No Will to Hire

Where there's a will, there's a way.
-- Old English proverb

The picture being painted by snooty establishment types, especially those of the right-wing persuasion, is that there is something wrong with those who are having a difficult time finding work. Either they aren't looking as hard as they should; they haven't done a good job selling themselves; they aren't flexible enough when it comes to compensation, location, title, etc.; or, they haven't put enough effort into improving the talents and skills they bring to the table.

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that companies are less than enthusiastic about boosting headcounts. Perhaps the best examples are those various surveys that reveal no small number of corporate executives are expecting decent growth in revenues and profits but don't plan on acquiring the human resources necessary to satisfy that demand. In fact, a post at Real Time Economics, "Employers Aren’t Trying Hard to Hire," highlights research suggesting that the will to employ is simply lacking.

Unemployed workers have a point when they complain that companies aren’t really trying to fill open jobs, a new study suggests.

In recent months, policy makers have puzzled over the inadequate rate at which job searchers and job vacancies are coming together. By some estimates, if openings were turning into hires at the rate they typically do, the unemployment rate should be about three percentage points lower than the current 9.6%.

Explanations have tended to focus on workers. Extended unemployment benefits could make people less willing to take jobs that pay poorly or don’t quite fit. Mortgage troubles and employed spouses could make it harder for people to move for work. People might not have the right qualifications for the jobs available.

A new paper, though, suggests employers themselves are at least part of the problem. The authors — Steven Davis of Chicago Booth School of Business, R. Jason Faberman of the Philadelphia Fed and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland — take a deep dive into Labor Department data and come up with an estimate of what they call “recruiting intensity,” a measure of employers’ vacancy-filling efforts including advertising, screening and wage offers.

Their finding: Employers haven’t been trying as hard as they usually do. Estimates provided by Mr. Davis suggest that over the three months ending July, recruiting intensity was about 12% below the average for the seven years leading up to the recession. Their lack of effort probably accounts for about a quarter of the shortfall in the hiring rate.

Depressing as it might seem, the finding is in some ways encouraging. It suggests that the trouble with hiring might be more a “cyclical” function of low business confidence than a chronic, “structural” ailment that will last for years to come.

Comments

[Justin]

In the last year i have heard several variations on the following scenario, most first hand.

Software engineer interviews for position one level lower and about minus $30K previous employment. Interviewers are hostile, ask mostly trick questions for hours, do not answer his questions except with more of theirs and all have foreign accents. He is not offered job. Later he is told he was underqualified when in fact he was over qualified. Many others applied for position. Sources in company inform that noone was hired and company is now applying for H1B to temp fill position at lower cost.

[Everyone knows the media is just toying with your mind....whatever's left of it]

Distrust In US Media Hits Record High, As CNBC (And Especially Mad Money) Viewership Drops To Multi-Year Low

In today's "less than surprising data point" category, the clear winner is Gallup's analysis of people's ever increasing distrust in the mass media. From 46% in 1998, the percentage of people who indicate they haven't "very much/none at all" trust in mass media has grown to a stunning 57% currently. This is an all time record, as the general public perception toward the MSM has flipped over the past decade. Is it becoming increasingly more difficult to lie to the average American?

http://www.zerohedge.com/node/216822?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29

[Nickelthrower]

Greetings,

I provide freelance media services to Fortune 500 companies. I work with the CEO, CFO, CIO, etc etc etc. I get to listen in on the most sensitive inside talk by the companies that actually run this country. That said, I would like to break it down for all of you guys - Workers are nothing more than a commodity to be exploited for maximum gain.

There is not an ounce of civic responsibility in any of these corporations. The moment it becomes profitable for employees to drop dead I guarantee you that you'll see 'em drop dead by the millions. You are no more than an ant to these guys so get over it.

[Tim]

Nicklethrower, I think your right but there's nothing to get over. A relationship with an employer is a two way street. If I'm just a piece of meat then your just a paycheck. Loyalty begets loyalty.

[NO stocks 4 me]

"Distrust In US Media Hits Record High, As CNBC (And Especially Mad Money) Viewership Drops To Multi-Year Low"

So you think this clown with then noise machine cares?, he's already made millions pushing his stocks that he gets a kick back from the boys that want him to push it, not to mention getting all the inside info he needs to get in and get out. This guy and his half bro the Goldie pimp, are well off enough to weather most anything. They are like the millionaires that cry about payin a few more K in tax when even what's left over wouldn't change anything in their life. 15% of 40 or 50K is still a hell of a chunk than 30% of a million on the individual that has to pay the same for the usual items we all need in life, not a 600D or private jets. But boy are they all for cutting those nasty entitlements, like that welfare SS, yeah right.

[Lie detector technicians needed]

Senator Franken Sends Letter To Bernanke, Bair And Holder Demanding Criminal Charges For All Responsible For Biggest Alleged Mortgage Fraud In History

The biggest financial story which continues to get absolutely no mention on CNBC just got its latest multi-step escalation: Senator Al Franken has just blasted a letter to Tim Geithner, Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Eric Holder, John Walsh, Controller of the Currency, Sheila Bair, and, drumroll, Ben Bernanke, telling the recipients that "each of your agencies has an important role to play in addressing this egregious situation and holding all appropriate actors fully accountable.

http://tinyurl.com/247q33k

[No Name Guy]

"they aren't flexible enough when it comes to compensation, location, title, etc.; "

In the case of the folks I know, this is precisely the problem. Good friend of mine could get by (along with his GF) if he only took a bulls**t minimum wage job. Instead, he's anchored on the pay of his previous one. So, he's chosing to go broke, and then whines about it. How many 99-ers are in this same boat? Yeah.....LOTS.

Well, suck it up. You ain't in Kansas any more Toto. Work the 2 minimum wage jobs and put in 50-60 hours a week (every time I mosey around, I see plenty of help wanted for them) and cut back on everything else. Get used to hot dogs and beans. Nothing like having to give up cable, the big screen, the cell phone, high speed net access, etc to motivate a person.

And No Stocks, it IS those effin entitlements that are the problem on so many levels. They enable the lazy and irresponsible to sponge off of those that actually DO work hard (and only make 30 to 50k a year). That's the problem with an ENTITLEMENT. It breeds that mentality - gimme, gimme, gimme. (Insert Grandpa Simpson rant). And that doesn't even take account of the absolute destruction of the public finances they entail.

And no stocks, you inadvertently make my point - 15% is about what those 40k a year schmucks are paying in socialist security and medicare taxes (and how much more courtsey of their state via state income taxes or increased sales / excise taxes?). They certainly would be better off if they'd been having that put into a personal savings account (or had just been doing it themselves) instead of it being flushed down the money toilet that is DC.

[roger]

Where there's a will, there's a way.
-- Old English proverb
Proverbs and slogans, I love them,
they give us instant wisdom and do
away with the need of thinking.
The triumph of the will,was the Fuhrers
favorite.
My preferred one: he who thinks only of
his belly, is worth less that what comes
out of it. Arab proverbe.

[Juvenal]

Having been around government for 25 years and law even longer...workers...people are indeed numbers, commodities, resources for exploitation. Leave the civic mindedness to the do gooders with personal wealth, churches that have brainwashed the congregation to hand over money and skim a little off the pastor's big salary for the needy (for the corporate show and all).

This is still the Stone Age, kill or be killed. If you are insulated by an insider job, celebrity or a rich family or spouse...lucky you. For everyone else, know where your cave is, carry your stone axe and trust not even your own tribe; given the opportunity they'll eat your guts out.

[kevinearick]

The Open Source Tribe

The foundation for a tribe is spiritual, not physical, for many very good reasons, but primarily to produce multiplier effects through adaptive capability, which is lost when ac reacts to dc (instead of leading it), which simply feeds the positive feedback rail, through the inversion route of the op-amp into the ADC. The dc bus will automatically feed off the ADC; that’s all it knows. The primary path of the tribe, then, is building the quantum energy required to reach the next level, when the dc bus shorts into itself, which it always does. A beget B, and B beget C, and so on, until the bridge is required, at which time there is no time: Noah, Moses, Mohammed, etc.

“His vassals there only occupy their land on sufferance. If anyone gives trouble, he doesn’t just come to punish and take tribute. He takes the land away and gives it to anyone he chooses. It has generally seemed to me that these Normans care more for property than people… he could not comprehend one important feature of European feudal life: the absentee landlord. The King gave his great lords scattered land to hold; they in turn had tenants…For his father had turned out to be the last chief. He himself, as a celibate priest, had no heirs.”

So, if the legacy families controlling the multinationals also control government, and the Church, through local property, as absentee landlords, giving themselves the powers of administrative eminent domain, arbitrary property taxation, and monetary inflation, to the end of building cookie-cutter communities feeding cookie-cutter nation/states, in their own image as false idols, then the American Dream, home ownership, has been a hoax all along, to draw current into the demographic ponzi economy, and the associated hoarding of non-productive assets gathered there has only served to imprison the tenant to immobility, which sheds an entirely different light on those pesky tribes upon which America spent several trillion dollars to isolate and expunge, only to amplify their reaction, feeding the next round of military economic activity.

Capitalism preaches return on merit from free economic association, but the actual contract delivers tenant at the will of the multinational, and make-work jobs as a spoils system, in what is essentially a global company town, in which all prices are fixed. When the Soviet Union fell, America lost its foil, and History has been popping layers off the stack ever since, exposing all the false contracts to global scrutiny.

Gotta be smarter than the computer. The universe is a landscape, from which the dc bus rules itself out, because it is blind. Ignorance is the enemy, not the dc bus, or anyone in it, and, yes, it’s not wise to expect a critter to be anything other than a critter. Sometimes, the more you try to stay away from them, the closer they get, hence the jester.

[roger]

When an accumulation of debt appears as an accumulation
of Capital, we know that there is nothing left anymore
to squeeze from productive labor and the only way to
accumulate more wealth is by money speculating on money.
Not much spirituality here,just the real economy in action.

[If this happened in a foreign country we'd call it a banana republic]

Fraud Factories: Rep. Alan Grayson Explains the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis, Shows Examples of Forgeries and Fraud

http://tinyurl.com/25l34yt

[Nick]

@justin said- "Many others applied for position. Sources in company inform that noone was hired and company is now applying for H1B to temp fill position at lower cost."

It's not just computer science. Chemistry, the physical sciences, engineering are all under siege by the h1-b visa. Academia is the worst because there isn't any cap on the numbers. Plus you have tenured academics who want labs packed to the hilt with cheap labor.

If Harvard wants 2000 fresh faced post-docs from India they get them. These people then apply for American jobs outside the ivory tower.

There's a reason Americans don't want jobs in the sciences!

[If this happened in a foreign country we'd call it a banana republic]

No matter what they say.......... republicans love cheap illegal labor

For two days, Whitman forcefully denied receiving any such letter and said she fired the $23-an-hour housekeeper last year immediately after learning she was illegal. But Whitman's husband changed course Thursday after a letter surfaced with what appeared to be his handwriting, forcing him to say he may have been aware of the correspondence back in 2003.

The husband's shift only served to intensify the uproar in a contest that until now been focused on serious issues such as job creation, government spending and education in a state with a $19 billion deficit and 12.4 percent unemployment.

The former eBay chief executive has called for tougher sanctions against employers who hire illegal workers, and the fact that she employed an illegal immigrant maid from Mexico for nine years could undermine her credibility. She has also spent millions courting Latino voters, who could play a key role in determining the outcome of the race.

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20100929/US.California.Governor.Housekeeper/

[think about what he is saying..think about the last 30 years]

The Beginning of the End of Walmart, Scenes from NYC

http://tinyurl.com/2we5hbg

[ruralcounsel]

People are anchored to underwater homes that they can't sell without going bellyup, and the employers want flexibility on location?

People are servicing record debtloads, and the employers want flexibility on compensation?

Tell me they aren't just trying to pass as much risk and as many costs down to the potential employees as possible. As the workers get desperate, they will eventally be forced to assume more of these these risks and costs. The Dust Bowl and Okies all over again. All part of the downward spiral of the race to the bottom. Eventually, the employers will find out they bankrupted their own customer base. So much for those business models!

It's all about risk management, parsed as cost reduction.

[francismarion]

As an unregenerate 'snooty right-winger', I recognize that a harrowing is a-comin', no- check that- is here. People are being forced out of homes that were priced artificially high. They're losing jobs that were sold to the lowest bidder. No way out.

The question is, where to next? Face it, lots of 'middle-class' families were always marginal at best given the sham-economy created by the debt of the last couple of decades. Now the world is on to our game. They are playing to win. Time to pay up.

American are going to have to teach their kids the virtues of education and delaying gratification. That won't keep mom and dad out of a drastically reduced lifestyle. But it might remind us which side of our bread is buttered, the knowledge of which we seem to have lost, like the car keys, somewhere between the three thousand square foot house and the thirty thousand dollar mega-car, neither of which we could ever have afforded in any sane scenario.

Better days lie ahead. But first the harrowing.

[kevinearick]

Contract Law

“An Irishman is a free man, within his tribe. The Saxon peasant is not. At a later date, the English – not Henry, who is clearly very devious- but the English lords will genuinely believe the Irish have sworn to one thing, and the Irish will think they have sworn to another, and both sides will mistrust the other. This Plantagenet king comes from the devil.” Lawyers are first and foremost officers of the court; the Court is corrupt. Where does that leave the lawyers?

Many are waiting for the powers to be to plea mea culpa. That is quite unlikely. The controlling factions do, however, have a record of this show buried within their mythologies, and they are rapidly building a nucleus within the nucleus accordingly, throwing their minions, from the outer layer inward, into the chasm, hoping to build a bridge across the economic divide, marshalling their remaining resources in D.C. and the state capitols, in preparation, and to keep the reality of the situation from entering the groupthink stream shared by their captains, which isn’t too difficult considering that they were specifically bred to be blind. And the status quo in the outlier communities is only being held together by bred behavior, as the local property lords compete across shrinking sub-fulcrums, to survive.

So, marriage has been falling steadily since 1960, with a current rate of less than 20% among adults under 34 in some cities, and the actuaries are still assuming a long-term rate of 90% in their calculations, expecting illegal immigration and H1B1s to backfill as necessary. Meanwhile, with all the empty units already in these markets, they have double that many units permitted and “shovel ready,” with each community making big plans for tourist and healthcare expansion … as the procession marches into the abyss. Have you noticed the increasing frequency of pneumonia-related symptoms where you are?

The human symbiotic relativity circuit depends entirely upon marriage, which has survived every imperial assault in History. Empires are just a convenient form of gravity. The priest demands approval from the government to consecrate a marriage? What God has put together …

When the kids feel no attachment to a culture, watch out. They can feed the bear, and get away.

[kraft cheese]

there must be something wrong in these company officials, else why are not vacant places being filled.