the interviews are not about whether or not I can do the job, but if the principal sees themselves sitting down and eating lunch with me in the cafeteria.
As we grow and change, there are new things we need to do. The right person, with the right skills, would be a great leader of such things.
The position(s) in question has never existed in this company before. The position(s) in question require a combination of different skills, and are at a senior level that requires good managerial expertise and a lot of flexibility on travel.
As far as I can tell, they also don’t exist anywhere else in the industry, or even in closely adjacent industries. So it’s not like I can go out and pluck a person with job description <X> from another company to come here and do the same.
We’ll know the right person when we see them. But we can survive without hiring such a person. In the absence of a hire, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing now…coming together as a team to solve particular problems, hiving off capacity here and there, but being sub-optimal overall because the right leader could turbo-charge these efforts and free the rest of us up to do other things. Over time, we will try and develop an internal resource to step into the role. But that could take a few years.
I give a 30% probability or less that we will actually fill either one of these positions.
This a isn’t new practice. Organizations have been doing this for as long as I’ve been working in the private sector, which goes back to the early 80’s. So I doubt that this is some special, 2011-type twist on the job openings number quoted in the OP.
Some postings are posted with the intention of never hiring an outside person in the first place. For example, when a senior position in the county government opens up, they are required by law to post a job posting for that position. But they have no intentions of actually hiring anyone from outside; there will be an internal promotion instead. Now, maybe their old position will open up and there will be a posting for that. Now you have 2 postings but only one external hire. Or the old position will simply be removed, and you’re left with one posting and no jobs being created.
I’ve got four open positions now, and am spending lots of time recruiting. But the market in Silicon Valley is very good right now, for potential employees. We don’t expect perfect matches, and we will train, but you can only train people to a certain extent. For these positions you basically had to go into an EE or Computer Engineering program in college, and probably have a masters. I was at a conference last month, and no one seemed to be looking for a job and everyone seemed pretty contented.
I suspect a good number of the openings, as always, are filled jobs that never got removed and a good number are trolls.
We don’t do phantom posts, especially since I probably know every person in my industry who would match that kind of position. We’re a close knit community and I’ve been in it for a long time.
Um, the graph that claims to measure this actually measures the weekly payment averages multiplied by duration averages. The increases in this line also happen later than the rises in the unemployment line- this could very easily just indicate that people becoming claiming benefits at times of high unemployment are likely to be unemployed for longer than their counterparts who lose jobs in a good job market, which is news to no-one.
It in no way indicates that when unemployment benefits increase unemployment levels follow.
Do you actually interview for these positions, or just collect resumes?
but the cake really wasn’t a lie! I saw it, it was chocolate, it had candles!
Why? Here’s a list, some of these have already been covered
- The company is required to take applications (by contract) even though they aren’t hiring.
- They have to advertise the position, even though they intend to hire the boss’ nephew.
- The job requires specialized knowledge/training, which is hard to get, and the company will not train.
- They’re just fishing to see if anybody is desperate enough to take the job at a rate far below industry average
- The job is in some way very, very undesirable: be it working conditions, location, hours, etc.
- The boss firmly believes “anybody” can do the work, or has a really nasty temper – so he goes through employees like crap through a goose. (and it’s always the employees’ faults!)
- It’s a short term temporary job (like the census was) that hires new folks at each new location, so it appears to never be filled to a casual glance.
I think this is a huge factor, along with employers having gotten used to finding “perfect fits” from other companies, and being able to poach them…and then the read the headlines about high unemployment and assume that this should be an employer’s market. As you note, the housing market makes potential employees less mobile, and the job market makes them more change-risk averse. If you combine that with the apparent employer aversion to hiring the unemployed, it is far harder to fill a position now than when we were near full employment.
Another factor due to the high unemployment is the avalanche of resumes that appear when a position is advertised. It takes a lot of time and man power to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and unfortunately a lot of that gets done by clueless HR staff that throws out a lot of wheat. I ended up in my current position through a headhunter even though I had applied directly earlier. I didn’t have experience with the exact systems I am now working with (fairly exotic) but had experience with numerous similar things, and anyone in the field would recognize that, but HR was looking for an exact match.
When employment is high, then the applicants tend to self select more.
There are also a lot of contract conversions in that number. You have someone working on contract - they aren’t unemployed. The company wants to turn them into a real employee. They need to post the job, even though its unlikely they’ll hire anyone but the guy currently in that role. So you have a posting, but no corresponding decrease in unemployment.
Currently in the Twin Cities, Best Buy is hiring 200+ IT people. But you may or may not want to bother to apply - I’d guess half or more will be conversions from their current contracted staff.