Free Republic

In a push to hire minority police officers, the Obama administration is asking the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies to forgive drug use, disregard the criminal records of candidates from “underrepresented communities” and lower standards on written and physical exams. It’s part of the administration’s Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement initiative following a string of officer-involved shootings involving African Americans. Key to the mission is the racial diversification of local law enforcement agencies so that they “better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.” To accomplish this, several barriers must be removed and the details are outlined in a...

The greatest moral claim of the political left is that they are for the masses in general and the poor in particular. That is also their greatest fraud. It even fools many leftists themselves. One of the most recent efforts of the left is the spread of laws and policies that forbid employers from asking job applicants whether they have been arrested or imprisoned. This is said to be to help ex-cons get a job after they have served their time, and ex-cons are often either poor or black, or both. First of all, many of the left's policies to...

Something isn't clicking in the US labor market. On Tuesday, the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — or JOLTS — report showed there were 5.757 million jobs available in the US in March, a near record. Additionally, the number of unemployed persons in the US per job open is down to pre-recession levels at about 1.5 workers per job. In 2010, for example, this number was closer to five unemployed workers per job opening. And while the abundance of jobs is often interpreted as a sign of strength in the labor market, there's a persistent and growing gap...

Getting a job takes longer than ever, as employers ask more of candidates. It has never been easy to land a job, but a rise in hiring has added a new twist: Employers are taking nearly twice as long to hire people as they did several years ago. Companies need an average of 23 days to screen and hire new employees, up from 13 days in 2010, says Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at the jobs and recruiting site Glassdoor, based on a study of nearly 350,000 interview reviews by the site's users. Applicants run a gantlet of multiple interviews not...

U.S. cities that implemented big minimum-wage hikes to $10 an hour or more in 2015 have seen a strikingly similar aftermath: Job gains have fallen to multiyear lows at restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality venues. The data aren't, for the most part, stark and reliable enough to amount to smoking-gun proof. But Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — all on the leading edge of the push for big minimum wage hikes — all show worrisome job trends.

Lawmakers continue to wrangle over a bill that would overhaul the nation's immigration system. One provision in this bill would allow companies to import a lot more skilled workers. The tech industry has lobbied hard for this, despite fears among some American workers about the extra competition. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin says the bill has American workers covered. --Employers will be given a chance to hire a temporary foreign worker when truly needed. But first, they'll be required to recruit Americans. No exceptions, no excuses,-- he said. Still, making companies recruit Americans isn't the same as making them hire them....

Should computers decide who gets a job? That’s a question recently asked by Government Executive Magazine which looked at a study of hiring practices and how much hiring recommendations generated by standardized testing differed from managers who “went with their gut” in terms of eventual employee performance and retention. The results were, at least as I read it, a bit muddled.First of all, the test subjects they looked at were all applicants for low skill service jobs. (Such as you’d find for new hires at call centers or data entry firms.) They were all given standardized tests and those results...

The US economy is turning into a nightmare for recruiters: They just can't find enough qualified people to fill jobs.In a recent note to clients, Macquarie Research analyst David Doyle cited a survey of HR executives conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggesting that firms are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting workers and filling positions.Both the manufacturing and the services sectors are having a harder time recruiting people today than they did during the credit bubble in the mid-2000s. HR folks are particularly struggling in the services sector, which follows the larger trend of the US...

ABC NEWS Updated 15 mins ago Louisiana State Police charged two law enforcement officers in the shooting death of a 6-year-old boy and the wounding of his father. Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, and Derrick Stafford, 32, were charged with second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder in the shooting in the city of Marksville on Tuesday, Col. Mike Edmonson said during a news conference late Friday. Jeremy Mardis was killed and his father, Christopher Few, was left in critical condition. The shooting happened when the two city marshals allegedly opened fire on a vehicle following a pursuit, said Edmonson.

“We’re feeling a little bit of the tightness in the market,” said Tim Grace, the global chief talent officer for Toys “R” Us. Mr. Grace said the retailer is on track to meet its goal of hiring 40,000 seasonal workers, but added that “we are not getting as many applicants as we have in the past.” With unemployment at a seven-year low, hourly retail work is becoming less attractive to job seekers who now have more options. The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons—those who want to work full-time but can only get a part-time job—has shrunk by...

Facing accusations that it cannot adequately protect the White House, the U.S. Secret Service plans to hire 1,100 more officers and agents for an agency besieged by embarrassing scandals and security lapses, two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the plans said. The addition of 700 uniformed division officers and 400 agents over five years would expand its staff of 6,647 by nearly 17 percent, the biggest hiring increase in more than a decade at the 150-year-old agency whose job it is to protect the president, his family, and senior officials, along with fighting financial crime. The Secret Service...

Myles UdlandSeptember 2, 2015Deutsche Bank's Torsten Sløk thinks the labor market is more than strong enough to justify interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve In an email on Wednesday, Sløk writes that he continues to talk to clients who don't believe the US economy is anything other than weak, "not good," or on the verge of recession. But the indicators Sløk is looking at show nothing of the sort. In fact, the opposite. Last week, we highlighted charts from Sløk that showed, to him, an economy picking up steam. On Wednesday, Sløk turned his focus to the labor market,...

Hillary Clinton’s recent speech in which she decried “quarterly capitalism” has predictably generated a great deal of commentary. With good reason. Not only is “quarterly capitalism” a whopper of a myth, Clinton’s solution to what is not a problem would bring great harm to the economy. Missed by Clinton is the basic economic truism learned the hard way by European countries that you can’t hire people easily if you can’t easily fire them. As readers will soon see, the hiring analogy is apt. But first, it’s important to address her argument that excessive investor focus on quarterly earnings has somehow...

Last week the Labor Department offered some seemingly very good news: U.S. employers now have more job openings than ever previously recorded. There is a bounty of opportunities to be had. And yet to unemployed workers, it may not feel that way. That’s because many companies are acting like big teases. They say they want to hire, then drag their feet. In fact, the average time required to fill a job opening has also just reached an all-time high: 27.3 days, or almost a month, according to an important and underappreciated monthly data release called the DHI-DFH Mean Vacancy Duration...

Percentage of African-Americans in U.S. Police Departments Remains Flat Since 2007 But police hiring of other minorities has increased, report shows By Ben Kesling and Cameron McWhirter May 14, 2015 2:43 p.m. ET 28 COMMENTS The percentage of African-Americans in U.S. police departments has remained flat since before the recession, even as police hiring of other minorities has increased, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey released Thursday. A lack of black officers, especially in communities with large African-American populations, has been cited frequently in the wake of police-involved deaths of black residents that sparked riots in cities from...

A pair of researchers from Cornell decided to test the theory that there is a bias against women pursuing academic careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and found that there is none. “Results revealed a 2:1 preference for women by faculty of both genders across both math-intensive and non-math-intensive fields, with the single exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference,” Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci wrote in an article published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They surveyed “873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 fmale) from biology, engineering, economics...

>With more than 330 million people using the service to list their resumes, find jobs, or find new hires, LinkedIn has a lot of data about the job market. To close out 2014, the company released a list of the top skills people who got hired this year had listed on their profiles and that recruiters searched for the most. These are the 10 skills that got people jobs this year:

Ann Coulter: Would It Kill You To Hire More Black Cops? (Yes) Ann Coulter August 27, 2014 As the story of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown begins to look less clear-cut than we were led to believe by Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, the “voices of oppression” on MSNBC now say the real issue is that there aren’t enough blacks on the Ferguson police force. As Brown may or may not have said seconds before his death: I give up. If the Ferguson police are forced to hire more minorities and women for the sake of...

Bank Robbery Suspect Who Fatally Shot Himself During Chase Was Former Atlanta Police Lieutenant Police said Dodd was a former lieutenant with the Atlanta police and was visiting Matteson from Georgia Wednesday, Nov 19, 2014 • Updated at 4:05 PM CST A man suspected of robbing a bank Friday morning and leading police on a car chase through the south suburbs before fatally shooting himself has been identified as a former lieutenant with the Atlanta Police Department. Maurice Chester Dodd, 44, died of a gunshot wound to the head and his death was ruled a suicide, according to the Cook...

The Labor Department just released statistics that show that job openings in June are at a 13-year high. But while hiring is also up, it's not nearly at the levels that the job openings are. For job-hunters, the disconnect can be frustrating and painful. What's going on, and how can you get around this? * Not all jobs posted will be filled. Sometimes businesses post jobs with no intention of actually filling them. They're looking for applicants to put in their files so that they have a supply of candidates when a job does open up. Sometimes, positions are posted,...