By Jazz Shaw
August 17, 2013
Both Dr. James Joyner and Bloomberg’s Peter Orszag are looking into a rather puzzling pair of statistics from the labor market this week. Posted job openings around the country are up roughly 50%, but new hires have only risen by 5%. What can account for the disparity in these numbers? It would seem that if companies are posting that many more openings, surely hiring should be on the rise in comparable numbers, and yet it’s not happening.
Orszag:
To get some sense of how significant this is, consider that if, since June 2010, hiring had risen a third as much as advertised jobs have (rather than only a 10th), and nothing else were different, job creation would be roughly 500,000 higher each month, and the unemployment rate would already be back to normal levels.
So what explains the yawning gap between jobs open and jobs filled?
Joyner:
Orszag floats four theories that have been offered:
There’s a mismatch between the skills needed and those available on the market Employers are offering wages too low to attract applicants Jobs are mostly being filled with internal candidates Firms have reduced their “recruiting intensity,” and just aren’t that excited to fill openings
He argues pretty good reasons to discount any of these as likely explanations for much of the gap. He concludes,
Regardless of the true explanation, it’s still good news that more jobs are being advertised. That wouldn’t be happening if the economic outlook were entirely bleak.
But, if nobody’s hiring, the economic outlook is pretty damned bleak for the unemployed and underemployed.
As with most cases when we attempt to analyze a trend taking place involving tens of millions of people, I suspect the “answer” isn’t just one driving phenomenon, but rather a combination of factors.....
(Excerpt)
Read more:
Why is hiring so much lower than new job openings? « Hot Air
Guess that 99 weeks of Unemployment Checks and SNAP is too enticing.[/QU
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