Employers, fill all those open jobs already!

By: Eli Amdur
Vantage Point
NorthJersey.com

..... One of the most starting of all phenomena in our current jib market is that gaping hole called open jobs. There are 11 million of them, and that number has been rock-solid consistent - give or take a small variance - for 18 months running. It's gob-smacking, nothing less.
..... An open job is one that an employer would fill immediately if the right candidate would just show up. It's not pie in the sky; it's real. But as that candidate has yet to appear, to the employer anyway, the job remains open. The universally accepted reason given by employers is that the right candidate - hidden meaning: Perfect - hasn't appeared. That's no longer a good reason; it's stubborn, persistent illusion.
..... It's time to fish or cut bait, dear employers, and fill those jobs already - and there's no better time to do it than now, in what continues to be the strongest job market in history. For perspective's sake, in January, [2023] the civilian labor force numbers 165.8 million. Of that number 160.1 million were employed. Now, if you're asking where, in the difference of 5.7 million, 11 million jobs would fit, the answer is that they would immediately grow the size of the civilian labor and, with it, productively.
..... Productivity! With all the talk about our powerful, consistently record-setting job market, the envy of the world, the focus has always been where you'd expect it to be: on jobs, unemployment rate, layoffs and all other predictable labor statistics. Certainly, I've been doing that. It's natural.
..... But let's look at this not only from a different angle, but as a different issue: the cost of keeping a job open. E Very day a job remains open, revenue opportunity is lost. Productivity is most simply defined as the revenue generated by the production of goods or services per hour worked. If we continue to look at open jobs as an employment issue, we'll get no further than that, as we have been doing all along. But if we look at filling ope jobs in terms of economic growth, we have something.
..... Measuring productivity, judging by six sources I used, is not uniform, or even thoroughly objective. Be that as it may, I've taken the liberty of merging data, not to come up with statistical means, but to find a good starting point for my assumption that filling open jobs would lead directly to growth: company top lines, national GDP and even the global economy. If employers would look at this as growth and not as cost, the rest becomes an easy consensus.
..... "I'm comfortable with one calculation I sourced that says the global cost of vacant jobs that are not producing revenue is $8.5 trillion. That, in case it has not hit you, is a lot of money. Now, with the estimated global GDP (source: World Bank) at $97 trillion, the loss of productivity worldwide due to vacant jobs amounts to roughly 9% of global GDO.
..... With the United States' GDP at $23 trillion, or 24% of the world's it is safe to assume that our share of productivity loss is at least $2 trillion, and probably more because much of our productivity is in high-revenue services and out-of-wack health care costs. Could our lost productivity number be $3 trillion? Sure. But the point should be clear.
..... Aligned with an economy that is rapidly brining down inflation, growing jobs like they're mushrooms in a forest, moving ahead with the most aggressive infrastructure plan since the 1930s, launching the CIHIPS and Science Act, and assertively pivoting to products made in American, I can't think of one argument for keeping those jobs vacant. Cost cutting? Wrong time for that. Efficiency? That's another word for cost-cutting. Caution regarding a perceived upcoming recession? Pessimism. Fortune favors the brave, and this is the time for it.
..... Employers must do two things. Take the bold step to fill those damn jobs already, and at the same time start thinking in terms of what they're doing to promote our national interest. Backyard provincial thinking has no place in the 21st century.
..... Just think of what a $2 trillion increase in productivity would do. Expand the size of the workforce, reduce unemployment, generate revenue and profitability, lead to new industries and facilities, bolder Social Security and other crucial human services, and secure our position as the world's leading economy for generations to come.
..... The more I think about it, the more I see both the opportunity and the fallacy of the open jobs number.

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