Alison Green is one of the few people who has been asking workplace questions for a decade on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how to navigate it better.
Employers are desperate to find good workers but can't lure them at any price. You will hear a different story if you talk to job seekers or existing employees at those companies.
The job market has undergone a sea change in the past two years, but companies haven't adjusted to it. They're still offering low salaries, even though candidates can command more, and they're still operating on a model of underpaying and overworking.
These accounts are typical of what I'm hearing from job seekers and employees at companies that are having trouble hiring.
I've lost count of the job ads I've seen that say they want 8 years of experience but are only paying $17. I think the employers think that is a good pay rate, but it really is not.
My employer is desperate for another key staff member, but doesn't want to give any more than a week of vacation. Won't budge at all. It is incredibly short-sighted.
I recently went through a job search and it was interesting. I got an offer from every interview, but one actually called while I was on the way home. What some employers were offering was laughable. One health care agency boasted in an interview that they encourage taking time off and promoting a healthy work-life balance because they involve direct contact with medically vulnerable patients. Their benefits included both vacation and sick time, but they did not have a sick time allowance. It's unbelievable. They had a job ad up that was marked as urgent hiring.
I hear that there is a desperate need for trained employees in my industry. Since everyone in our department knows this, no one seems to know why we aren't offering market rate.
We can't find qualified applicants who will work for what previous employees were making because we are hemorrhaging talent. We are going months without filling positions because our HR VP thinks we are overpaid. I wonder who will win? The market believes otherwise.
At the same time that companies are failing to offer competitive salaries, many of them are overstuffing the job descriptions.
My organization isstruggling to fill a role, complaining about how they can't find anyone qualified and when they do find someone qualified, they get turned down. No kidding. Good luck finding someone with several years of commercial land transaction experience and volunteer management experience for the position. You want to pay an experienced person who has to do two very different jobs and report to two different supervisors peanuts? They have been trying to hire for this position since July.
In my field, I'm seeing a lot of postings for jobs over the last month or so, and I've had multiple recruiters contact me just this week. The job descriptions are more demanding than before. I had a client rant to me recently about how they weren't getting good candidates for their positions. I suggested that they focus the job description on the skills they want, and he got defensive and said how much work they needed to do. You have to pay for it. They no longer hold 100% of the cards.
The market seems to be resistant to adapting to new conditions. Employers are still operating like they did a decade ago, without considering how they might need to change to raise offers, increase benefits, and generally make themselves a more attractive place to work.
This person points out that they are not approaching their hiring processes with the seriousness that this market demands.
What I’m hearing about the job market doesn’t match what I’m actually seeing. I’m hearing, “We’d hire anyone with a pulse and half your experience.” I’m hearing, “Please apply, I could use someone like you.” I’m hearing, “You’re a great fit for this role” from the recruiter.
What I’m seeing is I apply into a black hole. I’m being told to reach out to people who never get back to me. I’m seeing “desperate” companies take a lot of time to think about it. I’m seeing people get to the final round of interviews, and suddenly be disqualified for something that, according to the company, should have disqualified them when they first spoke to the recruiter. (Seriously, a friend went to a final interview after getting extremely good feedback from his internal recruiter on every prior step in what I think was a four-part interview, only be told that the company was looking for entirely different skills for the role. Think interviewing in French and then being told the job requires Japanese. You’d think they’d have figured that out much sooner in the process.)
Companies that are managing to hire effectively are changing their processes.
I recently was hiring for a position and it was a fast job market for the best candidates— we had 2 turned down offers (one person had 4 competing offers)! We realized our typical process was too slow (it took approximately 3 weeks). We knew we had to be faster—the third time through, we had an offer in their hands within 9 days of their application, and it was accepted. We also increased the salary nearly $20,000 from the first posting to the third posting, because the market was showing us that the candidates we wanted could command more money! (We discussed keeping the same salary but making the role more entry level, but decided to increase salary instead).
Some employers seem to be doing everything they can, but are still running up against the realities of the job market.
My company is in the software sector and finding experienced developers, programmers, and implementation folks in our specific, very competitive, ecosystem is REALLY hard. We’re fully remote (with fully supported IT), pay competitively (really), pay at least 80% of medical insurance premiums and have other really nice benefits, have amazing work-life balance, require folks to take their vacations and a very supportive, transparent, employee-centric culture. … We’ve had folks accept our offer, then renege two to four days later. We’ve had someone start working and after two weeks, quit because they accepted another offer. Our specific job market has always been competitive, it’s now insanely competitive.
Too many companies have become used to not having to pay competitive wages, offer attractive benefits or treat people well. Some of them are finding it easier to complain about the labor market than they are to figure out how to make themselves a place that people will want to work in.
It's unclear how long this moment will last and whether it will be long enough for more companies to be forced to alter their mindsets, but the more accustomed we get to these changes, the better off workers will be.
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