Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Topic: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers? (Read 552 times)

Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

2021-12-28, 02:41:10

Employers in America often complain about a lack of qualified applications or applicants in general. To me it seems this issue is partially the fault of the employers themselves, There are issues in which the qualifications for a job are years of experience, a college degree, and advanced certification for jobs that pay little more than a stocker at Walmart.

Those are standard complaints about the state of American employment. But there are other issues such as the one I just encountered. A prospective employer (Scientific Gaming, they make and support video poker machines which amount to PCs with a couple of attachments for gambling). I can enter any certification into their application, except anything that has to do with the job. If I was certified as a nurse, I can select that from their dropdown certification menu. But literally, no technical certification can be selected from it or manually typed as you can see by the attachment. There's not a workaround to get past the screen, even by uploading the certifications. What's the result? They can hire a nurse or accountant to support their machines, but a CompTIA A+ certified person?

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #1 – 2021-12-28, 05:24:40

Quote from: midnight raccoon on 2021-12-27, 18:41:10

except anything that has to do with the job

Did you try to apply for a listed job opening?

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #2 – 2021-12-28, 08:36:30

Shortage of workforce is a lie. Workforce is always there in the numbers of the unemployed, but goes unutilised, so there is really no shortage.

What employers are short of is cheap workforce, i.e. slave labour. And, recruiting is a hassle, nobody wants to deal with it, so there are whole industries replacing the traditional recruiting process, the traditional recruiting process being a job announcement written by the business who wants to fill the vacancy. Instead, the job announcements are outsourced, written by external recruitment specialists, and the content of the announcements shows it - a lot is lost in translation, i.e. there are communication problems between the employing business and the outsourced recruitment agency.

My advice: Just ignore the contents of the job announcement. If you want the job, do some research, find out the real employing business (i.e. try to bypass the recruitment agency who may have published the job announcement on behalf of the business), and if the business looks like something where you'd like to work,
- contact them directly to agree an interview (requires good communication skills on your own part - and don't get frustrated if you get referred back to the recruitment agency),
- try to apply for jobs that you are UNDERqualified for and UNqualified for (if you have career ambitions, then this is the way to go to acquire experience of not just having a job, but progressing in career - don't make yourself cheap).

Maybe at some point I will give an overview of my own entire career (which is magnificent for the time being).

Have a happy turn of the calendar!

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #3 – 2021-12-28, 20:07:33

There's no such thing as a shortage, with perhaps a minor exception for the UK, but even that is effectively the same thing as any other "shortage." A work permit for a few months or a year that may not be renewed is comparable to a job with that lack of certainty, except it's quite a lot worse as a proposition.

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #4 – 2021-12-29, 03:27:21

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on 2021-12-28, 05:24:40

r a year that may not be renewed is comp

Yup, it was listed on Indeed.com. It was like they just had an outdated list of random certifications in their dropdowns. At first, I thought their site was connecting an outdated database of possible certifications, but I think I was wrong and it's just an HTML 3 or 4 list. It was very strange for basically an IT company that happens to specialize in gambling (But I have seen some of their machines in smallish casinos for Las Vegas locals. Some of them are crap, we're talking SVGA graphics and dim CRT monitors. So maybe having a terrible application website only makes sense :p)

Quote from: ersi on 2021-12-28, 08:36:30

Shortage of workforce is a lie. Workforce is always there in the numbers of the unemployed, but goes unutilised, so there is really no shortage.

Very true. The problems employers complain about in finding staff are largely self-inflicted.

Quote from: ersi on 2021-12-28, 08:36:30

find out the real employing business (i.e. try to bypass the recruitment agency who may have published the job announcement on behalf of the business

I have encountered a situation like this. On the Linkedin I found a job that look promising and followed the link to apply and it turned out to be an employment agency. I was unable find the true employer, but I'll take your advice and dig deeper.

Quote from: ersi on 2021-12-28, 08:36:30

ry to apply for jobs that you are UNDERqualified for and UNqualified for

Will do.

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #5 – 2021-12-29, 21:18:04

Quote from: midnight raccoon on 2021-12-28, 19:27:21

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on 2021-12-27, 21:24:40 r a year that may not be renewed is comp

I think you meant to quote this...

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #6 – 2022-01-04, 19:34:21

Another thing is that work relationships have been changing. It seems that everybody needs to have an own company. As long as you are a successful salary man, the company can be dormant, just for occasional withdrawal of returns on passive long-term investments in case of need. The company needs to be ready to find a business area as soon as the salary job fails.

Work relationships are being turned upside down. It probably happened early on with cab drivers. A cab driver used to be an employee, a shift worker getting paid some dollars per hour. The car and the clothes used to be from the taxi company. But these days cab drivers have to have a registered company of their own, their company rents a car from the provider, and gains access to the platform (taxi app) where the customer base is.

This way, on the one hand, the driver can set his own working hours. On the other hand, the rent of the car and fees for the access to the platform guarantee that the driver will never earn much. Everything is online/remote, so there is little opportunity to impress some bosses to advance in your career. The arc of the job is to keep doing it until you get fed up and hopefully find something else to do.

"Being your own boss" means you have no employee benefits and you cover all the equipment costs that would normally be the responsibility of the employer. With this kind of "modern" work arrangement, it's actually the platform provider who can claim to be your employee or client or customer or partner, and get the employee benefits or customer protection accordingly.

As time moves on, it gets harder to be an employee. More and more people have to become either businessmen or investors or pretend to be such, whose main way to earn is the middleman's cut.

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #7 – 2022-01-06, 20:10:02

I'm so disappointed right now. There seemed to be a good job with decent pay in tech support. So I signed up for their hiring event on the 11th. So I was redirected to their application and skills assessment page (which there's little doubt I could pass the assessment). There was a list of duties, most of them you would expect out of tech support but among them was "always upsell (stupid crap)" I have zero interest in selling people stupid shit they don't need over the phone and I've never been good at it (could be due the lack of interest in doing so

and also I have a stuttering speech impediment, that I usually have under control unless I have to tell people stuff I don't believe in.

So I won't be quitting my current job for that one :/

Quote from: ersi on 2022-01-04, 19:34:21

"Being your own boss" means you have no employee benefits and you cover all the equipment costs that would normally be the responsibility of the employer. With this kind of "modern" work arrangement, it's actually the platform provider who can claim to be your employee or client or customer or partner, and get the employee benefits or customer protection accordingly.

Yup, the joys of the "gig" economy".

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #8 – 2022-01-07, 07:37:15

Yes, there are times when it is very hard to avoid salesman jobs. I have thus far managed to avoid salesman jobs, direct customer contact, and creating my own company. I'm still afraid that once I create my own company, no matter how minimal, I will have to become a salesman and a duper/brainwasher of customers.

Re: Is America's labor shortage the fault of employers?

Reply #9 – 2022-01-11, 19:14:31

It might have been just as well that I found out the job wasn't what I was thinking/hoping it was. They're sending me notifications about my "in person interview" despite the fact that 1) I cancel the interview 2) They moved the interviews to Zoom meetings. That tells me enough about the company :p