There are nine points six MILLION [9,600,000} job openings in America right now and businesses are desperate to fill roles that have now been empty for months.
But at the same time, you are reading endless articles about people who have applied for thousands of jobs and haven’t heard anything back from the companies that were supposed to be desperate for workers.
So if there are so many job opportunities, then why can’t anybody get a job?
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently nine point six million [9,600,000] job openings in America and only six point five million [6,500,000] unemployed people. So why not just take the openings that desperately need workers, and give them to the people that desperately need jobs? Well, it’s not that simple and there are two reasons why companies are struggling to fill roles even when so many people are looking for a job, and two equally important reasons why people can’t find a job even when so many companies are looking for workers.
The first reason why people can’t find jobs even when companies have so many open positions is that it’s easier for a company to look desperate than it is for a human to look desperate. According to the Congressional Research Service, the number of job openings is calculated using a survey of sixteen thousand [16,000] business establishments on the last day of the month to assess if a job opening exists.
According to the informational guidelines a job opening only has to meet three criteria to be counted.
- a specific position exists and there is work available for that position;
- the job could start within 30 days, and
- the establishment is actively recruiting outside workers.
There are companies that are constantly advertising job openings for positions that are hard to fill OR are subject to high turnover. Last year Endgadget a technology newspaper received a leaked internal report from Amazon which revealed that the company had a staff turnover rate of one HUNDRED and fifty percent [150%]. That means Amazon which has one point six million employees [1,600,000] was hiring two point four million people [2,400,000] every year just to maintain its workforce. In the same year only a third [1/3rd] of Amazon’s new hires stayed with the company for longer than 90 days before quitting, getting fired, or getting laid off. With that much turnover, the company doesn’t bother to remove job listings once someone gets hired to fill a role. Warehouse staff are continuously being onboarded and offboarded at almost the same rate so hundreds of thousands of positions stay open across the country.
Amazon’s hiring practices for some of their best-paid and most attractive job opportunities ALSO showed how easy was for job opening numbers to paint the wrong picture. ANOTHER Amazon internal document reviewed by Business Insider revealed that the company’s Web Services Utility Computing Team posted twenty-five THOUSAND [24,988] job openings in 2022 but only seven thousand eight hundred [7,800] of these positions were actually approved to be filled. This also happened in a year when Amazon was laying off more staff than they were hiring.
The strategy that these companies and hiring managers are using is to constantly have positions open to attract top talent, if anybody that is not OVERQUALIFIED for these positions applies for them, they just get rejected. Amazon is not the only company that does this, most of the top tech, finance, and consulting companies do exactly the same thing.
Amazon is just not as good at keeping internal documents from the press. So even though you might think it’s the best time ever to get a job, the numbers are misleading and that’s just the first reason, there are much bigger problems than just numbers.
So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out why with so many job openings people still can’t find a job.
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