So I’m driving home from Vermont that past Columbus Day and my wife, forgetting that’s it’s Monday night and not Sunday night, puts on NPR hoping to hear the Click and Clack brothers show( highly recommended by the way these guys are great!). But it’s just NPR news and one of the stories concerns some economists who just received the Nobel Prize. One of the the areas the economist attempt to explain with very sophisticated( way too sophisticated for me!) numbers is the current job market . The net/net is this–there is high unemployment in this country and there is also a high number of unfilled positions at the same time!!! Kinda doesn’t make sense on the surface but what it comes down to is a few different factors 1) First and foremeost, the requirements of these open jobs do not match the skillsets of the ranks of unemployed folks 2) No one is willing to train, has the time to train , has the money to train , has the knowledge to train nor feels like training folks. 3) On a micro level, hiring managers realize the unemployment is rate high so they believe they can find the impossible candidate for impossible money to fill their impossible job openings 4) Companies are interviewing people and are finding the right people for the job but they are just too nervous and too unsure of the current economic conditions to “pull the trigger” and make no decision.
So there is my very realistic explanation of the view mentioned by our Nobel Prize winners. Now I don’t want folks who are looking for a new “home” to get discouraged by these observations. This scenario is a good thing! Yes, it signals the ending of a poor employment market and once hiring managers/companies realize that their “ideals” cannot be met they tend to get much more serious and realistic about hiring. Plus it doesn’t impress the boss to have a position open for +6months!! So I would suspect, based on past experience, to see this condition continue to shake out through early 2011 but I see a more realistic and helathy job market for people of all professions. The fall is always an active employment market and this fall continues the trend, albeit with some of the above mentioned difficulties!
Of course, if you are the typical highly educated, rare bird recruiterd by Slide Brook your job market has been continually improving since 9/09.
We’ll all get there! Slowly but surely!!! You just wait!