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Need a job....5.8 million job openings

35-40k starting for a basic staff accountant is lousy pay?

I got like 200 resumes submitted for the job....

I guess it can't be too bad....

But thanks for your opinion
I can pull all sorts of numbers outa my butt too! Anecdotal arguments are so easy to win.

I make a gazillion $$$ at my pc every day, contact me if you want in on the secret!
 
There were consistently a few million job openings throughout the recession when people claimed they needed unemployment benefits for years on end because they couldn't find work. Most of them were for occupations with high turnover rates and I suspect a sizable chunk mentioned in the OP are the same. There's also probably a boost resulting from seasonal positions as summer approaches.
 
The last time I tried to hire someone I got tons of resumes but 99.99% of them sucked.

If you want a job you should -
1. Be able to spell, punctuate and write in complete sentences.
2. Provide contact information that isn't "JoeyzaPimp@gmail.com" (yeah, that was one of them)
3. Answer your phone if I call.
4. Be on time for an interview.
5. Have had less than 20 jobs in the last year.
6. Have at least one or two verifiable references that aren't relatives or parole officers.
7. Show some kind of evidence that you understand and are capable of learning the job you're applying for.
8. Refrain from telling your potential employer that you already know his or her business better than they do.
9. Be able to explain at least one thing of value you can bring to the table.


Well I do all of that and I still can't find a job man. I've been looking for two years now and I can count on one hand the number of face-to-face job interviews I've had.
 
The last time I tried to hire someone I got tons of resumes but 99.99% of them sucked.

If you want a job you should -
1. Be able to spell, punctuate and write in complete sentences.
2. Provide contact information that isn't "JoeyzaPimp@gmail.com" (yeah, that was one of them)
3. Answer your phone if I call.
4. Be on time for an interview.
5. Have had less than 20 jobs in the last year.
6. Have at least one or two verifiable references that aren't relatives or parole officers.
7. Show some kind of evidence that you understand and are capable of learning the job you're applying for.
8. Refrain from telling your potential employer that you already know his or her business better than they do.
9. Be able to explain at least one thing of value you can bring to the table.



When I co-owned our computer company, I ran into every one of those issues, but I need to add, DON'T go to great lengths to tell me why the job would be so good for YOU.

In parting,I decided to retire early, got bored and went into the Landscaping business, and registered as a "Social Enterprise", structured to create jobs for people with "barriers". In that process most of them had or had had a parole officer, but none of them ever did any of those things. It was surprising how open they were, and how grateful they were
 
I do not think it is just a shortage of skilled people...which it surely partly is.

I think it is also because the jobs offered are lousy...and few want them.

Look at the BLS's employment figures by education level...specifically, the first employment-population ratio, not seasonally adjusted (which is a much better gauge of employment then the U-3 unemployment rate). A higher number is better, btw,

In the last 12 months, the 'Bachelor's degree and higher' and 'Some college or associate degree' category have seen their ratio's drop...I.e. a lower percentage of their groups are now employed. That strongly suggests that there are not enough jobs appropriate for there level of education available...not that there are not enough skilled Americans.

However, over the last 12 months, the two least educated categories have seen their employment-population ratios rise. And the group without even a high school diploma have seen by far the most growth. This strongly suggests that these people are increasingly finding work.

Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment


It also strongly suggests that mostly entry-level jobs are being created.
 
Well I do all of that and I still can't find a job man. I've been looking for two years now and I can count on one hand the number of face-to-face job interviews I've had.

I'm sure that part of it depends on what career field you're trying to get into but, if I remember correctly, you now have a job lined up.
 
The growing debate is how much of this is a skills gap issue from education and experience vs. unrealistic expectations issue of those posting these "openings" they cannot fill.

I am sure it is some combination of the two greatly skewed by the profession in question, but I am unsure what to give the most weight to in a general sense. Because of that concern it is a real unknown if federal grant based intern programs or similar incentives will accomplish all that much.

There is a related story about that very topic:
America's persistent problem: Not enough skilled workers - Aug. 7, 2015

When I was on the market, one manager who was interviewing me told me he wanted someone who could do the tasks "in their sleep". I asked who on Earth with good prospects would want tasks they could do in their sleep. It didn't register with this clown that a bored employee is not something a competent manager would want. Let that sink in for a minute: Do you think if you put a highly skilled person in a dumbed-down position that they will produce faster then whom wasn't over-hired, irrespective if the pay is high?
 
Well I do all of that and I still can't find a job man. I've been looking for two years now and I can count on one hand the number of face-to-face job interviews I've had.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that are advertising for jobs that aren't actually hiring, they're just stockpiling resumes in case they ever need them. I had someone point out a retail company locally that was doing that, and are still doing that. There will be one local store that has ads for employees, assistant managers, store managers and district managers for months on end. They gather a ton of resumes. Then they take that ad down and put the same ad up for another store in another area and the same thing happens. They're not actually hiring for any of those positions, they have no actual openings they are trying to fill, they just want to have a pile of resumes, which I assume will be largely useless by the time they get around to looking at them, so they feel like their HR department is accomplishing something. I've actually seen five or six local companies doing the exact same thing and these aren't small companies either.
 
Seriously, I don't do drugs. I don't want to sound like crap. LOL.
Oh come on, you can play your instrument while tripping on LSD.

You just gotta have good concentration. [emoji12]
 
There is a related story about that very topic:
America's persistent problem: Not enough skilled workers - Aug. 7, 2015

When I was on the market, one manager who was interviewing me told me he wanted someone who could do the tasks "in their sleep". I asked who on Earth with good prospects would want tasks they could do in their sleep. It didn't register with this clown that a bored employee is not something a competent manager would want. Let that sink in for a minute: Do you think if you put a highly skilled person in a dumbed-down position that they will produce faster then whom wasn't over-hired, irrespective if the pay is high?

There is perhaps 20+ articles on LinkedIn at the moment talking about this very subject, even if they are coming at it from different perspectives.

Roughly have the articles and responses align with the idea that there is not enough skilled applicants to meet the job requirements as posted, with the other half basically saying that too many job offerings they have run across have a requirements set of experience and education that equates to the so called "purple unicorn" theory (the term in this case meaning the job is looking for a candidate that is seemingly an impossible combination of requirements and education.)

So you end up with a debate that suggests what I am saying and you are asking. Is the increase in the difference between job offerings and job hires the result of a legitimate complaint on the skill set of the workforce out there or are we talking about too much usage of looking for a candidate that is near impossible to find? As such the potential complication is looking for a highly skilled person that ends up in a position well below their pay grade *or* the business taking a risk on someone without all the requirements but with perhaps the aptitude to handle the majority of them (argumentative.)

The whole thing becomes complicated as we really do not have a clear indication (on a profession level, or function level, or all of these 5.8 million non-filled jobs) on why we have such a gap. As you have seen in this thread alone there is wild variation in what the problem really is. Are we really sure the whole problem is a skill set and/or education issue? Are we really sure we are seeing the potential for dumbed-down approaches to handle this gap? I am not confident it is all one or the other, we seem to have a combination of factors making any proposed solution unable to handle the entire problem for 5.8 million empty jobs these organizations cannot seem to fill with a good enough applicant.

Really think about that, it is very unlikely it is really because of *one* problem.
 
these werent cpa positions...but good office staff accounting positions

base pay 35-40k to start

i need that person to have actual ACCOUNTING knowledge and experience....

excel is a MUST....

knowing a debit from a credit is a must....and asset from a liability is a must....

and the head and neck tattoo's.....

sorry....cant use you

Double the pay and you'll have a shot of getting good applicants. Pay peanuts; get monkeys. 35-40K might work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but not near any major city.
 
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Oh come on, you can play your instrument while tripping on LSD.

You just gotta have good concentration. [emoji12]

I have heard some musicians play while on LSD. They thought they were Paul McCartney, but I thought they were a cross between Justin Bieber and a cat being run over by a car. LOL.
 
If this is all true, then why aren't people hiring? I'm about to look for a new job the next 2 months, since I'm leaving the navy(honorable discharge), I would like to not be stuck without pay when there are so many job openings out there(supposedly).
 
If this is all true, then why aren't people hiring? I'm about to look for a new job the next 2 months, since I'm leaving the navy(honorable discharge), I would like to not be stuck without pay when there are so many job openings out there(supposedly).

What did you do in the Navy?


What ever that was, I would suggest you pursue that. Our economy rewards specialists far more highly than generalists.
 
Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that are advertising for jobs that aren't actually hiring, they're just stockpiling resumes in case they ever need them. I had someone point out a retail company locally that was doing that, and are still doing that. There will be one local store that has ads for employees, assistant managers, store managers and district managers for months on end. They gather a ton of resumes. Then they take that ad down and put the same ad up for another store in another area and the same thing happens. They're not actually hiring for any of those positions, they have no actual openings they are trying to fill, they just want to have a pile of resumes, which I assume will be largely useless by the time they get around to looking at them, so they feel like their HR department is accomplishing something. I've actually seen five or six local companies doing the exact same thing and these aren't small companies either.

Large companies do that due to beauracracy. Their HR departments have quotas. A head muckety muck, as some point in the distant past of the company, noticed a problem with not enough applicants...so, they established....an SOP. And no matter WHAT has happened between then and now, that SOP MUST be followed, because to challenge it's worth is to challenge the very worth of the head muckety muck who established it in the first place. A very highly paid person's PRIDE is on the line, man.
 
I can pull all sorts of numbers outa my butt too! Anecdotal arguments are so easy to win.

I make a gazillion $$$ at my pc every day, contact me if you want in on the secret!

Did you read the original OP?

Or do you like just being obtuse
 
these werent cpa positions...but good office staff accounting positions

base pay 35-40k to start

i need that person to have actual ACCOUNTING knowledge and experience....

excel is a MUST....

knowing a debit from a credit is a must....and asset from a liability is a must....

and the head and neck tattoo's.....

sorry....cant use you

it's funny that you hold up this example to prove your point. I guess then you won't object to your own example serving as the prototype for these job 'openings' which are mostly temp garbage below a living wage

because 35-40k is indeed garbage for an ACTUAL accountant. No one i know would go near it. Average starting pay after graduating here with a BBA is 80k. So what this means is you keep posting openings that may or may not get filled and if they do it will be scrubs who took a single high school accounting class filling them, or someone just looking to pad their resume. Not sure which you could rely on less tbh
 
Double the pay and you'll have a shot of getting good applicants. Pay peanuts; get monkeys. 35-40K might work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but not near any major city.

80k for a basic staff accountant?

This is data entry, payables, receivables, and income recording

This isn't my top accountants....or my controller

And the pay is what you start at....

But again, thanks for playing
 
Job openings are just about everywhere today.

America had around 5.75 million job openings in March. That's just shy of the all-time high, 5.78 million openings, set last July, according Labor Department data published Tuesday.

It's great that U.S. businesses are hiring. But these record number of openings are also a sign that business owners can't find the skilled workers qualified to fill the jobs they have.

"Employers are having a tougher time finding qualified workers," says Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group.
Related: America's part-time work force is huge

Since November, the number of job openings has increased for five straight months. In 2007, before the Great Recession began, job openings averaged 4.5 million per month. Last year there were 5.3 million openings per month on average.

America has near record 5.8 million job openings - May. 10, 2016

i have a couple of things open now....

but looking for the right people, not just warm bodies

and skills are lacking....(ie one in the accounting department, and most of the people i have had brought in failed our test on excel)

if you cant use excel in accounting, you are basically screwed

I'd be wasting your time applying for an accounting gig.
 
The growing debate is how much of this is a skills gap issue from education and experience vs. unrealistic expectations issue of those posting these "openings" they cannot fill.

I am sure it is some combination of the two greatly skewed by the profession in question, but I am unsure what to give the most weight to in a general sense. Because of that concern it is a real unknown if federal grant based intern programs or similar incentives will accomplish all that much.

Great point. The job I have right now ( title is Application Analyst ) the posted requirements were wanting all kinds of things including a CS degree multiple years experience in SQL, several certifications etc..
However if someone actually had what the posted requirements were they would want at least 20k or more than the job pays...
Why did they post all those requirements then? to discourage people who didn't at least have 'some' experience from applying so they wouldn't have to interview dozens upon dozens of people who didn't know crap.
They didn't expect a person to actually meet all the requirements though.
 
Job openings are just about everywhere today.

America had around 5.75 million job openings in March. That's just shy of the all-time high, 5.78 million openings, set last July, according Labor Department data published Tuesday.

It's great that U.S. businesses are hiring. But these record number of openings are also a sign that business owners can't find the skilled workers qualified to fill the jobs they have.

"Employers are having a tougher time finding qualified workers," says Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group.
Related: America's part-time work force is huge

Since November, the number of job openings has increased for five straight months. In 2007, before the Great Recession began, job openings averaged 4.5 million per month. Last year there were 5.3 million openings per month on average.

America has near record 5.8 million job openings - May. 10, 2016

i have a couple of things open now....

but looking for the right people, not just warm bodies

and skills are lacking....(ie one in the accounting department, and most of the people i have had brought in failed our test on excel)

if you cant use excel in accounting, you are basically screwed

I work in automotive, and specialize in transmission repair, and I know there is a skilled labor shortage. I could walk off the job and find another right away because even though most shops do not advertise, they are severely lacking labor. There are numerous causes to skilled labor shortages.

In automotive, indy shops do not hire newbies or trainies very often, dealships do but most of them put them on low wage flag, them give them all warranty work which pays less, meaning they have to spend a fortune in tools and make less than a walmart greeter. Some dealerships have remedied the new mechanic problem by either rotating warranty work rather than throwing it all on the new guys scaring them away for good, or by paying trainies by the hour, then moving them to commission after following a senior tech for a while.


But we still have a shortage, no one wants to train, I am 29 and I can run circles around alot of people in the automatic transmission industry, but I learned from my father who learned from his cousin who taught himself. Now no one wants to teach, they want someone with 20+ years experience which are all nearing retirement, and do not want out of vocational school people for even entry level jobs. The same who cry about the problem are the same who created it, and it goes far beyond automotive, it is with most skilled trades, they are so busy chasing pennies today they are losing dollars tomorrow.
 
I work in automotive, and specialize in transmission repair, and I know there is a skilled labor shortage. I could walk off the job and find another right away because even though most shops do not advertise, they are severely lacking labor. There are numerous causes to skilled labor shortages.

In automotive, indy shops do not hire newbies or trainies very often, dealships do but most of them put them on low wage flag, them give them all warranty work which pays less, meaning they have to spend a fortune in tools and make less than a walmart greeter. Some dealerships have remedied the new mechanic problem by either rotating warranty work rather than throwing it all on the new guys scaring them away for good, or by paying trainies by the hour, then moving them to commission after following a senior tech for a while.


But we still have a shortage, no one wants to train, I am 29 and I can run circles around alot of people in the automatic transmission industry, but I learned from my father who learned from his cousin who taught himself. Now no one wants to teach, they want someone with 20+ years experience which are all nearing retirement, and do not want out of vocational school people for even entry level jobs. The same who cry about the problem are the same who created it, and it goes far beyond automotive, it is with most skilled trades, they are so busy chasing pennies today they are losing dollars tomorrow.

If Id apply for a transmission gig I'd be wasting your time. My skills are very specialized. Now then I can make you look very good in the public eye if ya got some money.
 
it's funny that you hold up this example to prove your point. I guess then you won't object to your own example serving as the prototype for these job 'openings' which are mostly temp garbage below a living wage

because 35-40k is indeed garbage for an ACTUAL accountant. No one i know would go near it. Average starting pay after graduating here with a BBA is 80k. So what this means is you keep posting openings that may or may not get filled and if they do it will be scrubs who took a single high school accounting class filling them, or someone just looking to pad their resume. Not sure which you could rely on less tbh

Sorry...no

My controller makes 160k

My top accountants are at 65-85k

This is not those jobs....

But thanks for playing.....

Strike 3 and your out
 
There is perhaps 20+ articles on LinkedIn at the moment talking about this very subject, even if they are coming at it from different perspectives.

Roughly have the articles and responses align with the idea that there is not enough skilled applicants to meet the job requirements as posted, with the other half basically saying that too many job offerings they have run across have a requirements set of experience and education that equates to the so called "purple unicorn" theory (the term in this case meaning the job is looking for a candidate that is seemingly an impossible combination of requirements and education.)

So you end up with a debate that suggests what I am saying and you are asking. Is the increase in the difference between job offerings and job hires the result of a legitimate complaint on the skill set of the workforce out there or are we talking about too much usage of looking for a candidate that is near impossible to find? As such the potential complication is looking for a highly skilled person that ends up in a position well below their pay grade *or* the business taking a risk on someone without all the requirements but with perhaps the aptitude to handle the majority of them (argumentative.)

The whole thing becomes complicated as we really do not have a clear indication (on a profession level, or function level, or all of these 5.8 million non-filled jobs) on why we have such a gap. As you have seen in this thread alone there is wild variation in what the problem really is. Are we really sure the whole problem is a skill set and/or education issue? Are we really sure we are seeing the potential for dumbed-down approaches to handle this gap? I am not confident it is all one or the other, we seem to have a combination of factors making any proposed solution unable to handle the entire problem for 5.8 million empty jobs these organizations cannot seem to fill with a good enough applicant.

Really think about that, it is very unlikely it is really because of *one* problem.

Wages are stagnant since 2000, so in conjunction with our decaying infrastructure, america is becoming 3rd world, and during the transition it has millions of over qualified workers/job seekers. These people gtfo of their ****ty paying job as soon as possible, leading to openings for the same ****ty job they left and for jobs no one who can perform the work will take

a trillion $ bank using a super shady indian-speaking temp agency with a PO box halfway across the country to 6 month 'contract' to some resume they found on career builder with no experience $12/hr to close multi million $ loans. Then that person leaves when they figure out how super shady it is, and the temp agency asks "do you know anyone? I need to fill this position" not giving a damn WHO fills it. That is becoming very common and represents a huge proportion of those openings. No one is reliable because their *job* isn't reliable, not because they aren't willing to work hard or the trillion $ bank can't afford to offer reliable employment, as the OP would have us all believe
 
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