Posted on 05/12/2016 4:21:04 AM PDT by expat_panama
Small-business owners were more upbeat in April, with job openings matching a cycle high, but finding qualified applicants remains a major problem, according to the National Federation of Independent Business on Tuesday.
NFIB’s Small Business Optimism Index rose 1 point last month to 93.6. This ends a three-month slide to a two-year low in March. The gauge remains below historically normal levels.
A net 11% of smaller firms plan to add staff, up from March’s 9%,...
...46% of small businesses said they had few or no qualified applications...
,,,24% of NFIB respondents said in April that they planned to increase compensation...
...18% of firms expect the economy to get worse vs. 17% in March. A net 1% see sales rising vs. unchanged before. But actual sales have only been positive in one month in the last four years.
A few more businesses (a net 8%, up 2 points) say it’s a good time to expand, though the share of respondents planning capital spending was steady at 25%.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
That could be viewed as a double edge sword. To the business owner who complains about not being able to find "qualified workers", the solution is to pay above the "market wage".
When I was actively looking for a better job 7+ years ago, I had more than one interview end badly when the interviewer said (after 45 minutes to an hour), "I'm afraid your qualifications are "too strong" for this position."
I fixed it for them.
Companies offering competitive salaries have long lines of applicants. There's no shortage outside very specialized and difficult fields, or where you need government licensing.
In the short run. But in the long run when people see that welders are making mad cash they learn to weld.
Unless treasonous globalist scum import third world scabs to do the job for crap wages...
Report yourself to the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.
Later
If a business really needs to fill the position they'll loosen up the requirements and train the best person they can get unless there's some regulation preventing it. Often the requirements are just wish lists that can be dropped with no impact on employee quality.
Amazing how many companies dropped their excessive demand for degrees and "ten years experience" during the Reagan boom years.
Nailed it!
1) Moral character.
2) Work ethic.
3) English language fluency.
We can teach anything else, but finding candidates possessing all three of these basic attributes has become phenomenally difficult.
That’s not how it works except in theory.
Gee, I possess all three of those attributes, plus a reasonably high intellect.
However, I’m a 60-year old, White, Christian, conservative male—I guess those characteristics disqualify me.
Then wages should be raising, but they are not.
Adjusted for inflation wages are down/stagnant over the last 30 years. But productivity is way up.
Welders—Fence! Fence! Also para-military to provide security for the construction crews from hostiles. Traveling support camp for the workforce.
People with moral character, work ethics and communications skills won’t work for peanuts.
As a worker in High tech, it seems to me what I see is the companies have plenty of young men with the degrees required to hire, but they can get H1B visas cheaper.
Further if you hire a young chap, after 2 to 3 years of hard work he wants to earn a decent income, say enough to pay off his school debts and get married, that sort of thing. Well the issue with that is he might jump jobs if you do not give him a raise, whereas the H1B via guy will not for at least 5 years.
One thing I have noted in the last 20 yeas is productivity has gone up rather quickly, so you need fewer folks. The ones that remain are well paid, but no new ones are hired unless someone retires. Hard for Young guys to get in or advance under those circumstances.
In the non-degreed positions, what I see is companies want to hire contract labor or labor without benefits through a sourcing company. These companies supply skilled labor by sourcing older tech guys for low wages with no benefits, but that is all the 55 year olds can get. Most of the Engineers I work with do not advocate their sons following them, though in my generation we almost all followed our fathers footsteps in the technical fields.
It really does come down a miss-match between wages and skill set. A person with a skill expects to make enough to have a decent life. In my area they want to hire line techs in the cable industry for under 15 an hour. Skilled labor, 2 year degree, dangerous, out in all sorts of crappy weather and they want to pay a wage insufficient for a single guy who does not room share or depend on family for housing to live.
I am also in high tech and I agree with your post.
What we have going on in this country is disconnect between Business and Political leaders and the best interest of the majority of people.
They never face the consequences of their decisions, the pain is paid by other people while they reap the benefits.
In short they are strip mining the country for their own beneft.
Some how we need to bring the incentives back in alignment.
This election should be a wakeup call for them. But so far all I see is more of the same manipulation.
Obama fraudulently enrolled a huge number of people directly off of unemployment and onto SSDI after their 99 weeks of extended benifits ran out.
Around seven million able bodied , unemployed workers were fraudulently enrolled in SSDI, more than doubling the number of people on SSDI before Obama took office.
Obama was able to do this under the radar screen because there was a SSDI “Trust Fund” of IOU’s the program wrote to the government in times of surplus and Obama has raided the SSDI Trust Fund Lock Box and treated it like his own little off the book slush fund. He cashed in all the IOU s and blown through the “trust funds” so the SSDI Trust Fund is now bankrupt.
Obama expertly timed the bankrupting of the SSDI fund to coincide with the the exact month he leaves office so there is a looming funding crisis of the 13 million SSDI recipients as the fund runs out the end of 2016
Here's the bad news for the people who choose the disability scam.
They have been out of the workforce for almost 8 years and most of the disabilities justifications were for nebulous and hard to prove “ mental disability” .
The combination of claims of mental disability, the 8 year gap in employment history and the suspicion that that person has committed disability fraud is going to make these 7 million people Obama enrolled in SSDI permanently unemployable.
They are also going to be sen as having been stealing money set aside for the most vulnerable, at risk and legitimately needy members of our society - the profoundly handicapped and disabled members of our society
We are already in seriuos economic trouble and dumping 7 million SSDI recipients on the streets with no way to pay for them is going to a heck of a mess
God help me, but I truly despise the the profoundly destructive people in the Obama Administraion for what they have done to this country but I never cease to be amazed at how they keep their propaganda going and hide their agenda and malfeasance form the American people. .
I have to mention that Small Businesses are often guilty as all hell of asking for a ridiculous amount of qualifications for positions - bachelor’s degrees, 2-4 years experience, etc. - that as often as not could be fulfilled by any college grad with an associates.
When I graduated with my IT networking degree I was completely screwed because NOWHERE would even look at someone who didn’t have an expensive certification I couldn’t afford to get after I didn’t pass the first time, couldn’t get hired anywhere to get the 2-6 years experience that I kept seeing listed and couldn’t afford to go back for a better degree.
So yeah, I’m pretty cold to pleas of ‘waaah we can’t FIND anyone’ at this point.
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