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A tough labor market for white-collar workers has turned recruiting upside down
- Volundr 8mo agohttps://archive.is/OAEU2 https://archive.is/OAEU2
- yesbut 8mo agocoming soon to a town near you: indentured servitude. hopefully they will at least have nice bunk beds in the corporate dorms.
- shiroiuma 8mo agoNah, they can save money by buying larger beds and making employees share the beds. A single king-size bed can fit 4-5 employees.
- georgemcbay 8mo ago> A single king-size bed can fit 4-5 employees. ... at a time. So if you also run three shifts that's 12-15 employees per bed!
- shiroiuma 8mo agoExactly right. On top of this, they're going to have mandatory bed position assignments. Just like you currently can't choose which desk you're going to sit at, and have to put up with the most annoying person on the team as your deskmate, in the near future you're going to have to cuddle with him/her at night too, whether you like it or not, and regardless of his/her bad hygiene, just because your manager decided to stick you two together.
- c0balt 8mo ago> in the near future you're going to have to cuddle with him/her at night too, whether you like it or not A solid solution to reduce heating costs. Maybe one can go a step further and remove the bed though, a large mattress (or let's say rubber mat) should be enough.
- 1718627440 8mo agoThis has already happened. During the industrial revolution sharing bed shifts was common. You just rediscovered the reason why worker protection laws have maximum working times and forbid employers from demanding outside of working hours.
- shiroiuma 8mo agoDon't worry, the employers will make sure these worker protection laws are all rescinded, so we can go back to workers having to share beds. The workers are happily voting for this, because they believe regulations are bad.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoThe smart ones have to share a bed and start a family together so we can have better future employees.
- arethuza 8mo agoThat reminds me of the grim lodging houses described in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier.
- carlosjobim 8mo agoSoon? Most people pay taxes on their income and have a mortgage for their home, or even worse pay rent. Slaves used to have the option to purchase their freedom.
- pttrn 8mo agohttps://archive.li/OAEU2 https://archive.li/OAEU2 (archive.is seems down for me)
- emperorxanu 8mo agoOh. Basically this is the scam they use at Offerzen. When I saw wsj.com I figured this would be an "article" that's mostly manipulative, fear-mongering and doom and gloom. If you're paying to maybe get hired, you're not the client - you're basically being sold to yourself.
- akramachamarei 8mo agoIt's a strange kind of concept creep that "scam" came to mean "bad deal", or "suboptimal deal", or "worse deal" to some users, instead of deception. Not clear what is fraudulent about the listed practice, just sucky.
- mono442 8mo agoI wonder how the real estate market will look like in the biggest cities in the coming years. I haven't changed jobs for quite a while so I don't know if this article is accurate but if it's really that bad, then I wouldn't be surprised if we see a big crash. After all, the appeal of biggest cities was always, at least to me, the availability of white collar, highly paid jobs. If these ceased to exist, I don't see reason why people would want to move there anymore.
- johnebgd 8mo agoWhite flight all over again but this time it’d be white collar flight.
- dyauspitr 8mo agoBut white collar flight to where? Rural areas don’t have any jobs. There are only so many businesses a town can support. What will people do?
- joquarky 8mo ago> The building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects. Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the welfare dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated it into a thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a brick with a mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to erect large buildings quickly. The robots had put up the building next to ours in a week. > The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient. > As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- sph 8mo agoThat’s the contract agent, something I wished existed years ago. Some interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838336 I am working on contract work through a third-party company, and I proposed them such a solution: I employ them, pay them a percentage [1], they keep me busy with work, just like any serious actor has an agent. It is a great business model for everybody, and their workload is small enough they can represent a dozen people with ease. They actually liked the idea, have spoken of switching to such a model eventually, but the sad reality is that they make much more money the “classic way”: the big client gives them the contract, and they subcontract to me. This way they can skim 30-60% off the amount paid to the sorry bugger that does all the work at the bottom, without lifting a finger. It is very sad no one seems interested to serve this need, except very few examples (there’s that NY management agency people have been recommending for the past 10 years, which have such a backlog of candidates there’s no real chance of getting in). If I had any interest in being a salesman and recruiter, I’d build such an agency in a heartbeat. 1: I’d pay for an actual agent 10-15% of my daily rate for the duration of the contract, which is much more than the numbers presented in the article.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lazide 8mo agoYou said it yourself - they make more money and have more control doing it the other way. Put differently - why wouldn’t you do it?
- actionfromafar 8mo agoWhat they do may be a local optimum.
- lazide 8mo agoThat doesn’t answer my question?
- TrackerFF 8mo agoIs this still the result of COVID-era overhiring (caused by free cash)?
- feverzsj 8mo agoSounds like crony capitalism, which is quite common in developing countries.
- beng-nl 8mo agoI would call the USA a developing country except it’s deteriorating.
- akramachamarei 8mo agoThis is not what "crony capitalism" usually means. Crony capitalism is where businesses are in bed with politicians. Getting regulations passed to inhibit their competitors, and such like.
- feverzsj 8mo agoAnything replacing fair competition with backroom deals and influence peddling is crony capitalism.
- 4gotunameagain 8mo ago“If you are not paying, you are the product,” said Andre Hamra, Refer’s CEO. “It incentivizes us to actually help the person.” What joke. That phrase does not apply to this situation at all, as it is not like you got a service for free, it is just that it was someone else paying. And that dude thought it would be a good idea to take the money of people looking for jobs instead of the companies that are swimming in cash. I bet he actually believes his lies himself.
- c22 8mo agoI think this could be a fair model and a true characterization if you only charged on successful placement.
- pjmlp 8mo agoMaybe this is new in US, but paying recruiting agencies is nothing out of the ordinary in many European countries, at least if you actually want to have a recruiter that cares about where you land as position.
- kavalg 8mo agoI do care. Please, give me a couple of such good recruiters if you know them.
- pjmlp 8mo agoI never used this kind of recruiters, but after a quick search, this was one I found, https://www.ircgmbh.de/en/applicants/application-coaching-and-application-training/ https://www.ircgmbh.de/en/applicants/application-coaching-an... Usually what is asked to pay for are improvement related activities, regarding coaching for better CVs, training for interviews and such.
- probably_wrong 8mo agoLooks like suits are making a comeback. (For those who don't get the reference: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)
- r33b33 8mo agoThat's an interesting way of saying "total collapse of capitalism and built-up for bolshevik style revolution"
- r33b33 8mo agoSpecial place in hell for people who share locked articles.
- ImageXav 8mo agoThis seems like such an easy way to create perverse incentives and profit off people who are already down on their luck. Imagine being told that the only way to get considered is to pay a fee. Then later on you get told to pay the gold fee for priority. Oh you're still not getting hired? Go for our platinum package that will definitely make the difference! Not enough money? No worries, we'll take 30% of your salary for the first few years. Or maybe we'll just give you some a fixed debt at a high interest rate. Aren't you glad you used us?
- 627467 8mo ago1. What you describe already happens (has always happened?) in some blue collar jobs, its just the agencies dont call them gold or platinum plan, they call them "mandatory traning sessions" or "medical checks" that has built in admin fees. 2. Even linkedin upsells their plans "to increase you visibility"
- Havoc 8mo agoThat seems incredibly grim. Pay to play but you need to have played to be able to pay
- logicallee 8mo agoDoes this have an alternative market-based solution? I see a big problem with job scams from "legitimate" companies advertising jobs they have no plans to fulfill or which do not exist at all. They seem to do this because they employ HR and recruiters, and it looks good if job openings are on their site. It's a real problem. I believe there could be a solution: charge $500 to post an opening and give $50 to each of ten AI-vetted qualified candidates. That means the candidate had a real job interview and passed it without AI assistance. They get $50 to interview. If the company doesn't hire any of ten qualified candidates, then they can pay another $500, or stop pretending that the job they're advertising for is real. What do you think of this novel model? On the candidate side, it allows them to interview once and then only be called into a job interview if they're being paid $50 to do so. The system could also go the other way and prevent candidates from making interviewing their living, by only inviting them to a limited number of interviews with job offers on the table - such as three such interviews job offers. After that they don't get more job offers since they're not really on the market. The AI could also represent salary reality more transparently. Basically, overall it should be the companies hiring that pay, not candidates who have lots of their time wasted. What do you think of such a market-based approach?
- OutOfHere 8mo agoDon't do it. Move instead. It's substantially easier to get a job if one is willing to relocate to where the job is (within the same country).
- fakedang 8mo agoThe jobs today are in India, which has its own unemployment woes.
- disqard 8mo agoCan you share a bit more about the situation in India? My (distant, probably flawed) gestalt is that there's tons of jobs moving there, and lots of new college grads vying for them.
- fakedang 8mo agoIndia has way too little native job creation for the population size it has of young folks entering the job market. There's a reason the largest Indian tech startups are basically gig marketplaces or some variation of that (Zomato, Swiggy, Meesho, Zepto, etc). The other alternative is working entry-level at the usual WITCH BPO companies, where the starting pay is ridiculously low for the hours worked - even lower than a gig worker. Manufacturing jobs are far too few and scattered across the country, and there's no way to actively recruit for them most of the time. And of course, the lucky ones get to work for an American company in a swanky office because of more jobs being shifted there. Perhaps they'll get to work on a novel software system for aircraft stabilization like MCAS (true story).
- disqard 8mo agoThank you for making time to reply! I appreciate it :)
- josefritzishere 8mo agoThe problem with this of course is that the contract agent at some scale, becomes a gate keeper...like health insurance companies.