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The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

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Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#111

Post by cgearhart »

fecak wrote: post #10
jonathanjaeger wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cove…

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

> If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality.

I agree. I'd happily put a nominal fee in escro to ensure that the target company I'm applying to actually looks at the resume. I'd also happily pay the fee for them to drop any job ads that they don't intend to fill.

> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.

I'm not at all convinced that this is true. The response rate seems completely uncorrelated with the amount of time spent on the application. Even at a lower relative response rate, casting a wider net grabs a larger absolute volume of responses.

As an aside: the biggest thing missing from the job hunt process is respect for your applicants _time_. At this point I drop out with companies that don't seem to consider that. I don't need feedback, but I also don't have time to waste doing repeat phone screens and months of interview process.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#112

Post by cryoshon »

digikata wrote: post #38
hueving wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student debt has been thought to be the next crash, but I'm not sure how unless the laws change. It's not dischargable in bankruptcy so it's not like you can walk away.

It's the next crash through a different vector - if the loans aren't dischargable, a large portion of the the economic activity that young people normally generate as they grow along their career path is now siphoned off to repaying loans. That's a low value use of the money to the rest of the economy. Maybe it doesn't end in a dramatic crash but an economic stagnation for as long as inflation is low (inflation being…

We can already see this in the US economy. Millenials are largely putting off traditional milestones like marriage, car ownership, having children, saving for retirement (or saving at all) and home ownership for lack of capital.

These are pretty major drivers of consumption, but think about the second order effects: fewer home pools being built, fewer new auto parts needed, fewer childrens clothes being bought, fewer weddings to need DJs, etc. There's quite a bit of fallout there, and it's going to be hard to pin John and Son's pool construction company going tits up on student loan debt slowing the economy, even if it's the case.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#113

Post by 6stringmerc »

Kalium wrote: post #58
fecak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. This is the theory, yes. In practice, that 10x level of effort is not matched by a 10x increase in the number of interested responses or a 10x increase in response rate. Diminishing returns sets in quickly. You wind up with more interested responses by shutgunning your…

While I know the strategy was high-risk, I made a very aggressive Cover Letter touting my capabilities and frustration with not geting interviews, and eventually that landed in the hands of the boss that hired me for my first professional job out of college and start in my field of business communications.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#114

Post by jaredhansen »

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

>You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one.

True as far as it goes, and I too am concerned about the future of work, but I'm skeptical that we have ever seen, or will ever see, a future in which "no one is hiring". Today, there is tremendous demand for certain occupations, even as others are being hollowed out.

The difference from historical expectations is that the rate of change between who was hiring last year and who will be hiring next year is growing, and quickly.

People "trying hard" to get jobs in technology almost certainly can do so. People "trying really, really, really hard" to get jobs in heavy manufacturing in the American midwest are probably going to have a hard time (as are would-be blacksmiths, weavers, scribes, typists, telephone operators and many others).

Said another way: the direction of the "hard work" vector is more important than the magnitude. Said still another way: "work smarter, not harder". Said yet one more way: "make something people want."

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#116

Post by cryoshon »

6stringmerc wrote: post #108
cryoshon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dreaded internal candidate situation is a waste of everyone's time. They already know who is going to be hired, yet collectively everyone has to come together to interview you anyway. Then there's the rejection, if they even send one.

Oh absolutely, and I think that maybe, just maybe, there should be a legally mandated annotation on such a posting that an internal candidate has been identified and you are competing with them. In my experience, even worse than a rejection was being offered a salary not commensurate with my experience, and in the neighborhood of $5,000 less than what I was already making in a nearly identical role. I've had that hap…

Yeah, I'm pretty interested in seeing what effect (if there is even any, not trying to push an opinion here) the bad economy for young people has on salary/compensation negotiations between workers and employers.

Do the employers think that young people are desperate for any kind of job, and then low ball their salary? Or do the candidates settle for a number once it reaches the threshold they think they are worth? Do people negotiate more or less than before the recession on average?

I don't believe that there's even data on these questions, but they would reveal an awful lot about the economic state of affairs if you could get enough good data to establish causation-- which might be very hard.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#117

Post by theworstshill »

nilkn wrote: post #107
theworstshill wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not the other way around - just kill everybody above a certain cutoff and feed them as soylent to the rest? They've already spent most of their productive years anyway, right? Its equally ridiculous, isn't it?

No, killing people and feeding them to others is several orders of magnitude more ridiculous than simply voluntarily having fewer children.

Every developed country in the world has a negative net population growth - natural growth excluding migration. The only reason the seniors are fed, clothed and washed is a a supply train of foreign nurses and home-care aides, usually from a country such as Philippines - which has a positive population growth. The entire economic system, as it is right now - in reality, is based on positive population growth. How is decreasing the number of kids is going to help?

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#118

Post by xrange »

icelancer wrote: post #97
downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

> Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. The reality is that BOTH are true. There is no law stating that each generation of humans should have it easier and with more resources available to them. My generation is facing this crisis, and the default response is to complain. Wh…

>It's time to get to work, even if "work" is 20-30% (random number) tougher than what our parents dealt with.

...sounds like:

"Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy" http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#119

Post by tikhonj »

thieving_magpie wrote: post #24
NoGravitas wrote: post #6

> The world needs at least 600 million new jobs in the next decade for young people Or, perhaps, the world needs to stop coupling basic human needs for subsistence and dignity to wage labour, and find some better way of doing things.

It's so easy! Why has no one thought of this? All we need to do is convince every government in the world to undertake dramatic changes to their economic and labor structure.

The economic structure changes drastically every few generations anyhow. Why not take direction of it? Besides, it's less a matter of making structural changes as it is of trying to change the culture and popularize the ideas that will motivate structural change.

My parents lived in the Soviet Union and Russia now is nothing like it was even three decades ago. It's pretty incredible. It's less drastic but still true for other countries.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#120

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

morgante wrote: post #65
tsunamifury wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion on the matter is that every employer has unique expectations that they pretend are industry standard and obvious. I'll relate this to your statement by saying, they don't know how to try because interviews as a process are like crossing a field of landmines. Too much academic work or management responsibility, they call you overqualified. To little: they say you aren't trying. Enthusiastic for a low end jo…

Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness. A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?

Good engineers can be bad at English. I've seen C-suite briefings and strategy docs with obvious errors in them.

Unless you're working in publishing, I'd pay less attention to trivial errors than to evidence of an ability to get useful things done.

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