10 ms·

Employment in America: WTF is going on?

159 points by blahedo 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ffrryuu 13y ago
LinkedIn is great :)
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  LinkedIn is terrible, but if you get a job through a linkedin connection you're likely to think it's fantastic. If every employer was using myspace for the same purpose many people would probably think it was great too.
rprospero 13y ago
So much of modern hiring seems like C. S. Lewis's comments about searching for your keys under the street lamp. There's a talent shortage, since everyone in the light has been hired. There's massive under underemployment, since everyone in the shadows can't get hired. There's a few dozen billions to be made by the person that fixes the problem. I wish I could comprehend the scale of the problem - it'd be nice to be that person.
- calibraxis 13y ago
  Unemployment is basically caused by fiscal policy. (Which is to say, it's political, since economics is political.) Unemployment is actually rather absurd when you think about it: people can't get jobs, even though by definition they want to; and there's lots to do. Not only do we have an economic system which has such a weird wasteful phenomenon, but we also pursue policies to ensure this phenomenon occurs.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    This is true but I take it in a different direction than you probably do. Most of the help we give to the unemployed is contingent on two things: 1. They don't have income and 2. They are looking for a job. That seems like a great way to test for unemployment benefits but what it fundamentally does is ensure that if you are unemployed and need the help you can't try to supplement through self-employment. Thus our current unemployment assistance largely works to discourage new businesses from starting. A better system would be a mandatory severance system where if you find yourself unemployed, you get a lump sum. You can look for a job, become self-employed, try to start a business with it, or any combination of these. But when it is gone, it is gone.
    - dlp211 13y ago
      I'd like to point out that many states do in fact allow you to supplement your unemployment income with some form of employment income.
    - capisce 13y ago
      In fact basic income would provide both better incentives for those without a job and increase liquidity in the employment market since people would no longer have to suffer a crappy boss or work place out of fear.
  - vpears87 13y ago
    Unemployment is primarily caused by monetary policy and secondarily by fiscal. And due to structural issues of an economy, there is a natural rate of unemployment. Lending is the lifeblood of any economy. If you play around with the rates, significant outcomes can happen. And the Federal Reserve, through the FOMC, has been influencing the interest actively since 1979.
  - nazgulnarsil 13y ago
    [Auction the unemployed](http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unemployed http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unem...)
pontifier 13y ago
I'll tell you what's going on. It's a nightmare to hire someone. All the reporting requirements, all the paperwork involved, all the taxes and insurance requirements. I certainly don't want to actually hire anyone unless I absolutely have to, and even then I will get "independent contractors" or use temps if i can first.
- jw_ 13y ago
  For a non-American - what are the reporting requirements for hiring in the US that you're referring to?
- walshemj 13y ago
  yes and the cheeky buggers what to be paid as well!
- seiji 13y ago
  Who are you and what are you doing on my Internet?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  How much extra is it though? If there was a monetary cost to the extra paperwork, like paying someone else to handle it or accounting for the value of your own time. Would that be a significant fraction of the total cost of hiring someone?
- ajross 13y ago
  This sounds like a political statement. Obviously those sorts of requirements do exist, but they exist for everyone and in most cases scale as O(1) and not with employee count. They might plausibly be a barrier to hiring a first employee. They certainly aren't causing unemployment. As an existence proof, virtually none of those factors changed across 2008-2009, when we saw the biggest swing in employment rate since 1928.
  - csense 13y ago
    > in most cases scale as O(1) and not with employee count I've read in many places that startups and small businesses are a very important engine of economic growth in the US. Since that O(1) obstacle disproportionately hurts small businesses, it could serve as a long-term brake on growth.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
Sorry, employment data is classified for national security reasons.
Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
Some great quotes in there... "Job descriptions heavily larded with keywords make it virtually impossible to find good candidates. But every day that an impossible job requisition remains unfilled, the employment system vendors make more money while companies keep advertising for the perfect hires." ... I'm a big believer that the market will shift to "pay for results", not "pay for subscription access to an aggregated database that you have to hire 4 people full-time just to sift through". "...employers believe they save money when they leave jobs vacant, because their accounting systems track the cost of having workers on the payroll — but cannot track the cost of leaving work undone."
dubfan 13y ago
> Taleo, Kenexa, LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and their diaspora That's not what "diaspora" means.
- richardfontana 13y ago
  I found that jarring too. I assume he meant something like 'progeny'?
salemh 13y ago
There is no business plan in any applicant tracking system, no profit in a job posting, no future in federal employment metrics, no solution in HR departments, and no answers in databases or algorithms. Meh, not really the problem. Every company realizes there is a buyers market (sans Technical) for every position, and can interview 20+ people for a help desk role. No training is available because, what is the ROI? I know several companies (this is SLC) who don't train even for automated testing. After the testing, the employees find a better job. Symptom or syndrome? Symptom is employee skills > company re: new job, vs higher position in company (or, in better English, training leads to employees finding better companies, vs staying with a current company and building that company.) There is no loyalty amongst most companies for training or career development, as the ROI is not there (under utilization, a fallacy of implementation). Should your company be based on ROI metrics per-project, and per-resource? Do you call your employees resources? Utah (which has a large influx of Silicon companies trying to find cheap labor (typically they do) at lower cost of living thus for salary (typically they do) can look at 20+ candidates with marginal requirements met (experience/projects), but, it is a buyers market. Its not panacea like Silicon Valley, and SLC is rated very high for business, tangentially, you should be able to find top talent for top dollar. Talent shortage, there is not, but training / development there is, and no company wants to take that on, because companies realize loyalty exists at a quarter-quarter statement (worse with a PE firm), so how do employee's progress? Change jobs every 2-3 years for a 10k+ raise. I realize I am ranting, but skill matching to a position is broken, and no automated ATS system will fix a resume/pubic facing publication. /end: The "problem" at a symptom level is companies holding out for "best of best" when they probably do not need such candidates, and could train for such. Given, a SharePoint admin at $20 / hr (case study), they found it, after I placed them, and they left after six months when they realized their skill set warranted a $20k raise. Companies can under pay undergrads and mid-level candidates (who are not ivy/target/"rock star guru beer whatever") and do so, only to find a high turn-over rate. Fix turn-over rate? Or just keep filing the desperate mid-esque level folks who just need work and would fulfill Senior level demands of work fulfillment? /ranting
- duney 13y ago
  With the exception of the last one, every instance of "their" in your post should have been "there." I say this not to be a pedant, but because it made your otherwise good post difficult to read.
lumens 13y ago
The hiring system we live with today–resumes, jobs descriptions, recruiters, HR interviews, and the rest–is massively antiquated. In the past 50 years only distribution has improved. A communications gap exists: resumes don't speak to candidates' wants and desires, and job descriptions don't accurately depict a day in the life on the job. Today, recruiters, both internal and external, work to overcome this communications deficit. However, their presence and business models introduce agency problems. My company, Mighty Spring, is an effort to bridge this communication gap in a scalable way, putting candidates and employers in direct contact. We provide candidates a platform to be transparent about their interests and needs without risk (utilizing anonymity), and help employers communicate the finer points of their jobs better than the walls of text they produce today. This is Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com) — the easiest way to find new opportunities with startups.
craigyk 13y ago
AMEN
Zigurd 13y ago
There are too many perverse incentives to trust job descriptions and supposedly open positions. H1-B visas, political advantages from complaining about a "training gap," etc. Maybe job postings should be bonded. Put up $20k per position and forfeit it if you have not filled the position in X months.
- maerF0x0 13y ago
  Thats a good point, I have known a number of startup companies that have many "open positions" listed not because they're hiring but because of how it appeared to potential VCs . They want to appear to be a growing, valid, healthy company ...
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    I could see a two-track system: Bonded postings that get counted in official statistics, and "informal" postings that amount to wishes. horses, etc. Bonding agents would drive down the cost of binding to a pretty small amount and/or enable bonding requirements to rise so that it is prohibitive to lie about open positions.
    - smm2000 13y ago
      I would not be surprised if higher percenrage of bonded postings will be fake because all postings required for visa/greencard will be bonded and useless.
      - Zigurd 13y ago
        The idea behind bonding is to make it very expensive to post fake requirements. The natural result of forfeiting a bond is for your bonding costs to go way up. An H-1B is for jobs that can't be filled. If they go unfilled, the bond is lost. Losing a bond of some tens of thousands of dollars is only justifiable for truly high-value positions, and that's what H1-B is supposed to be for, not phalaxes of warm bodies for contract shops.
    - smm2000 13y ago
maerF0x0 13y ago
IMO many companies do not hire "underqualified" people (ie people who do not exactly match the job description) because they're afraid to hire, train and lose employees. They fail to account for the opportunity cost of lost profits due to "waiting longer" for the right hire. I'd rather have a profitable employee after 1-3 months of training than to search for 6 months .
- nikatwork 13y ago
  But what if we train them up then they quit? We can't afford to do that. It's Too Risky (tm). Plus training is expensive. ...12 months later... Why do none of our employees have industry standard skills? Lawd, it's so hard to find good people!
  - malandrew 13y ago
    You pay them lower but fair salary while you are training them and then pay them a fair salary when they are trained. If you train them, you've increased their value and you're expected to pay for that additional value even if you are the one that did the training. Training an employee is a capital investment with a much greater cost of maintenance, you just need to factor that in when hiring. Just because you paid for the training, does not entitle you to keep paying someone in perpetuity at their salary before being trained.
    - maerF0x0 13y ago
      Basically the thinking is this: Cost of training * expected return on equity = Amount I should be able to extract out of the trained employee forever. Selecting arbitrary numbers to keep things simple, if it costs $1000 to train the employee, and you want a 10% ROE then you expect to earn $100 per year more on that employee, forever. If the employee leaves they take that $100 per month potential away. This leaves a few paths for employers: 1) Pay less until you have a return of capital, 2) Dont up the salary after the "asset" is upgraded, allowing you to get a much ROE as possible. 3) Dont hire untrained people, so you can capture ROI from others' training. All of the above ignores the opportunity cost of not hiring. I presume for most profitable and busy companies, the lost opportunity is greater than the cost of training.
gnu8 13y ago
This is an ad.
jacques_chester 13y ago
A lot of this rhymes with online dating, and for similar reasons. Asymmetric information, skewed ratios, the paradox of choice ... very similar dynamics.
nbouscal 13y ago
There is a reason the term is "talent shortage", not "labor shortage". Yes, there are tons of unemployed people. A vanishingly small proportion of those people can actually fill the jobs that people are hiring for. Hence: talent shortage. Yes, hiring unexperienced people and training them is an option, but you can't do that for your entire engineering team. Hiring new grads isn't a problem, hiring people senior enough to make those new grads productive is. In short, not only is this post an advertisement, it's not even an accurate one. The talent gap is a significant problem, and it's only going to get worse if we don't acknowledge it.
- avenger123 13y ago
  I just wonder how much of this talent gap is real. For example, if I am looking for Ruby on Rails experience and I have candidates with strong python and Django experience are they off the list? Or how about someone that has done PHP for a long time and you are looking for RoR. Or let's say someone with Java experience is available but you are looking for Scala. I just use these as the initial comparisons but I'm sure there are more. Can you not let the python person train up on Ruby on Rails and have a strong candidate? I understand its best to match one to one what is being looked for, but I wonder how many good candidates are being passed by because they don't fit the perfect stack but are likely able to perfectly adapt.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    Nope, people with Django experience are definitely not off the list. PHP isn't off the list either, though the signal-to-noise in that community does seem (anecdotally) to be a lot lower. In my experience people cast a wide net for senior candidates in terms of what they've worked on, the important thing is how they've worked, what roles they've taken, what teams and projects they've led and shipped. Basically, people that can be trusted to build a solid foundation for the more junior candidates to build on top of. Even with a wide net on the specifics of their experience, candidates like that are still not easy to find.
    - gambler 13y ago
natmaster 13y ago
More like people are not learning the right skills to be useful. Economic restructuring used to happen much more slowly but with the advancement in technology these days it happens significantly more rapidly.
keithwarren 13y ago
Is it just me or did I just read 8 paragraphs or blather pretending not to be an advertisement for some book? I think he said that HR departments suck at hiring because they outsource to tech companies who use keyword searches. I could be wrong, but I think the problem is a bit more complex than that.
- twistedpair 13y ago
  I'd seen that before. Leads to the embarrassment of interviewing "Javascript Engineers" for a Java position and having to inform the applicant that your HR department is full of fools.
  - ArtDev 13y ago
    That is hilarious. Really though, most people in our industry are constantly being recruited for jobs we don't want or aren't vaguely qualified for. But, hey, it keeps LinkedIn in business!
dba7dba 13y ago
One of my favorite experience with recruiting agency, from 10+ years ago. I had sent in my resume and on it, there was NOTHING about Novell. I mean NOTHING. I get a call from a recruiter for what position? A Novell Administrator. Told myself never to use a recruiting agency.
a3n 13y ago
"3.9 million jobs are vacant, thanks to the empty promises of algorithms. If the U.S. Congress wants a solution, it should launch an investigation into the workings of America’s employment system infrastructure, which is controlled by a handful of companies." Oh please, no. Anything Congress touches risks dying like a baby between two pit bulls.
- zrail 13y ago
  OT: pitbulls don't harm their humans. They're only a threat to humans who are obviously a threat to them or their humans.
  - jussij 13y ago
    I don’t buy that. The Pitbulls of Australia seem to have a habit of mauling and killing small children on a regular basis, more so than any other dog breed. Maybe the Pitbulls in Australia are different but I doubt it.
    - ledge 13y ago
      Pitbulls are often trained to be mean. They are supremely athletic and strong, so they are the logical choice for fighting dogs, guard dogs, etc. I can't say whether or not there is a genetic component to incidents of mauling involving pitbulls, but people are a large part of the problem too.
batemanesque 13y ago
"Stop begging for jobs" is an approach that requires a level of privilege most people don't possess
Aloisius 13y ago
Many places with large numbers of job openings also have very low local unemployment (the Bay Area for instance). We like to report on numbers at the national level, but worker mobility is at a 40 year low [1]. That certainly isn't helping anything. [1] - http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-567.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-567.pdf
wil421 13y ago
Does this post not concern tech jobs. I recently graduated from a smaller local college and had no problem getting interviews or offers. In fact almost every job I applied for called me back within a day to do an interview. None of them outsourced their hiring either.
tokenadult 13y ago
The point of the blog post is that employers need to learn how to do hiring and not expect to outsource hiring to companies that get rich off of productive companies being clueless about hiring. That sounds like good advice. As a data point, one of my all-time most-liked comments here on HN[1] is my FAQ about company hiring procedures. Yes, people who run companies that innovate and make new products and services still have to learn the timeless facts about how to hire good workers. There is no substitute for the head of the company having a firm, reality-based idea about how to add workers to the team. Successful hiring is an outgrowth of successful management. Know what you are looking for in new workers--not just what they should be able to do the day they are hired, but what they will grow into as your company grows. Be clear about the difference between hiring clones of yourself whom you'd like to have as friends and a diverse workforce full of smart people who get things done. As my FAQ says, use work-sample tests for all your hiring. Don't trust educational credentials, but rather verify. Use legally safe means to find out who is smart and can learn more on the job. (References and expanded details on these points are available at the link.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
- malandrew 13y ago
  The saddest thing I've seen in my career is that most managers don't realize that hiring is a huge part of their job if their team contributes materially to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) and can grow that contribution by hiring people. The people the hire managers and promote people to managers rarely stop to ask: (1) Can this person keep the people underneath them happy and productive and make them happier and more productive? and (2) Can this person actively seek out other people to work under them that are productive? Hiring in too many businesses is outsourced to HR. i.e. A department manager goes to HR and says "give me someone who can do X, Y and Z". HR is then left with only keywords and has little knowledge of whether or not a candidate with a differing skill set could also perform the job well or better with a little training. Only the department manager has enough knowledge to hire correctly for the needs of their team. Why we ever let them get away with outsourcing this core responsibility to HR is beyond me.
jerrya 13y ago
I enjoy Nick's work, but I am not sure how applicable it is to many software jobs: People must stop begging for jobs It’s time for people to stop thinking about jobs, and high time to start thinking about how — and where — they can create profit. If I run a company, I’ll hire you to do work that pays off more than what I pay you to do it. Today, virtually no employer knows whether hiring a person will pay off. That’s why you need to know how to walk into a manager’s office and demonstrate, hands down, how you will contribute profit to the manager’s business. That’s right: Be smarter than the manager about his own business. Stop begging for jobs. Start offering profit. Because if you can’t do that, you have no business applying for any job, in any company. I haven't seen too many software development positions in large companies where you can walk into a manager's office and demonstrate you are smarter about the manager's own business than he is. I know more about your specialized domain than you? I know more about design for your specialized domain than you or your designers? I know more about the algorithms developed in your specialized industry than your engineers? I know more about database design used in your proprietary application? I know more about the customers for your specialized domain and their needs than you do? And I'm supposed to be able to claim that for any software development company I interview with regardless of industry? I enjoy working in software, and I think I am pretty good at it, but one aspect I enjoy is that moving from company to company I learn about new domains, new industries, new algorithms, etc.
- kd0amg 13y ago
  Also knowing what you can contribute to their business is much easier than knowing what you can contribute that they don't already get from one of their current employees.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  Pretty much every job offer I've gotten has involved walking into a manager or interviewer's office and pointing out things he can do better with his business. It's often not core stuff, but I'll frequently point out UI improvements they could make, or new technologies they may want to take a look at, or new algorithms & data structures that can solve their interview questions. And on the flip side, I enjoy learning about new businesses and new techniques they're using to the greatest extent that they'll share them with me. A-players are not threatened by this. B-players are. I've found that it is generally good for your career to try to work with A-players whenever possible and avoid B/C/D/F-players.
jheriko 13y ago
"Recent phenomenon is cause of ancient problem" Give me a break. there are a lot of interesting points and valuable insights. I won't say there isn't a real problem there, but the core message is wrong IMO. Comfortable people make far too little effort to find work. Talk to job seekers about how far they will go for a job... this is why I will always have one. People seem to think they are somehow entitled to a convenient job on their doorstep.
- luckycharms810 13y ago
  I think the issue is that there are million unfilled jobs out there, and there are qualified people who are ready to fill them. By putting a giant recruiting company between the two, you are filtering a lot of good people out of the equation. I've lost out on a lot of interviews by not having a github account. But if you think about it, thats a lot like asking a doctor to give a public record of lives that he has saved while off duty.
programminggeek 13y ago
Just spitballin' here, but it seems to be that a lot of it comes down to the terrible incentive programs in place at the most successful companies. First of all, the shareholder is not always right and short term self interest does not make for long term good decision making. So, if the people at each level are basically just angling for their own short term self interest, be it a promotion or a raise/bonus/performance incentive, they will do what they must to hit whatever those incentives are, even if they harm the long term health of the business. In short, instead of investing profits, companies are scaling back to look good and hit their profitability or stock price targets. It's short sighted and will end up hurting a lot of companies in the middle to long term because they are inevitably cutting plenty of good people along with those who are less good at what they do. I really don't think that the goal of business should be to hire a ton of people for the sake of hiring people. A business exists to make a profit, but sustaining profitability requires great people, great operations, great products, great sales/marketing, and great service. When a company stops investing in those things, they get worse. When entire industries/countries do this, it doesn't take long for some upstart to take the lead.
Aloha 13y ago
The automatic matching BS is why my resume is chock full of bullshit with a skills matrix. I would rather they look at my overall experience and try to match me to a relevant job.
memracom 13y ago
There was a time when a company would hire you if you showed that you were smart, able to solve problems, and had some years of experience working in some other companies. They did NOT expect you to already know the job. Employers were willing to work with employees, to guide them, train them, build them into what was needed.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Nick's (first) book is hands down the best resource on job-hunting and interviewing I have ever found.
valugi 13y ago
really hate the Taleo systems and such. They are made stupid on purpose.
Symmetry 13y ago
Is any of the stuff he mentions different from how it was pre-2008? In one sense the reason we still have unemployment is simple - we never had a classical recovery from the recession, we just had a return to normal growth. If you look at almost any historical recession you'll see a spike in unemployment, a dive into negative GDP growth, and a dive in inflation. Then, during the recovery you'll see a spike in GDP growth, a spike in inflation, and the employment level recovering to what it was pre-crash. This recession didn't have peaks in growth and inflation, just a return to normal. If you just looked at the GDP and inflation charts (or a combined NGDP chart) you'd expect that we'd still be having high but falling unemployment right now. And I could get into a big, long discussion of why this happened involving IOR, and the Fed relying on indicators that are always months out of date, and zero bounds, and certain coughdallascough Fed regional bank presidents being idiots. But whether or not there are supply side problems contributing to high unemployment in the US now, the demand side indicators show we should be having high unemployment now so there's no need to go "WTF".
- dynode 13y ago
  Not to mention quantitative easing.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
dawidw 13y ago
Not everyone is complaining... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UREepszk7I&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UREepszk7I&feature=player_em...
codegeek 13y ago
"Employers don’t do their own hiring, and that’s the #1 problem. Employers have outsourced their competitive edge — recruiting and hiring — to third parties whose heads are so far up The Database Butt that this little consortium should be investigated by Congress." This. Personally, I completely and absolutely blame the employers for this mess that they have "talent shortage". I am amazed with the whole recruiting ecosystem if there is such thing here. People are the most important assets of a company and giving this responsibility to a third party (read vendors/recruiters/agencies) just does not work. But again, most companies do not really bother about this. Until we stop calling people as "resources" and "head counts", this broken recruiting model will never change. These "vendor databases" that he is talking about is a major irritation. I still get emails from some random recruiting firm where I might have sent my Resume as a fresh desperate undergrad 10+ years ago. This needs to stop.

159 points by blahedo 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ffrryuu 13y ago

LinkedIn is great :)

InclinedPlane 13y ago
LinkedIn is terrible, but if you get a job through a linkedin connection you're likely to think it's fantastic. If every employer was using myspace for the same purpose many people would probably think it was great too.

rprospero 13y ago

So much of modern hiring seems like C. S. Lewis's comments about searching for your keys under the street lamp. There's a talent shortage, since everyone in the light has been hired. There's massive under underemployment, since everyone in the shadows can't get hired. There's a few dozen billions to be made by the person that fixes the problem. I wish I could comprehend the scale of the problem - it'd be nice to be that person.

calibraxis 13y ago
Unemployment is basically caused by fiscal policy. (Which is to say, it's political, since economics is political.) Unemployment is actually rather absurd when you think about it: people can't get jobs, even though by definition they want to; and there's lots to do. Not only do we have an economic system which has such a weird wasteful phenomenon, but we also pursue policies to ensure this phenomenon occurs.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  This is true but I take it in a different direction than you probably do. Most of the help we give to the unemployed is contingent on two things: 1. They don't have income and 2. They are looking for a job. That seems like a great way to test for unemployment benefits but what it fundamentally does is ensure that if you are unemployed and need the help you can't try to supplement through self-employment. Thus our current unemployment assistance largely works to discourage new businesses from starting. A better system would be a mandatory severance system where if you find yourself unemployed, you get a lump sum. You can look for a job, become self-employed, try to start a business with it, or any combination of these. But when it is gone, it is gone.
  - dlp211 13y ago
    I'd like to point out that many states do in fact allow you to supplement your unemployment income with some form of employment income.
  - capisce 13y ago
    In fact basic income would provide both better incentives for those without a job and increase liquidity in the employment market since people would no longer have to suffer a crappy boss or work place out of fear.
- vpears87 13y ago
  Unemployment is primarily caused by monetary policy and secondarily by fiscal. And due to structural issues of an economy, there is a natural rate of unemployment. Lending is the lifeblood of any economy. If you play around with the rates, significant outcomes can happen. And the Federal Reserve, through the FOMC, has been influencing the interest actively since 1979.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  [Auction the unemployed](http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unemployed http://www.morganwarstler.com/guaranteed-income-auction-unem...)

pontifier 13y ago

I'll tell you what's going on. It's a nightmare to hire someone. All the reporting requirements, all the paperwork involved, all the taxes and insurance requirements. I certainly don't want to actually hire anyone unless I absolutely have to, and even then I will get "independent contractors" or use temps if i can first.

jw_ 13y ago
For a non-American - what are the reporting requirements for hiring in the US that you're referring to?
walshemj 13y ago
yes and the cheeky buggers what to be paid as well!
seiji 13y ago
Who are you and what are you doing on my Internet?
Houshalter 13y ago
How much extra is it though? If there was a monetary cost to the extra paperwork, like paying someone else to handle it or accounting for the value of your own time. Would that be a significant fraction of the total cost of hiring someone?
ajross 13y ago
This sounds like a political statement. Obviously those sorts of requirements do exist, but they exist for everyone and in most cases scale as O(1) and not with employee count. They might plausibly be a barrier to hiring a first employee. They certainly aren't causing unemployment. As an existence proof, virtually none of those factors changed across 2008-2009, when we saw the biggest swing in employment rate since 1928.
- csense 13y ago
  > in most cases scale as O(1) and not with employee count I've read in many places that startups and small businesses are a very important engine of economic growth in the US. Since that O(1) obstacle disproportionately hurts small businesses, it could serve as a long-term brake on growth.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Sorry, employment data is classified for national security reasons.

Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago

Some great quotes in there... "Job descriptions heavily larded with keywords make it virtually impossible to find good candidates. But every day that an impossible job requisition remains unfilled, the employment system vendors make more money while companies keep advertising for the perfect hires." ... I'm a big believer that the market will shift to "pay for results", not "pay for subscription access to an aggregated database that you have to hire 4 people full-time just to sift through". "...employers believe they save money when they leave jobs vacant, because their accounting systems track the cost of having workers on the payroll — but cannot track the cost of leaving work undone."

dubfan 13y ago

> Taleo, Kenexa, LinkedIn, Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and their diaspora That's not what "diaspora" means.

richardfontana 13y ago
I found that jarring too. I assume he meant something like 'progeny'?

salemh 13y ago

There is no business plan in any applicant tracking system, no profit in a job posting, no future in federal employment metrics, no solution in HR departments, and no answers in databases or algorithms. Meh, not really the problem. Every company realizes there is a buyers market (sans Technical) for every position, and can interview 20+ people for a help desk role. No training is available because, what is the ROI? I know several companies (this is SLC) who don't train even for automated testing. After the testing, the employees find a better job. Symptom or syndrome? Symptom is employee skills > company re: new job, vs higher position in company (or, in better English, training leads to employees finding better companies, vs staying with a current company and building that company.) There is no loyalty amongst most companies for training or career development, as the ROI is not there (under utilization, a fallacy of implementation). Should your company be based on ROI metrics per-project, and per-resource? Do you call your employees resources? Utah (which has a large influx of Silicon companies trying to find cheap labor (typically they do) at lower cost of living thus for salary (typically they do) can look at 20+ candidates with marginal requirements met (experience/projects), but, it is a buyers market. Its not panacea like Silicon Valley, and SLC is rated very high for business, tangentially, you should be able to find top talent for top dollar. Talent shortage, there is not, but training / development there is, and no company wants to take that on, because companies realize loyalty exists at a quarter-quarter statement (worse with a PE firm), so how do employee's progress? Change jobs every 2-3 years for a 10k+ raise. I realize I am ranting, but skill matching to a position is broken, and no automated ATS system will fix a resume/pubic facing publication. /end: The "problem" at a symptom level is companies holding out for "best of best" when they probably do not need such candidates, and could train for such. Given, a SharePoint admin at $20 / hr (case study), they found it, after I placed them, and they left after six months when they realized their skill set warranted a $20k raise. Companies can under pay undergrads and mid-level candidates (who are not ivy/target/"rock star guru beer whatever") and do so, only to find a high turn-over rate. Fix turn-over rate? Or just keep filing the desperate mid-esque level folks who just need work and would fulfill Senior level demands of work fulfillment? /ranting

duney 13y ago
With the exception of the last one, every instance of "their" in your post should have been "there." I say this not to be a pedant, but because it made your otherwise good post difficult to read.

lumens 13y ago

The hiring system we live with today–resumes, jobs descriptions, recruiters, HR interviews, and the rest–is massively antiquated. In the past 50 years only distribution has improved. A communications gap exists: resumes don't speak to candidates' wants and desires, and job descriptions don't accurately depict a day in the life on the job. Today, recruiters, both internal and external, work to overcome this communications deficit. However, their presence and business models introduce agency problems. My company, Mighty Spring, is an effort to bridge this communication gap in a scalable way, putting candidates and employers in direct contact. We provide candidates a platform to be transparent about their interests and needs without risk (utilizing anonymity), and help employers communicate the finer points of their jobs better than the walls of text they produce today. This is Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com) — the easiest way to find new opportunities with startups.

craigyk 13y ago

AMEN

Zigurd 13y ago

There are too many perverse incentives to trust job descriptions and supposedly open positions. H1-B visas, political advantages from complaining about a "training gap," etc. Maybe job postings should be bonded. Put up $20k per position and forfeit it if you have not filled the position in X months.

maerF0x0 13y ago
Thats a good point, I have known a number of startup companies that have many "open positions" listed not because they're hiring but because of how it appeared to potential VCs . They want to appear to be a growing, valid, healthy company ...
- Zigurd 13y ago
  I could see a two-track system: Bonded postings that get counted in official statistics, and "informal" postings that amount to wishes. horses, etc. Bonding agents would drive down the cost of binding to a pretty small amount and/or enable bonding requirements to rise so that it is prohibitive to lie about open positions.
  - smm2000 13y ago
    I would not be surprised if higher percenrage of bonded postings will be fake because all postings required for visa/greencard will be bonded and useless.
    - Zigurd 13y ago
      The idea behind bonding is to make it very expensive to post fake requirements. The natural result of forfeiting a bond is for your bonding costs to go way up. An H-1B is for jobs that can't be filled. If they go unfilled, the bond is lost. Losing a bond of some tens of thousands of dollars is only justifiable for truly high-value positions, and that's what H1-B is supposed to be for, not phalaxes of warm bodies for contract shops.
  - smm2000 13y ago

maerF0x0 13y ago

IMO many companies do not hire "underqualified" people (ie people who do not exactly match the job description) because they're afraid to hire, train and lose employees. They fail to account for the opportunity cost of lost profits due to "waiting longer" for the right hire. I'd rather have a profitable employee after 1-3 months of training than to search for 6 months .

nikatwork 13y ago
But what if we train them up then they quit? We can't afford to do that. It's Too Risky (tm). Plus training is expensive. ...12 months later... Why do none of our employees have industry standard skills? Lawd, it's so hard to find good people!
- malandrew 13y ago
  You pay them lower but fair salary while you are training them and then pay them a fair salary when they are trained. If you train them, you've increased their value and you're expected to pay for that additional value even if you are the one that did the training. Training an employee is a capital investment with a much greater cost of maintenance, you just need to factor that in when hiring. Just because you paid for the training, does not entitle you to keep paying someone in perpetuity at their salary before being trained.
  - maerF0x0 13y ago
    Basically the thinking is this: Cost of training * expected return on equity = Amount I should be able to extract out of the trained employee forever. Selecting arbitrary numbers to keep things simple, if it costs $1000 to train the employee, and you want a 10% ROE then you expect to earn $100 per year more on that employee, forever. If the employee leaves they take that $100 per month potential away. This leaves a few paths for employers: 1) Pay less until you have a return of capital, 2) Dont up the salary after the "asset" is upgraded, allowing you to get a much ROE as possible. 3) Dont hire untrained people, so you can capture ROI from others' training. All of the above ignores the opportunity cost of not hiring. I presume for most profitable and busy companies, the lost opportunity is greater than the cost of training.

gnu8 13y ago

This is an ad.

jacques_chester 13y ago

A lot of this rhymes with online dating, and for similar reasons. Asymmetric information, skewed ratios, the paradox of choice ... very similar dynamics.

nbouscal 13y ago

There is a reason the term is "talent shortage", not "labor shortage". Yes, there are tons of unemployed people. A vanishingly small proportion of those people can actually fill the jobs that people are hiring for. Hence: talent shortage. Yes, hiring unexperienced people and training them is an option, but you can't do that for your entire engineering team. Hiring new grads isn't a problem, hiring people senior enough to make those new grads productive is. In short, not only is this post an advertisement, it's not even an accurate one. The talent gap is a significant problem, and it's only going to get worse if we don't acknowledge it.

avenger123 13y ago
I just wonder how much of this talent gap is real. For example, if I am looking for Ruby on Rails experience and I have candidates with strong python and Django experience are they off the list? Or how about someone that has done PHP for a long time and you are looking for RoR. Or let's say someone with Java experience is available but you are looking for Scala. I just use these as the initial comparisons but I'm sure there are more. Can you not let the python person train up on Ruby on Rails and have a strong candidate? I understand its best to match one to one what is being looked for, but I wonder how many good candidates are being passed by because they don't fit the perfect stack but are likely able to perfectly adapt.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  Nope, people with Django experience are definitely not off the list. PHP isn't off the list either, though the signal-to-noise in that community does seem (anecdotally) to be a lot lower. In my experience people cast a wide net for senior candidates in terms of what they've worked on, the important thing is how they've worked, what roles they've taken, what teams and projects they've led and shipped. Basically, people that can be trusted to build a solid foundation for the more junior candidates to build on top of. Even with a wide net on the specifics of their experience, candidates like that are still not easy to find.
  - gambler 13y ago

natmaster 13y ago

More like people are not learning the right skills to be useful. Economic restructuring used to happen much more slowly but with the advancement in technology these days it happens significantly more rapidly.

keithwarren 13y ago

Is it just me or did I just read 8 paragraphs or blather pretending not to be an advertisement for some book? I think he said that HR departments suck at hiring because they outsource to tech companies who use keyword searches. I could be wrong, but I think the problem is a bit more complex than that.

twistedpair 13y ago
I'd seen that before. Leads to the embarrassment of interviewing "Javascript Engineers" for a Java position and having to inform the applicant that your HR department is full of fools.
- ArtDev 13y ago
  That is hilarious. Really though, most people in our industry are constantly being recruited for jobs we don't want or aren't vaguely qualified for. But, hey, it keeps LinkedIn in business!

dba7dba 13y ago

One of my favorite experience with recruiting agency, from 10+ years ago. I had sent in my resume and on it, there was NOTHING about Novell. I mean NOTHING. I get a call from a recruiter for what position? A Novell Administrator. Told myself never to use a recruiting agency.

a3n 13y ago

"3.9 million jobs are vacant, thanks to the empty promises of algorithms. If the U.S. Congress wants a solution, it should launch an investigation into the workings of America’s employment system infrastructure, which is controlled by a handful of companies." Oh please, no. Anything Congress touches risks dying like a baby between two pit bulls.

zrail 13y ago
OT: pitbulls don't harm their humans. They're only a threat to humans who are obviously a threat to them or their humans.
- jussij 13y ago
  I don’t buy that. The Pitbulls of Australia seem to have a habit of mauling and killing small children on a regular basis, more so than any other dog breed. Maybe the Pitbulls in Australia are different but I doubt it.
  - ledge 13y ago
    Pitbulls are often trained to be mean. They are supremely athletic and strong, so they are the logical choice for fighting dogs, guard dogs, etc. I can't say whether or not there is a genetic component to incidents of mauling involving pitbulls, but people are a large part of the problem too.

batemanesque 13y ago

"Stop begging for jobs" is an approach that requires a level of privilege most people don't possess

Aloisius 13y ago

Many places with large numbers of job openings also have very low local unemployment (the Bay Area for instance). We like to report on numbers at the national level, but worker mobility is at a 40 year low [1]. That certainly isn't helping anything. [1] - http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-567.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-567.pdf

wil421 13y ago

Does this post not concern tech jobs. I recently graduated from a smaller local college and had no problem getting interviews or offers. In fact almost every job I applied for called me back within a day to do an interview. None of them outsourced their hiring either.

tokenadult 13y ago

The point of the blog post is that employers need to learn how to do hiring and not expect to outsource hiring to companies that get rich off of productive companies being clueless about hiring. That sounds like good advice. As a data point, one of my all-time most-liked comments here on HN[1] is my FAQ about company hiring procedures. Yes, people who run companies that innovate and make new products and services still have to learn the timeless facts about how to hire good workers. There is no substitute for the head of the company having a firm, reality-based idea about how to add workers to the team. Successful hiring is an outgrowth of successful management. Know what you are looking for in new workers--not just what they should be able to do the day they are hired, but what they will grow into as your company grows. Be clear about the difference between hiring clones of yourself whom you'd like to have as friends and a diverse workforce full of smart people who get things done. As my FAQ says, use work-sample tests for all your hiring. Don't trust educational credentials, but rather verify. Use legally safe means to find out who is smart and can learn more on the job. (References and expanded details on these points are available at the link.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

malandrew 13y ago
The saddest thing I've seen in my career is that most managers don't realize that hiring is a huge part of their job if their team contributes materially to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) and can grow that contribution by hiring people. The people the hire managers and promote people to managers rarely stop to ask: (1) Can this person keep the people underneath them happy and productive and make them happier and more productive? and (2) Can this person actively seek out other people to work under them that are productive? Hiring in too many businesses is outsourced to HR. i.e. A department manager goes to HR and says "give me someone who can do X, Y and Z". HR is then left with only keywords and has little knowledge of whether or not a candidate with a differing skill set could also perform the job well or better with a little training. Only the department manager has enough knowledge to hire correctly for the needs of their team. Why we ever let them get away with outsourcing this core responsibility to HR is beyond me.

jerrya 13y ago

I enjoy Nick's work, but I am not sure how applicable it is to many software jobs: People must stop begging for jobs It’s time for people to stop thinking about jobs, and high time to start thinking about how — and where — they can create profit. If I run a company, I’ll hire you to do work that pays off more than what I pay you to do it. Today, virtually no employer knows whether hiring a person will pay off. That’s why you need to know how to walk into a manager’s office and demonstrate, hands down, how you will contribute profit to the manager’s business. That’s right: Be smarter than the manager about his own business. Stop begging for jobs. Start offering profit. Because if you can’t do that, you have no business applying for any job, in any company. I haven't seen too many software development positions in large companies where you can walk into a manager's office and demonstrate you are smarter about the manager's own business than he is. I know more about your specialized domain than you? I know more about design for your specialized domain than you or your designers? I know more about the algorithms developed in your specialized industry than your engineers? I know more about database design used in your proprietary application? I know more about the customers for your specialized domain and their needs than you do? And I'm supposed to be able to claim that for any software development company I interview with regardless of industry? I enjoy working in software, and I think I am pretty good at it, but one aspect I enjoy is that moving from company to company I learn about new domains, new industries, new algorithms, etc.

kd0amg 13y ago
Also knowing what you can contribute to their business is much easier than knowing what you can contribute that they don't already get from one of their current employees.
nostrademons 13y ago
Pretty much every job offer I've gotten has involved walking into a manager or interviewer's office and pointing out things he can do better with his business. It's often not core stuff, but I'll frequently point out UI improvements they could make, or new technologies they may want to take a look at, or new algorithms & data structures that can solve their interview questions. And on the flip side, I enjoy learning about new businesses and new techniques they're using to the greatest extent that they'll share them with me. A-players are not threatened by this. B-players are. I've found that it is generally good for your career to try to work with A-players whenever possible and avoid B/C/D/F-players.

jheriko 13y ago

"Recent phenomenon is cause of ancient problem" Give me a break. there are a lot of interesting points and valuable insights. I won't say there isn't a real problem there, but the core message is wrong IMO. Comfortable people make far too little effort to find work. Talk to job seekers about how far they will go for a job... this is why I will always have one. People seem to think they are somehow entitled to a convenient job on their doorstep.

luckycharms810 13y ago
I think the issue is that there are million unfilled jobs out there, and there are qualified people who are ready to fill them. By putting a giant recruiting company between the two, you are filtering a lot of good people out of the equation. I've lost out on a lot of interviews by not having a github account. But if you think about it, thats a lot like asking a doctor to give a public record of lives that he has saved while off duty.

programminggeek 13y ago

Just spitballin' here, but it seems to be that a lot of it comes down to the terrible incentive programs in place at the most successful companies. First of all, the shareholder is not always right and short term self interest does not make for long term good decision making. So, if the people at each level are basically just angling for their own short term self interest, be it a promotion or a raise/bonus/performance incentive, they will do what they must to hit whatever those incentives are, even if they harm the long term health of the business. In short, instead of investing profits, companies are scaling back to look good and hit their profitability or stock price targets. It's short sighted and will end up hurting a lot of companies in the middle to long term because they are inevitably cutting plenty of good people along with those who are less good at what they do. I really don't think that the goal of business should be to hire a ton of people for the sake of hiring people. A business exists to make a profit, but sustaining profitability requires great people, great operations, great products, great sales/marketing, and great service. When a company stops investing in those things, they get worse. When entire industries/countries do this, it doesn't take long for some upstart to take the lead.

Aloha 13y ago

The automatic matching BS is why my resume is chock full of bullshit with a skills matrix. I would rather they look at my overall experience and try to match me to a relevant job.

memracom 13y ago

There was a time when a company would hire you if you showed that you were smart, able to solve problems, and had some years of experience working in some other companies. They did NOT expect you to already know the job. Employers were willing to work with employees, to guide them, train them, build them into what was needed.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Nick's (first) book is hands down the best resource on job-hunting and interviewing I have ever found.

valugi 13y ago

really hate the Taleo systems and such. They are made stupid on purpose.

Symmetry 13y ago

Is any of the stuff he mentions different from how it was pre-2008? In one sense the reason we still have unemployment is simple - we never had a classical recovery from the recession, we just had a return to normal growth. If you look at almost any historical recession you'll see a spike in unemployment, a dive into negative GDP growth, and a dive in inflation. Then, during the recovery you'll see a spike in GDP growth, a spike in inflation, and the employment level recovering to what it was pre-crash. This recession didn't have peaks in growth and inflation, just a return to normal. If you just looked at the GDP and inflation charts (or a combined NGDP chart) you'd expect that we'd still be having high but falling unemployment right now. And I could get into a big, long discussion of why this happened involving IOR, and the Fed relying on indicators that are always months out of date, and zero bounds, and certain coughdallascough Fed regional bank presidents being idiots. But whether or not there are supply side problems contributing to high unemployment in the US now, the demand side indicators show we should be having high unemployment now so there's no need to go "WTF".

dynode 13y ago
Not to mention quantitative easing.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

dawidw 13y ago

Not everyone is complaining... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UREepszk7I&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UREepszk7I&feature=player_em...

codegeek 13y ago

"Employers don’t do their own hiring, and that’s the #1 problem. Employers have outsourced their competitive edge — recruiting and hiring — to third parties whose heads are so far up The Database Butt that this little consortium should be investigated by Congress." This. Personally, I completely and absolutely blame the employers for this mess that they have "talent shortage". I am amazed with the whole recruiting ecosystem if there is such thing here. People are the most important assets of a company and giving this responsibility to a third party (read vendors/recruiters/agencies) just does not work. But again, most companies do not really bother about this. Until we stop calling people as "resources" and "head counts", this broken recruiting model will never change. These "vendor databases" that he is talking about is a major irritation. I still get emails from some random recruiting firm where I might have sent my Resume as a fresh desperate undergrad 10+ years ago. This needs to stop.