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In my own field, I've notice three big reasons employers are having trouble finding new hires:
3) Their...process is so convoluted and/or lengthy that potential applicants who value their own time just say "nope" and don't bother... Plus, an obnoxious application makes it look like the employer is a pill to work for.
This was my biggest complaint when job hunting. The unnecessary "tools" some employers use in the process made me roll my eyes.
I actually had a company send me an exercise typed up on a crappy word doc (poorly formatted) asking me to describe how I would pack a suit case.
I sent it back to the hr person and told her I would pass if that was indicative of their hiring process. She never replied back.
Correct. Employers struggle to retain hires, and the fault lies on both parts, not just the employee. I just started a new job and quickly realized that the turnover was ridiculous. Nearly all the 20 employees had been there less than one year. I soon discovered why. My field is not high paying but it offers a livable wage. The company offers few benefits, even compared to other companies in the same field. The company also is mistrustful toward employees and expects employees to purchase their own uniforms despite rather menial wages. Employees never get two days off in a row and have to work many evening hours. The workload is high and there is much intolerance toward employee errors. I already plan to leave after a year or maybe even sooner. I have more than a decade of experience in my skilled field so I think I can find something bettero.
That describes my last job to a tee. Long hours, crap wages, no benefits, no raises, impossible workload and no support from management. The turnover was insane. As soon as people found something better, they bailed.
This was my biggest complaint when job hunting. The unnecessary "tools" some employers use in the process made me roll my eyes.
I actually had a company send me an exercise typed up on a crappy word doc (poorly formatted) asking me to describe how I would pack a suit case.
I sent it back to the hr person and told her I would pass if that was indicative of their hiring process. She never replied back.
Reminds me of a time I applied for a clerical role at BJs two years ago. The HR sent me an email to take an assessment and guess what? There was no link in the email to take the test. Tried replying to the mail, but mailer-daemon. I called up the BJs store, talked to a HR guy and asked him if they can resend the email with the proper link included. "Sorry but that stuff comes out of the home office. I have no ability to do that. Just wait another day or two, they'll probably send it again." OK, two days later and nothing. By that point, I figured its not worth it hounding them again (and not like you can actually get a hold of anyone at the home office anyway) and moved on. Why do I have to keep bugging them to do their jobs right when they're the ones getting PAID to?
A fair wage? Where I work, we're constantly trying to fill openings. We're offering well over $100k for new college grads, and it usually takes months to fill a position. It has nothing to do with "unfair wages" or discrimination. There are just too many companies competing for the talent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemlock140
Same here, and recently some of our $100k employees have been poached by companies like Amazon, offering them more. Two in the last 6 months, plus one to Tableau, another to Starbucks headquarters.
You guys are making it sound like any college grad can just stroll into one of those $100k jobs, which I know is balderdash...or, heck, my wife, my daughter, my SIL, and I would be walking into them.
Wait. I just checked the Amazon job site.
All their available "university, non-tech" jobs are in Germany and Czechoslovakia.
I guess we can't just walk into them...we'll have to do some swimming.
Same here, and recently some of our $100k employees have been poached by companies like Amazon, offering them more. Two in the last 6 months, plus one to Tableau, another to Starbucks headquarters.
This article is kind of on point if you're talking about the tech field exclusively, or the skilled labor fields (because nobody is going into them). For literally every other profession out there, this lament about lack of skilled workers is just a ball-faced lie.
You talk about 100K employees being poached - well yeah, in Seattle 100K is considered a slave wage in tech. Companies offer more than that for kids right out of school. But what about the accountants or lawyers? Nobody is poaching those people. To people not in tech, the buzzword of "we lost a 100k talent!" seems significant. To those who understand Seattle, it's understood you were underpaying them in the first place.
The reality here is what is happening is companies are actively fighting the invisible hand. Economics dictates that when demand goes up, supply goes down, and in order to keep what you have, you have to pay more in order to retain it. Corporations today are simply digging in their feet, electing to leave positions completely unfilled rather than up the salaries they are offering in order to entice talent to come to them. Their whole strategy is an attempt to starve out the worker until they come crawling to accept their slave wages. And it's a huge reason for the instability we have today.
This article also touches on how it takes longer to fill a job, alluding that the reason for that is it takes longer to find a candidate. That's also not true. A lot of the reason why it takes so much longer now is because companies run enormous background checks that can take a couple of weeks after 7 round interviews. The whole process has gotten completely onerous. Combine it with the amount of companies that use candidate-unfriendly apps such as Taleo (thus making it take an hour to apply for a job) and the arrogance of companies to not even bother to respond to candidates, thus making them less likely to continue looking for jobs at their company, and what you have is a recipe for a lot of people in a standoff with a lot of corporations.
The other big thing that turns people away from applying (even in tech - especially in tech) is this concept of "contract to hire". Oh sure, quit the job you presently have and come work for us. For the first 6 months, you'll accrue no vacation time, get no health benefits, and have absolutely no job security. But after that, we might either give you another 6 months or maybe, just maybe hire you. Maybe. It's so one-sided in that regard it's not even funny. And, thankfully, most people I know in my industry are finally wising up to it and saying no.
I didn't. I took Algebra in high school as well as Calc I. I went right to Calc II in college.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigDGeek
I didn't have to take algebra in college. I went to UT-Austin. You also had to take a math placement test at orientation to determine what math courses you were eligible to take.
If your SAT score and class rank weren't high enough, you had to do a summer semester as a provisional freshman and college algebra was part of the coursework. I didn't have to do this because I was admitted outright.
Basically, UT-Austin assumed that you'd taken 2 years of algebra, a year of geometry, a year of trig, and probably calculus as well (though trig & calculus weren't required at that time). Why take college algebra after all that?
So you both actually did take basic algebra.
You just weren't required to take it twice.
Heck, I tested through basic algebra in college myself, and that was more than 40 years go. Nothing new about it.
It's not always that simple. We have two jobs open right now at my work that NOBODY qualified has applied for. The amount of work you're asked to do is strictly controlled and the pay & benefits package are very, very good for our field. For the first opening, 2 decent-looking candidates applied but after they interviewed them, they decided not to hire either one. For the second opening, nobody with any meaningful qualifications applied.
You don't really want those jobs filled. Not really.
If you were actually losing money by those jobs being unfilled, at some point someone would figure out that hiring the best you could find and then training him would be the best business route.
But the fact is, you don't really want those jobs filled. You're able to get the work done now without spending more money for it.
Does anyone else remember how easy it was to get a job when resumes were primarily submitted in person and there was human contact before anyone at the hiring company ever even laid eyes on the resume? If you submitted 10 resumes, chances are you'd get responses on 3 or 4 of them. Nowadays most resumes never even wind up in front of human eyes, and then employers wonder why they can't find just the right candidate.
Stop trying to hire a resume and try to hire a human being.
Does anyone else remember how easy it was to get a job when resumes were primarily dropped off in person and there was human contact before anyone ever even laid eyes on the resume? If you submitted 10 resumes, chances are you'd get responses on 3 or 4 of them. Nowadays most resumes never even wind up in front of human eyes, and then employers wonder why they can't find just the right candidate.
Stop trying to hire a resume and try to hire a human being.
Will places even allow you to submit a resume in person anymore?
Will places even allow you to submit a resume in person anymore?
The last few times I've tried I was instructed to go away and submit my resume online.
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