US Job Openings Reach Record High

[Simfan34]

Do we know what the specific fields with the highest openings were?

It's clear, Tender, that more needs to be done to have a more even geographical distribution of economic growth and job creation. While the trend is more pronounced in other countries (both developed countries like France and the UK, or emerging economies like Thailand), there has been a clear concentration of job growth since the recession in a few cities. Previously regional companies, in a longer trend, have also moved their headquarters from second- and third-tier cities to the major centers, intensifying this trend.

We need to do more in the US to ensure that these regional cities are places younger, educated people are willing to work and live, and, as such, where companies can draw from a competitive labor pool. This deals with cultural and social amenities, but, on a more basic level, it is an issue of the urban pattern and housing, which the former issues depend on. Faceless, soulless suburbia is not a draw for young people, but neither are ill-conceived transit schemes or business development corporation-devised astroturf cultural initiatives.

[Simfan34]

     As I've said many times, HR policies in the United States are messed up and do not promote filling positions. Of particular concern is inflexibility with regards to the requirements of the position, which make the candidate pool unnecessarily small. I've often looked at computer programmer requisitions and wondered if there were even anybody in the world that met all of their requirements, given how exacting and specific many of them were.

If you're looking at professional openings in the public sector, a large share of openings are listed only because of laws or policies that require hiring practices to be non-discriminatory, when in reality the job description was written for the sake of a specific person. The entire application and interviewing process becomes a hollow exercise that is completed only for the sake of following the law's letter.

This is so common, even for non-senior positions, that the career office at my MPA program trained graduating students to recognize these listings so that they wouldn't waste time applying for openings that didn't really exist in the first place.

In tech what is also driving this trend is at times a desire to hire someone on an H1-B visa; overly demanding requirements enable firms to turn around and say that they're unable to fill the opening domestically.

[Simfan34]

As I've said many times, HR policies in the United States are messed up and do not promote filling positions. Of particular concern is inflexibility with regards to the requirements of the position, which make the candidate pool unnecessarily small. I've often looked at computer programmer requisitions and wondered if there were even anybody in the world that met all of their requirements, given how exacting and specific many of them were.

If you're looking at professional openings in the public sector, a large share of openings are listed only because of laws or policies that require hiring practices to be non-discriminatory, when in reality the job description was written for the sake of a specific person. The entire application and interviewing process becomes a hollow exercise that is completed only for the sake of following the law's letter.

Actually, in many cases there is a real application/interviewing process before the job is advertised. It is not that they do not want a proper process to run, it is that, for some reasons (frequently union-related) they cannot enforce the requirements they really need. So, they, first, do a selection on criteria they care about and then advertise a job description, fitting just the guy they chose (but often not mentioning at all, why they chose him).

It is, actually, worse in Europe, where the civil service rules are even more restrictive.

Well civil service positions would, be definition always filled internally, no? Certain posts might potentially be filled (and contested) by political appointees or civil servants, but posts within a civil service?