KARLA PORTER

A great friend of mine for­warded me the new Busi­ness Week blog post by Peter Coy. I’m grate­ful because he left some things unsaid.

I agree it would be super cool to be a Wine & Cheese Som­me­lier or Art Auc­tion­eer on a cruise ship but I had one of those “the cheese smells in Den­mark” moments think­ing those jobs cer­tainly aren’t rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the major­ity of those 2.6 mil­lion unfilled. And I know I’m right, however, I do not feel qual­i­fied at this time to com­ment on the Gen­tle­men Host vacancies.

Heidi Alli­son, a pub­lic rela­tions per­son who also runs a reference-checking ser­vice called Alli­son & Tay­lor, Inc., is quoted in the arti­cle say­ing that they remain vacant posi­tions because, “People don’t know about them. I’d say that’s the main rea­son.” Obvi­ous to me with a back­ground in recruit­ing, there are more con­cern­ing rea­sons unless all of a sud­den no one wants to work on the Love Boat. I’m skep­ti­cal but might con­sider apply­ing myself if I knew where those exotic jobs were posted.

So we move on to the “mis­match” the­ory.  It’s the one where geo­graph­i­cally speak­ing qual­i­fied peo­ple aren’t avail­able where the jobs are located. I don’t buy it with the excep­tion of highly tech­ni­cal fields, in which case the whole coun­try has brain drain. But, were not talk­ing of 2.6 mil­lion brain drain type jobs. Accord­ing to the Fed­eral Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics were talk­ing about jobs in man­u­fac­tur­ing, health ser­vices, con­struc­tion, hos­pi­tal­ity, blah blah blah.…

No unem­ployed avail­able to do those jobs in every city in our great Nation? I don’t think so…

Here’s my stab­bing guess:

• The jobs pay min­i­mum wage or just above and that’s not a liv­ing wage so no one wants them. They are hold­ing out to find some­thing they can actu­ally sus­tain their fam­i­lies on.
• Employ­ers think because so many peo­ple are out of work they’ll find a Rocket Sci­en­tist to do it — at min­i­mum wage.
• Over qual­i­fied can­di­dates are apply­ing because their unem­ploy­ment comp is run­ning out and employ­ers are afraid they’ll bolt once there is a turnaround.
• The com­pa­nies have a bad rep as employ­ers and have hor­rid turnover regard­less of the econ­omy because they don’t value their employ­ees the way they should.
• The right Recruiters are not work­ing the req­ui­si­tions or there is no Recruiter work­ing them at all, it’s an office Secretary.

I don’t know, I might have missed a rea­son or two, but you get the idea. Any­way, I did a lit­tle more digging.

“On the last busi­ness day of May 2005, there were 3.5 mil­lion job open­ings in the United States.”

OK, so there are a lit­tle more than a mil­lion less jobs avail­able in 2009 than there were in 2005.  So, why were there 3.5 mil­lion jobs avail­able in 2005 that couldn’t be filled?

Let’s con­tinue to have a poverty level min­i­mum wage and at the same time  vir­tu­ally halt Visas for immi­grant workers.

Sound like a fix?