Posted on 06/19/2012 12:15:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last week’s disappointing unemployment report has refocused attention on the question of why, despite modest signs of economic recovery in recent months, American companies aren’t hiring.
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.
The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed “skill gap” is that, when pressed for more evidence, roughly 10% of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won’t accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That’s not a skill shortage, it’s simply being unwilling to pay the going price.
But the heart of the real story about employer difficulties in hiring can be seen in the Manpower data showing that only 15% of employers who say they see a skill shortage say that the issue is a lack of candidate knowledge, which is what we’d normally think of as skill. Instead, by far the most important shortfall they see in candidates is a lack of experience doing similar jobs. 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at business.time.com ...
” Try hiring a marketing director for $30K and see what you get. “
You get employers whining, “We can’t get good people.”...
Good advice here: ask them back what the range is for the position. Otherwise, you have no clue what a reasonable figure is. Of course, if the "system" is just a machine, that's kind of difficult to do.
Bingo! Notice that the entire premise of the article is that the economy is recovering ((thanks,of course, to the sheer genius of Barack Obama). but that firms just won’t hire (undoubtedly because they are dirty Republican capitalists trying to make The One look bad).
Rubbish.
I think we have a WINNER here.
The going price is the price business is willing to pay for a position. No potential marketing director would accept $30K, but no employer in his right mind would offer $30K either for such a position. Well, maybe some idiots would, but it wouldn’t be the “going price”.
My point was, the going price is set by the marketplace for any given position or level. Sure, it’s negotiable to a point, but employers go into the hiring process knowing what they will pay for a given skill level. That’s the market price.
Not always true. Try hiring a marketing director for $30K and see what you get.
You’d be surprised. I know lots of marketing and business folks with mba’s and ms’s working in the 30-34 range. But Tallahassee is flooded with degrees.
There are a few basic rules of compensation:
1) You will never be paid less than what you will accept.
2) You will never be paid more than what it costs to replace you.
3) You will never be paid what you are worth
Far too true for both land based and offshore based oil/gas work.
A family member went to a local technical college for two years and was shocked that of 22 students aged 18 to 20 maybe 5 people knew what a nutdriver or a voltmeter was. The biggest problem for most was to realize that they were supposed to be there every day, on time and with their tools
Another issue stems from the fact that many of the now-unemployed have worked for 10, 20 or more years and even if they were not college educated, someone in their 30's, 40's or 50's is not ready to accept $9.00 an hour for their labor in an 'entry level' job. Well, not as long as their unemployment checks keep coming. That may change, in time.
I don't see how businesses will move forward. If they won't hire young people because they are 'unskilled' (and the company doesn't want to train) or because the young applicants won't accept a low-level position (for low pay) and no one wants anyone much over 40 or who made a hefty salary in their last job but may be a 'perfect' match for a similar job opening, who is left? This way lies massive continued unemployment, business slowdowns worse than we have now and a definite drag on the U.S. economy that we cannot sustain much longer.
The same article said the qualified applicants were being hired in SD which is a a much more desirable position than working on an oil platform.
They want you to multitask, carrying several job titles but only paying you for one job, and sometimes below market wage for a degreed professional in that position.
Some of the expectations are unrealistic both in terms of manpower it takes to get something done and the time for completion. Schedules are ever being brought into tighter deadlines (which inevitably slip because of outside forces, like a third party software vendor coming in with the product 4 months late).
Staff have to be treated with some respect and understanding or else the department will fail. While the hiring screening process may be tight, I’ve been in several working situations were people were promoted to management without any training or skills for the job.
I'm not referring to employers undercutting the going rate. I'm saying the going rate is set by the marketplace, and employers should be paying the going rate. But, that rate is not set by the job seekers which is what the article stated.
I've been out of the job market since '93. So I'm not familiar with corporate hiring practices today. But in my day, we always strove to pay the 'going rate' for a given position, or even sometimes a little higher, in order to get the best level of applicants possible. If that's not the goal for corporations today, then they're cutting their own throat.
I've even seen a FR poster, an employer in Silicon Valley, when pressed about his moaning that his business was suffering from the so-called "skill shortage", post this in as many words right here on one of these kinds of threads.
Hello my FRiend :~)
I am in the job market after an attempt to retire, the wage issue is real enough, I left an industry making almost 60K/yr, I’ll be lucky if I can get back in at 40K
I totally disagree. A programmer is not a programmer. It takes experience to write good, efficient, maintainable code. If you hire any old programmer, you’ll get spaghetti code that you can’t maintain and have to rewrite every year or so.
I’d rather hire an experienced COBOL programmer and teach him Java or C than I would hire a kid out of college supposedly versed in several languages.
Have to agree. HR is the biggest no-op in any company along side most of ‘management’. They’re both overhead but make life miserable for those generating the profit.
“Applicants don’t set the price for their ability.”
They somewhat do, it is supply and demand. If it is tough to fill a position, the applicant can demand more, or the position can go unfilled. Usually the qualified candidate is already working and aren’t going to leave their current position unless they get a significant bump in pay. Bottom line is if you want more you have to pay for it.
The only thing worse then training an employee and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay.
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