With Fred Coon
The “Unadvertised” Job Market is Back! Bureau of Labor Statistics reports have indicated that even HR departments are now unaware of available jobs within their own companies. Moreover, most U.S. companies are not reporting all of their job openings.
At one of our team meetings in our offices, my guest Jim Clark, an executive recruiter with the Phoenix, AZ MRI office, and I were discussing issues of mutual interest that were impacting the recruiting industry and the job market. Jim kindly shared the following article by John Sumser. It is a powerful statement about what is not known about job openings available in today’s job market. I have shared a few thoughts that Jim and I had as well as the bulk of the article by John Sumser.
During the “dot-com” period of the late 90s and early 2000s, recruiters have been clearly aware of impending labor shortages. 9-11-2001, the “dot-bomb” fiasco and the current unemployment rates hovering around six percent most likely have changed the look of the job seeking population and, more importantly, the nature of the available jobs.
When you first look at the charts provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they might appear to be contradictory in nature. According to John Sumser, “The Bureau of Labor Statistics does a great job of tracking and analyzing the various changes in the domestic American workforce. In addition to unemployment statistics, they cover a broad range of statistics about the economy. Their analysis of Job Openings and their Labor Turnover Survey are really important and highlight a myth (hidden job market) that we thought had been buried.” What follows are John’s thoughts.
The chart shows a very interesting trend. Over the past 2.5 years, employers have become less likely to describe all of their hiring as “having job openings.” In December 2000, employers were reporting nearly all of their openings. However, in July 2003 only 60% of hiring transactions were described as openings in the BLS survey.
We believe that Job Board revenues and transaction volumes are probably directly related to the level at which employers say that they have openings to fill. If our analysis is correct (and we’re pretty sure it is), Job Boards are leaving huge dollars on the table.” |