Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?

It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation.

I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member.

I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving.

After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me.

I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better.

Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.

With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly.

But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.

The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received:

(a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen)

(b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either)

My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified.

You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process.

Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.