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Why are American businesses so selective in their hiring these days?
































=From //[|Wells Fargo Daily Advantage]//, December 2011:=

===“One stumbling block to the increased employment thesis is the fact that existing employees could flood the job market next year, according to recent surveys. An article in //The Wall Street Journal// yesterday highlighted what could be a mass exodus from Yahoo! Inc. after bonuses are paid at the beginning of next year. More broadly, a Right Management survey of 1,000 North American employees found that 84% are planning to look for a new position in 2012, mainly due to rampant job dissatisfaction. Gallup, meanwhile, found that 71% of U.S. workers were either "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" at work, with the most disengaged being college educated people between the ages of 30 and 64. === ===That's surprising. I would have thought that workers right out of college would have been the most disengaged, perhaps because they discovered that their college degrees didn't get them as far as they had thought. But instead, it's people in their prime working years. One hypothesis: Upward mobility has stalled during the economic recession and tepid recovery. Workers have been in the same jobs longer than they would have liked, making similar salaries, all the while their companies are cutting back in other areas. If you were on the fast track all the way into your 40s and all of a sudden hit an economically induced roadblock, it's probably frustrating to have to hit the brakes. === ===One thing is clear: If you're part of the 16% that is apparently quite happy and wants to stay put, don't let anyone know that, or your boss will be flooded with applications for your position.” ===







=From //[|Wells Fargo Daily Advantage]//, November 2011: =

===“The Labor Department is out with its latest employment chart book, //Occupational Employment and Wages, 2010//. The chart book provides data from 1.2 million businesses about 800 different occupations, including how much they pay and how many of them there are. According to the data, the #1 occupational group in the country is "office and administrative support," accounting for 16.9% of all jobs. At 10.6% of all U.S. jobs, the #2 occupational group is "sales and sale-related," a group that happens to contain the two most numerous job positions: retail salespersons and cashiers. By contrast, "education, training, and library" jobs and "production" jobs each account for about 6.5% of the workforce, while the sciences and the legal profession each account for 0.8%. === ===The U.S. economy has been skewed toward sales and service jobs for some time, obviously. A big part of the economy revolves around importing a bunch of very similar stuff (polo shirts, say, or LCD TVs) and then surrounding that stuff with umpteen different distributors, each with their own fleet of sales people (do you want to get your imported cotton polo shirt at the Gap or Old Navy or JCPenney? Do you want to get your imported LCD TV from Best Buy or Sears or from a local electronics retailer?). Even more competition comes from the retail-salesperson-free internet. Retail sales is a hard enough job already without throwing in the fact that the customer to whom you're giving your spiel about this magnificent 57-inch LCD TV is just picking your brain before buying it online. === ===I'll be interested to see this same report in 10 years. There's a mini resurgence of "Made in America" goods, from foreign car makers relocating assembly plants to the U.S. to smaller-scale artisan craft and DIY (do-it-yourself) movements popping up all over. And some companies are starting to see that it's not always cheaper to make things overseas (and even if it is, cheapness isn't everything). Maybe the jobs landscape that emerges from this high period of unemployment will be very different from the one that preceded it, because a lot of people are itching to take control over their own destiny and make things.” ===

="Jobs and the G.O.P." by James Suroweicki= =The New Yorker - September 26, 2011=

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