Another explanation for why unemployment stays high

[nancylebov]

Companies impose pointlessly high requirements..

Indeed, some of the most puzzling stories to come out of the Great Recession are the many claims by employers that they cannot find qualified applicants to fill their jobs, despite the millions of unemployed who are seeking work. Beyond the anecdotes themselves is survey evidence, most recently from Manpower, which finds roughly half of employers reporting trouble filling their vacancies.

10% of employers can't find employees who are willing to take the salary being offered, but most of the problem is looking for people who know so much they need no training at all, or possibly a "why not the best?" attitude which leads to arbitrary work and education qualifications so that positions don't get filled for months.

Link thanks to dcseain.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

The fact that they're are lots of unemployed people doesn't necessarily mean there are people available who are qualified for a particular position.

On the other hand, it's routine to see job descriptions with ridiculous requirements. I remember that when Java had been out for only four years, companies were advertising for people with five years of Java experience.

[kore]

That "skills gap" shit makes me so mad. Like the person says below, there are advertisements for jobs here - with like seven years of C++, ten years of Java, experience as a sysadmin, &c &c, and I'm just like, the FEW people with those requirements are not going to be interested in your job opening. Bah.

[kore]

Yeah, but 'qualified' doesn't necessarily mean 'have this exact experience':

Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.

My dad and my father-in-law and other people in that generation are full of stories about how you could get an entry-level job, and work your way up to a good one, or even get hired for a good job just because the employer thought you might be able to handle it without having had 5-7 years' experience in the same field beforehand. And then people are encouraged to go to junior colleges and get "certificates" which really don't mean anything, because employers don't take them seriously.

[twistedchick]

And, outside the computer field, the same goes for much of journalism and editing.

[madfilkentist]

Though actually, requirements like that often have one of two reasons: (1) The employer wants a legal excuse to reject any applicant they don't like. (2) They want to hire a specific person but are required for whatever reason to advertise the position, so they tailor the requirements so only the person they want fits them. I must confess to having gotten my current job through (2).

[siderea]

There's other popular reasons:

3) My last place of employment was notorious for trying to hire one person to do too many jobs, so you'd see the equivalent of "Web programmer, graphic designer, sushi chef and paratrooper." It wasn't that they had an airborn, unagi-slinging RoR hacker on deck, it was they were too cheap to hire up the staffing they actually needed to get the job done.

4) Before that I worked as a tech temp, and, I swear, the biggest value proposition of the high end temp agencies was that they would ignore what your HR department said and actually send you someone who might be able to do the job. There are plenty of hiring manager and HR departments out there who have to hire specialists in areas of which they know nothing, so they come up with a list of buzz-words and plug them into their seniority matrix. Hence the aforementioned "15yrs of Java experience" punch-line. Again, they didn't have such a person around, or they wouldn't be talking to a temp agency. They really just had no idea what they needed.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

yeah, I knew a highly experienced software guy who had experience in 29 of 30 varied languages and oh no, we can't take you.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

"..Looking for recent graduate with min 5 years experience. Must be ITER, Microsoft and CISCO certified....pay £6.38/hr"

and that's one just off the top of my head from today. It's no wonder they can't find anyone to fill the positions, some of the requirements are impossible !!

[landley.livejournal.com]

The problem is that as the number of applicants for each position goes up, it gets harder to choose between them. Interviewing is hard, and interviewing more people is harder.

For skilled work, as the unemployment rate goes up the average quality of each applicant goes down because people are applying for jobs outside their comfort zone, things they won't enjoy doing or have at best a rusty skill set at. (Of course everybody tries to make themselves seem like a good fit in the interview, but that just shows you're practiced at interviewing, not at doing the job.) This means that picking an applicant at random out of the pool, just to end the parade of interviews, isn't appealing.

So people keep hoping for a rockstar to stand out of the crowd, and then when they _get_ them don't believe it and probably think the interviewee is lying or crazy or has a drug problem or some other reason somebody with those qualifications doesn't already have a job...

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

The main thing behind the "skills gap" is that many employers need very, very specific skills, you know, like specific machinery that only they and 6 other companies use, that no school could afford to train on. But they don't want to pay to train new hires, no matter how qualified, for fear that they'll pay for all the training and other companies (that don't) will save money by offering better salary to the people they just trained.

Or, as several people in HR have said to me over the years, "Nobody wants to invest in 'human capital' because unlike other capital, it can just walk out the door with your investment."

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The problem is that as the number of applicants for each position goes up, it gets harder to choose between them. Interviewing is hard, and interviewing more people is harder.

Do you know whether this was a problem in other recessions and/or depressions?

I've wondered whether part of the application overload is that people have to apply for jobs in order to receive benefits.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The main thing behind the "skills gap" is that many employers need very, very specific skills, you know, like specific machinery that only they and 6 other companies use, that no school could afford to train on.

Do you have a feeling for what proportion of jobs are like that?

[doomspark.livejournal.com]

Case in point: my agency has an annoying habit of revamping job descriptions as people depart. They upgrade the requirements far beyond those necessary to do the job - and in doing so, they make it impossible for their current employees to move up (which would free up entry-level jobs).

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Shoot me now.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

Dahlink, I knew this back in the 80s.

The trouble is that when corporations caught the clue that they had to become lean and mean to succeed, they obliterated the long-standing custom of on-the-job training, which is where the majority of real learning happens anyway. The recession-based corporate style farms everything out for somebody else to do, even the imparting of industry-critical knowledge, which will prove to be their ultimate undoing. Trade schools and such are piss-poor substitutes for what you're meant to learn while doing, and unpaid internships had a different name in another century--indentured servitude. Even apprentices under the Old guild system got room and board for their labours. Top German companies still do this. Amerikan companies need to learn how to teach again, and re-learn that apprenticeship is a necessary rite of passage that preserves the industry.

[landley.livejournal.com]

I learned about it in the 1992 recession under Bush the Elder. It's a function of high unemployment.

[landley.livejournal.com]

These days anything that pays a middle class wage is either tenured/unionized/licensed or skilled.

A friend of mine recently got a job at a grocery store and they're willing to train (paid to train even), but they trained her to work at the store, and are now offering training to be a shift manager at the store.

I'm employable due to my open source programming work. All my downtime between contracts was both skill building and assembling a public portfolio. But I had to do open source work around 20 hours/week for about seven years before I started actually getting jobs due to it.

So I have the opportunity to self-train through the internet, and do it constantly. If I didn't, I doubt I'd have a job. (I'm very lucky my hobbyist interests worked out that way, although other people have done similar things via webcomics and music. But the "do it for at least 5 years before you see a dime" thing seems pretty consistent across disciplines.)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"Or, as several people in HR have said to me over the years, "Nobody wants to invest in 'human capital' because unlike other capital, it can just walk out the door with your investment.""

Self-fulfilling prophecy, that.

[paulshandy.livejournal.com]

They want more and more and offer less and less.