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The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

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Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#31

Post by space-monkey »

lotharbot wrote: post #27
ianb wrote: post #21

None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training" - those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we ask too much of education. But tr…

Not that long ago, I read several quotes along these lines: "We have plenty of openings, and we're getting 5 times as many resumes as before, but only half as many qualified applicants." Most of the quotes were from people in medicine, IT, and similarly complex fields. The problem isn't a lack of "training" of the sort that could be covered by a community college course and a 3-month internship; the problem is a lack…

A corollary to this is that in any complex field that is expanding at any material rate, demand for capable (experienced) people will be higher than supply. There are more jobs than yesterday, so there are more jobs than there were people getting experience yesterday.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#32

Post by canterburry »

I think one of the fundamental flaws with American companies is that someone with "the right skills" means the person is a shoe-in at the time of hire. They are expected the walk onto the job with all the training, know-how, experience etc that the company needs at that very minute.

Since trends are constantly changing and always towards something new and never before seen, there will simply never be a time when there is a bounty-full supply of shoe-in candidates.

American companies need to look for people who are fundamentally smart, able and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills and whom they can shape into the exact resource they need...and then know they can reshape them again when needed. I really believe this will lead to a far more qualified workforce at every company and be a source of renewed loyalty between employers and employees.

Consumerism has driven America into treating labor as any other store bought product which can be easily, quickly and cheaply acquired to fill a momentary need and discarded when trends change.

This is not a labor market problem, it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR.

Look at the really successful companies out there and you'll see they hire fundamentally smart people, everything else can be learned.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#33

Post by space-monkey »

pedanticfreak wrote: post #20

If you can teach high school students to be decent programmers surely you can teach a intelligent art history or English majors as well. Solution: Hire anyone intelligent to do the job for a fraction of the pay. They learn a new skill and you avoid paying a premium for hard to find skilled workers. You also get fiercely loyal employees instead on entitlement filled prima donnas.

A high school student probably has much less to unlearn than some Art History and English majors. Not to say that there aren't great people that have come from those backgrounds, but some highly intelligent folks come out of there with a bad attitude towards concepts like objective reality.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#34

Post by okaramian »

ianb wrote: post #21

None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training" - those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we ask too much of education. But tr…

Back in the old days companies would hire smart/capable people and train them up.

This mentality works well when you don't expect your workers to leave in under 5 years. I don't really know if this is a good or bad thing, but given the structure of American businesses it doesn't make as much sense to take on a new person, train them, then take the risk of them taking their skill set elsewhere.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#35

Post by Vivtek »

crenelle wrote: post #30
Encosia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible. My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but it's exactly the kind of retraining that's rele…

I have 30 years of experience in software development, with a computer science degree from the University of Illinois. I applied for a position at SEOmoz a few months ago. No phone screen interview. The CEO's comments seem to imply a very selective criteria was used to hire, and that it took them months. We don't know what criteria was used by SEOmoz to hire those candidates. I found his comments regarding older peop…

Heh. Yeah, I guess if you a priori assume that anyone over 29 isn't going to be hired, you're necessarily going to have a much longer search for a new hire...

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#36

Post by techiferous »

Vivtek wrote: post #3

I question his (somewhat oblique) assertion that people in their 30's are too old to train effectively in new skillsets.

It's just patently absurd. First of all, a person who is 35 expects their body to live until they are 80 but throws in the towel on learning new skills because their brain is broken? And what about the requirement that the president be at least 35...if he/she isn't able to learn new skills? And then, most importantly, where's the data? I don't observe that people in their 30s and 40s have trouble picking up new skills.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#37

Post by enjo »

This is another great opportunity to point out something rather puzzling about this recession.

If you have a college degree your unemployment rate is 4.7%, with a big chunk of that 4.7% in the building related fields (architects, civil engineers, etc... are having a tough go right now).

http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#monthly

It's a double digit unemployment rate if you just have a high school diploma. Meanwhile manufacturing output has actually increased dramatically, without adding any significant jobs. That's what I find scary. The U.S. is the worlds leading manufacturer (I'm having trouble finding data from 2009, but in 2008 we we're the largest manufacturer by a wide margin). Yet, manufacturing jobs are way down. I'm not sure those jobs are ever coming back. We've gotten crazy good at automation. Until the cost of human labor in the U.S. decreases by a rather large percentage, we'll continue to build ever more sophisticated systems for building things.

I'm not sure what that leaves us with.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#38

Post by gscott »

okaramian wrote: post #34
ianb wrote: post #21

None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training" - those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we ask too much of education. But tr…

Back in the old days companies would hire smart/capable people and train them up. This mentality works well when you don't expect your workers to leave in under 5 years. I don't really know if this is a good or bad thing, but given the structure of American businesses it doesn't make as much sense to take on a new person, train them, then take the risk of them taking their skill set elsewhere.

Now in order to be hired you have to know trivia questions.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#39

Post by klbarry »

canterburry wrote: post #32

I think one of the fundamental flaws with American companies is that someone with "the right skills" means the person is a shoe-in at the time of hire. They are expected the walk onto the job with all the training, know-how, experience etc that the company needs at that very minute. Since trends are constantly changing and always towards something new and never before seen, there will simply never be a time when ther…

"...it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR"

This seems to go deeper than that - in economics class, they teach that labor is always an easily variable input, that can be changed more or less instantly. Especially after reading about the effect of all "A" people in a company, it seems to me that economics is still stuck in the thought of labor as factory workers or the like - not modern thought workers. You can see how this thinking could influence company hiring practices.

On another note; Maybe the real shortage we have is of people "who are fundamentally smart, able and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills"? I don't think so personally, but it's possible.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#40

Post by tomjen3 »

wyclif wrote: post #29
tomjen3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that it is an American ideology - it seems to be something pretty much everybody does.

Yes, but speaking as a citizen of the USA, we spend the most with the least progress to show for it.

Properly, but only because for generations you had the money to throw at the problem - the US powerhouse used to be able to pay extra because it was the economy on the planet that was in the best shape.
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