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"They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't
by jdhn 9y ago
"They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay."
In my opinion, this is the key paragraph in the article. I see this all the time when recruiters send me job postings, and they want someone with 5 years of experience for the salary of someone with 2 years of experience.
- csdreamer7 9y agoIndeed, I think something like it should have been the title.
- jdhn 9y agoI feel like that would've made the title too politicized, as it is it's quite neutral.
- kartickv 9y agoBut maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue. Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.
- notyourday 9y agoIf they need to fill this job and it is not worth the higher salary and it cannot be filled at this salary or lower then this job should not exist as a job: the owner of the company, the manager of the company, the HR person of the company can either do that job themselves or that job should be eliminated.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 9y agoBut why? Does having the position open harm anyone?
- notyourday 9y agoAs long as they don't bitch about being unable to buy a Porsche 911 for $100, they are welcome to advertise it.
- thatcat 9y agoIt needlessly wastes peoples time.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoIf employers were required to pay for someone's time for an interview, you would see this fixed right quick. But because an employer can leave an unreasonable job req out there and interview as many candidates as they want, with the only cost being their own time, this continues.
- Retric 9y agoSorting resumes and conducting interviews is not free. So, you still need a cost benefit analysis.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCost of doing business.
- Retric 9y agoWasting resources for zero gain is never just a cost of doing business. Yes, not all jobs will be filled quickly. But, unreasonable salary expectations cause needless waste.
- notalaser 9y ago> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?
- havetocharge 9y agoThe task that they are hiring for does not generate enough revenue to be worth at price X. The business may not stop from operating if these tasks are not done, or not done on a priority basis.
- RobertoG 9y agoBut, in the standard perfect markets interpretation, that would mean that the task shouldn’t be done. Right?
- havetocharge 9y agoIf there are no takers, then the task should not be done, yes. What a lot if people seem to imply is that these jobs should not be advertised in the first place, which I disagree with.
- Retric 9y agoAdvertising is not free. Having a few unfilled jobs is natural but it's wasteful to have significant market disconnects. That said, a lot of 'jobs' are simply H1B fodder or resume bait etc.
- kazagistar 9y agoUnless they people causing them waste incur costs greater then they benefits, it won't change. Hiring has gone digital, reducing costs, so of course garbage job postings have increased.
- notalaser 9y ago
- havetocharge 9y agoThis is a great point. One can think of a job posting as a bid on the market. Not every bid results in trade. Similarly, not every job posting is a job, like your example demonstrated.
- Bartweiss 9y agoBut I don't think that's how job openings are calculated - they're mostly derived by asking employers, not just counting up postings.
- WalterSear 9y agoHow many market bid values are covered until you go through a vetting process so extended that you can realistically only look at a relatively tiny number bids before making a decision?
- humanrebar 9y agoSo what's the job-market-equivalent of a HFT or broker to reconcile the bids and asks?
- maxsilver 9y ago> I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. I always wondered why 50% of job listings were totally fake. "Selfish hiring practices" being the reason makes a lot more sense than "appearance of growth" that usually gets stated.
- ghaff 9y agoIt's also pretty common that the job is already basically filled internally or (less commonly at the moment) by H1B but for various legal or procedural reasons there has to be a job posting.
- owebmaster 9y ago> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? That would means the company is dysfunctional and only desperate people are going to join this wagon.
- icebraining 9y agoHow does that follow? You seem to be assuming a lot. If they're peripheral, optional tasks, like an extra service you could upsell to your clients for a small margin, it may not provide enough income for a market-level salary.
- owebmaster 9y agoSo you are incapable of hiring. When you don't have the money for a ferrari, you don't buy a toyota because of the lack of available ferraris.
- havetocharge 9y agoPeople are not objects, and your analogy is not accurate (or maybe just unclear). People (at least in our industry) are free not to accept jobs with low pay. You are also free to seek clients rather than employers.
- learc83 9y agoIn most cases, you don't want to take a job that's worth say $100k, but not $150k to an employer. Either the value you're bringing to the company is somewhere less than $50k, or the company is irrationally tied to not paying more than $100k.
- icebraining 9y agoSo what if the value is less than $50k?
- learc83 9y ago
- jdhn 9y ago>But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue. In that case, something's got to give. Either the wage has to go up, or they'll have to accept the fact that they won't find anybody who's willing to work for that wage and the job will remain unfilled.
- corporateslave3 9y agoIf the job isnt worth the salary, then the business isnt fungible
- stult 9y agoI wonder if this is a hangover from the recession. Hiring managers expectations have been anchored to market conditions that simply don't exist anymore but which lasted so long that no one in hiring recognizes the issue.
- RobertoG 9y agoIn my opinion this have nothing to do with circumstances. Companies that would prefer to pay less (that would be most of them) always say that there are not enough qualified people, they never complain that they have to pay too much. If there are not enough qualified people the answer is obvious: allow more emigration or educate more people in the field faster. The real goal is to reduce wages and improve profits. If there was not enough qualified people wages would keep growing. So, yes, there are not enough qualified people for the wages that we would like, but this is always going to be the case. In the same vein, employees never say they are overpaid. It's just unfashionable to say that there is an inherent conflict between labour and capital.
- whipoodle 9y agoYou are correct, it is about labor costs.
- Nursie 9y agoYup, see this all the time in the UK. Businesses complain they can't find the skills they need, but what they mean is they can't the skills they need for a derisory price. Particularly in the UK there seems little appteciation that software is a valuable thing, created by professionals. Too often the MBA types consider it just another form of generic office work, and seek to pay in line with that. Then they wonder why the technical departments they put together are so incompetent...
- gaius 9y agoTechnical staff, even those with multiple degrees from Russell Group universities will always be treated as blue-collar by the management class, in the UK. Private or public sector is the same.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoThen they should unionize like blue-collar staff. Seize the means of computation!
- jcadam 9y agoI occasionally peruse job listings for other countries (I'm in the US, but sometimes entertain delusions of emigrating). I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that the UK has got to be the absolute worst place in the western world to be a software developer.
- Nursie 9y agoNot sure about worst, and you can make a decent living as a contractor, or going into coding for a financial firm. But in terms of money on offer for a generic development job, yup, the pay is peanuts and they do indeed end up hiring monkeys.
- jldugger 9y agoJust remind them that both The Office and the IT Crowd were British shows.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y agoor 5 years' experience in something that has only been around for 2 years.
- TuringNYC 9y agoThere is a shortage of workers in as much as there is a shortage of BMW 7-series sedans for under $30k. I looked everywhere at that price. Massive shortage.
- jdavis703 9y agoThis is true in certain cases, but not all. I just offered an unemployed family member (and recent computer science grad) a freelance opportunity worth $100 an hour to build out a simple e-commerce site. They didn't want the work. I think part of the problem is that you can have a lot of "fun" these days for very cheap (video games, YouTube, etc). Maybe it's time for us to reexamine why people don't even want high-paying jobs.
- petraeus 9y ago"I'll pay you $100/hr but the whole budget is 5 hours"
- Danihan 9y agoIs there a word for laugh-cringing..? So spot on.
- notfromhere 9y ago>why people don't even want high-paying jobs. I'm gonna guess there's two sides to that story
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quantumhobbit 9y agoI'm in a pretty small secondary market and was recently advised by someone who knows what he is talking about to never accept less than $200/hr for contract work. That is the going rate around here and accepting less signals that you don't know what you are doing. Perhaps the $100/hr isn't as much as you think it is. More so if you are somewhere expensive like San Francisco or New York.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- HillaryBriss 9y agoduring my first real salaried job out of college, a coworker told me that they thought they could have done their work with nothing more than a high school education. that was true about my job as well. companies have been spoiled with degreed employees who do routine coding and testing. in a lot of cases the degree is unnecessary. but hiring processes can't break out of this pattern, this groupthink.
- fapjacks 9y agoI think this is totally right on. Additionally, I'd blame a big part of this problem on organizational refusal to hire and support remote employees. I am mentoring one person right now that could take jobs being offered in my city, but they live elsewhere in the country. Butts-in-seats management style is also part of the problem.
- X86BSD 9y agoOh I totally agree. I can't even tell you how many times I have had degreed folks or people with certification do the dumbest things that break stuff that someone who didn't go to college but spent age 8-25+ with computers, and hacking, and living technology come up and go, "um that breaks X because of Y". I've always personally favored self taught over degrees.
- dabockster 9y agoAnd also "we still don't see lots of employers being willing to take people in right out of school and train them for jobs" As a person that's only one year out of school with debts, I couldn't afford to be doing side projects when I was using all my free time to make sure I didn't miss a bill.
- wfo 9y agoIndeed: here we see that the 'efficiency' of the market or its ability to solve problems as an organic optimzation machine is a myth. The market is a collection of many dictatorial kings of fiefdoms called small and large businesses, and it expresses the collective will of these kings. Theory says if there is a labor shortage that wages should go up, but the owning class does not wish to raise wages, rather they prefer to keep their proportion of the profit for themselves, and when theory conflicts with the will of the powerful, well...
- X86BSD 9y agoThat is NOTHING new. This was going on in 1990. Recruiters wanting you to pad your resume, "Oh you've only used x for 2 months, put it on your skills section!", and employers wanting you to be a DBA, network engineer, security engineer, Unix admin, developer and yet only pay you for one of those jobs. This has been the norm. There has NEVER been a shortage of qualified American labor. The problem is, just like farm workers in California, everyone refuses to pay what Americans demand. So you get "let's just go hire some Indians at 20 cents on the dollar and have them beholden to us because we control their visa, and make them do all those jobs for one person's salary! Screw Americans! BRILLIANT!" So there is no shortage of qualified American labor, corporate america just refuses to pay market rate for americans.