As an unemployment services trust, 501(c) Agencies Trust spends a lot of time and energy analyzing the hiring (and firing) trends of the United States. We have noticed that one thing continues to hound employers in this country; it takes a long time to fill an open position.
Hiring lengths have become such an issue that many organizations try to anticipate where they may need new talent and begin actively sourcing candidates before there is an actual opening to fill.
According to the digital job board Indeed, 25 percent of jobs remain open for more than two months. That’s the longest wait for the highest proportion of positions in any country in the world. In a drastic comparison, it only take an average of two (2) days to fill a position in Russia. (Can you imagine?)
These trends are made up of a lot of moving parts like changes in the workforce, such as job types and the ages of workers, education level of workers and lagging wages. Not everything can be controlled by the employers looking for their next team member.
But one thing that U.S. employers appear to not be doing very well is training and recruiting employees they already have.
Indeed explains,
Employers today are investing more and more in a select portion of the workforce that matches the general background they need and then training them on the job for the specific skills organizational needs. These types of programs—whether they are internships, returnships, or internal continuing education initiatives—will need to grow to a greater scale to close these gaps entirely.
On the bright side, one thing longer hiring times mean is the economy is healthier and/or growing. Today’s job market is definitely in the favor of the U.S. worker. Employers may want to make sure they look at the skilled employees they have in place already, while they try and find a good hire in what appears to be a shrinking U.S. labor market.
