No Jobs Available! Is It Getting Harder To Get Hired?

[00:00:02.060] - Alice

The Books and the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre. Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:30.090] - Dan Paulson

Thank you, Alice. Welcome to Books and the Biz. Rich, how are you doing today?

[00:00:36.210] - Rich Veltre

I'm doing fabulous other than these allergies. How about you, Dan?

[00:00:39.570] - Dan Paulson

Well, so far, the allergies haven't kicked my butt, but we are getting a lot of tree pollen around here. So it is that time of year. But other things that frustrate us, and it sounds like are frustrating other people as we were researching subjects for today, seems like hiring isn't all is cracked up to be rich. Could you believe it?

[00:01:00.770] - Rich Veltre

I guess the answer is yes. I can't believe it. But yeah, definitely frustrating. Definitely frustrating.

[00:01:09.560] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think there are some changes of what, though, depending upon what job you have, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but came across this article, and I will pull it up for all the world to see here. We are talking about, it's actually a Wall Street Journal article, but why it's hard to get hired despite glowing or glowing job reports. So maybe the job reports aren't as glowing as they put out to be. Now, last week we were talking a lot about the recession or possibility of recession, I should say. We were talking about economic things that led cause to pause for us. Maybe there's some other things in the works here, but of course, this election year. And of course, because it's election year, they want glowing job reviews and people not being on the unemployment line. But that's not going to be true for everyone, is it?

[00:02:04.970] - Rich Veltre

No, I don't think it's going to be true for everyone. It's definitely in pockets, if you ask me. But it's definitely, I'll call it It's a challenge out there. It's an adaptation of what's been going on in the past. But now I think there's just a lot more avenues for us to take a look at.

[00:02:27.130] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, it seems like if you're frontline worker. If you are probably more in blue collar or trades, manufacturing, things like that, I think there's still a lot of active hiring, though I will say as we talk about this article, I think there's some examples of where maybe this isn't 100 % true. But it seems like when we read through this article, a lot of it was more white collar office jobs that were getting held up here. So the premise of the article basically is that applicants that are out there are finding several things. They're being ghosted for jobs, which personally, I think is a bad thing. They are being delayed. So some jobs are being pushed off that they've applied for, that maybe they've interviewed for. And it just seems like overall, they're on a hamster wheel trying to find these opportunities that don't seem to exist. And I guess I've seen it before, too. I think you have as well, where companies will try to gather resumes or get names of people for potential openings in the future. And there is enough questioning of what's happening with our economy that maybe these jobs aren't real.

[00:03:42.390] - Dan Paulson

Maybe they're just, again, collecting names and collecting information for a future time when things look a little bit more rosy. And that's going to be difficult because if you're applying for the job, you don't always know if that job is real or not. And it can be really frustrating in that case.

[00:04:03.440] - Rich Veltre

You can almost equate it to the real estate market lately. I mean, that you got people who want something and they go and suddenly something comes up and there's a lot of people who are interested. And then it's even, I guess, more frustrating. In the real estate market, at least you know there's a house. But in the job market, you might actually be applying for something that sounds like the most fabulous, perfect house, but that job doesn't necessarily exist. So that's extremely frustrating on the applicant side, that you're not sure that the job is actually there. You're not sure that what you're applying for is it just that I'm putting my resume in and my cover letter, and I'm doing my best job to put my best foot forward. And yet, you find out later or you think you find out later that there's actually no job there. So it's terrifyingly frustrating Yeah, I wonder if you actually ever find out if there's no job there.

[00:05:04.620] - Dan Paulson

I mean, if the company is... A lot of these things go on like Indeed. I don't know, monster. Com is out there. It tells you how long it's been since I've applied for a job anywhere. But I'm used to the newspaper ads where we would look through the newspaper and find something. I think if you're going through a headhunter, for example, there's probably more legitimacy to that because usually you're paying for that service. It doesn't mean that that job can't go away. It even brought up a point in this article that they were interviewing somebody, and that person got, I think, a call or a text from a job hunter that said, well, the companies decided to postpone filling this position for six months. So there was a legitimate job that all of a sudden disappeared just like that. And this person was frustrated because they had experienced that issue several times, it sounds like. I'm also curious about, we've seen a lot of differences in generational with the job markets, too. I'm wondering if some of this is tied to experience And maybe the companies that are looking for jobs are looking to gain, they're always looking for somebody who is fresh out of college that they can pay that wage, but has 20 years of experience.

[00:06:27.600] - Dan Paulson

That was often a joke on mine. You graduate from college, you should have 40 years of experience, but we're going to pay you 40 grand a year. I just wonder if the pool of applicants down there is thin enough and inexperienced enough that these companies are also struggling to find qualified help for the positions they want to fill?

[00:06:51.110] - Rich Veltre

I think the interesting part here is I think that we're stuck a little bit in an And I don't want to call it an era because it's not that long, but we're hitting what I think is some change that's going on between the communication between the company and the people. The expectations are up here over this side, and they're down here over this side, or maybe it's vice versa. And I think that there's a little bit of breaking the ice between the two pieces. Generational is definitely a possibility, because I think the younger generation is definitely much more about computers, AI, your technology. Everybody's walking around yesterday, and everybody's got their head in their phone. I mean, that hasn't gone away. Nor will it. But a lot of people who are running some of these companies, unless you're going for a tech startup or a tech-related growth company, if you're going for anything else, these people are not necessarily as techy as the generation is. So I I think there might still be a little bit of a communication gap. And I think we're hitting, stumbling into the recruiting part of that, because every time I turn around, recruiters are using some a bot or an AI, or their screening resumes.

[00:08:15.950] - Rich Veltre

And I think we've talked about this in other episodes, too, where how are you getting that information across to the point where you beat the screener, which the screener is not a person? How do you get to that next level and get to the person who's really the job seeker? But they put this bot in front of them. And a lot of those resumes, that person never sees them.

[00:08:39.810] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. I know Indeed does that for sure. It helps screen out a lot of what it perceives as unqualified candidates. And it also gives you tools where you never really have to interact with that candidate, even if they do get past your screening process. So I agree with you. When it comes to communication, we harp or I harp a lot on communication across the board, is we lack it. We've allowed technology basically to replace communication. I think that's one of the challenges, especially with a younger generation, as you put it, that they've been raised on computers. They've been buried in their phones for so long. Their preferred method of talking is texting. And God forbid, they actually hit the call button and use auditory methods to communicate to people. We are really a situation where I think even in the hiring phase, where people will complain about how people communicate, and yet the tools we use prevent that from happening. I mean, in my day, you'd send a resume and a cover letter, you mail that to the company, you would then follow up with a phone call trying to get a hold of a live body who could tell you what the status of your application was.

[00:09:59.220] - Dan Paulson

And nowadays, It's just the click of a button. It's almost like the dating app, swipe right, swipe left, depending upon what you want for that candidate. And there's a lot you can do before you ever have to talk to that person to decide if you're going to even move it to an interview phase. And to me, that's frustrating when the number one complaint that most business owners have is the lack of communication amongst their people, which then leads to a whole set of other problems. So now we look at it in the hiring phase, we've completely sanitized hiring to the point where it's robotic.

[00:10:39.420] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, and I think just bringing back another little piece or a little nugget that I started to say before, where there's pockets. I think if you're in accounting or you're in nursing, where there's clearly issues with shortages of qualified people and shortages of people actually getting educated in those fields, then I think there should be no reason why you hit these areas. I put my resume out, and I never hear anything. And that is where I get concerned, because if you're an able-bodied, educated person in those fields, there should be no reason for me to hear that you're not at least getting an interview. So to me, that says somebody They set up a screener, and the screener doesn't actually know what they're looking at. And that becomes a problem because that just... What's the word? Exacerbates? It just makes the problem bigger, right? So don't ask me how I came up with that word.

[00:11:46.660] - Dan Paulson

Big words. It's College Thursday here. It is a sign, I think, of, again, utilizing the technology tools, maybe to help in the screening process. Let's face it, companies typically don't really like to hire. It's costly, it's time consuming. There's a high probability even after the hire, the person you thought you hired isn't exactly the person that you did hire. And then that leads to, do we keep the person? Do we let them go? How much coaching or training do we give them to see if they're going to improve? It's almost as painful as doing performance reviews. I'll put it that way. Less so because you don't have to put a performance review on a person, but the interview process can be long and monotonous, to say the least. At the same time, utilizing this technology to save yourself some steps, I think, is missing opportunities because we hire people based on... We should be hiring people not just based on their skillset, but also based on their attitude, their personality, how well they connect to the culture that we're trying to create. And that's really hard to predict in a resume or through an online posting or a reply to a posting.

[00:13:14.870] - Dan Paulson

And as part of, again, that saving of time, are we really saving time? Are we stretching things out? Now, the other side of this, we talked on or the article talked about using these tools to basically build a Rolodex of potential candidates for a future position. Personally, I have an issue with that. I think it's disingenuous. I think it leads to, there's another big word for you, Rich. It leads to other issues that If you're building a culture of trust, communication, you talk about how great you treat your employees, but yet you've got a job out there that isn't a real job that you're just using as a fishing tool, more or less, to collect names. I just don't see that as being a positive way to go about it. There might be better ways to approach it. I don't know if we can talk about those here, we can brainstorm all those here. But it just seems to me that it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. And then we, of course, wonder why employees don't stick in a career or don't stick in their job for a long period of time. The things we're doing are incentivizing the lack of loyalty when it comes to a job.

[00:14:29.920] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I'm on the fence, because having dealt with companies that are relatively small versus relatively large, the idea of collecting resumes on a whole, I don't like it. But based on the fact that certain times you have to be able to move quickly, it makes it hard because you have to find a balancing act from, I have to be ready to pull the trigger, so I need to pull people in. And especially if you're on the smaller side and on a growth trajectory, how do you get good people if you don't actually go out and proactively look for people? Or is it a little bit more of this really was happening before, except there was a recruiter in the middle because the recruiter was the pooler of all the resumes. And now you've gone and used automated tools. So now you become the guy who's pulling the resumes or pulling them all, putting them in a folder. So is that just the adaptation of the hiring process that it used to be that you had somebody in the middle, a middleman, and you've taken out the middleman, but you didn't really adjust enough for the fact that you took the middleman out?

[00:15:52.520] - Dan Paulson

Thought pattern. Yeah, I can answer that for you. I know the middlemen are still there. And if anything, they're there in just as great a force, if not more, because what the middlemen are doing is they're the ones using the tools like Indeed and ZipRecruiter and things like that to build their list of candidates. So they're actively involved in it. And I agree with you 100 %. You know, business owners, especially small ones, because there's a lot of small business owners that are going to make the investment in a recruiter, they do have to build a Rolodex of names. I would just take a different approach. And I've talked about my clients with this often. You should always be hiring, always be hiring. And I don't mean actually filling a job. I mean actively recruiting. So if that ideal candidate comes along, you either create a space for them or you free up an opportunity where maybe there's an underperforming candidate. And they haven't done that in almost forever. Very few people are good at continuing continually recruiting new talent. And to me, what it involves, especially in more professional positions like this, is the networking, because typically your frontline staff, they aren't the networkers.

[00:17:14.450] - Dan Paulson

So the trades, manufacturing, a general labor is typically not going to go to a networking event looking for a job. Now, I will say this, if you are looking for a job, that's probably an opportunity because it's going to be a target rich environment that not a lot of other people are going to be in. Different story, though, when it's a professional, more of a white-colored job, is now you're dealing with something that everyone's accustomed to. But a lot of business owners don't network in a way to look for potential future candidates. And That's the way I would approach it. Instead of posting a fictitious job and enticing somebody in that way, I want to talk to them. I want to know about their personality. I want to know about their background. I want to know what type of culture really attracts them, what they're looking at doing, what their future career path is, where there's opportunities. Because ultimately, when you build that Rolodex, now you're also building a database, at least in your head, if nothing else, of people who are going to be a good fit internally, not just a list of names with a resume and potential experience as a background, because we all know we get hired for the experience we supposedly bring.

[00:18:23.910] - Dan Paulson

We get fired for the attitude that we have when we're on the job. So to me, when you take it out of a... You're talking to somebody, you're interviewing them, but you're not, if that makes any sense, they are more comfortable because there's nothing to hide. There's no pretense that I'm going to get a job out of this right now. So you get to see more of who that person actually is. Now, again, there's going to be some barriers and some walls up early on. Not everyone's going to show their cards in that respect. But you can ask different questions when they're interviewing, right? There's protected things you can't ask when you're interviewing somebody for a position. But when you're networking with somebody, you can ask about their families, you can ask about their hobbies, you can ask about things they like to do when they're not working, because it's to get to know the individual. Now, you put that into a hiring situation, there's certain things you can ask. As far as this question goes, there's certain things you can't. So it allows you to get a better understanding of that a schedule ahead of any hiring process, especially if you don't have a jobs open right now.

[00:19:36.160] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think it's... To me, there's just this roboticness in the beginning, and I think What I always used to do was try to get people to just talk to me. When I was hiring someone, I would just sit down and say, Okay, here's your resume. I've already seen it. And I flip it over. I put it on the desk, literally, so they see me do it. And I say, I don't want to talk about that. We're just going to have a conversation about you. Because I was more interested in, Tell me about who you are, what your attitude is. Give me some nuggets of what I'm going to remember about you, so that when Somebody says, do you want candidate A, B, or C? I know who I like the most. Because when I was hiring accountants, the training is the training. If you pass the CPA exam, I know you studied to do the same as me. We look at the resume, I can see the experience, and somebody's going to check the references. So beyond that, we can train you what we want you to do. We can train you to do it our way.

[00:20:44.630] - Rich Veltre

So the culture and the attitude is so important, and I'm worried that it's now flipped, that the roboticness is now ahead, as opposed to just check the boxes after you've met this person, you like them, then you down and you check the boxes and everything's fine, then that's a valid candidate. I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I just feel like everything is so AI-driven and the personal nature of it is getting stomped on.

[00:21:19.590] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, it's gotten very mechanical in a lot of ways. And that's what I think we're seeing here. Now, I won't put all the fault on the businesses. I think as I read through this article, another The other issue that I see is there's a lot of people that have had it really easy for a long time. And what I mean by that is there was a time when pretty much if you fogged a mirror, you could get a job. And then you could work in a spot for maybe a year. I mean, I've seen some resumes where they haven't even stayed nine months, and then they've moved on to a different job, maybe with a different title, maybe with more money. And then they just continue to hop like that. I mean, when When I was doing the job thing, if your resume stretched beyond two pages, you better have a good reason why. Not that I see a lot of multi-page resumes. Of course, it's hard to tell because most of them are online now. You have to print them off to see how many pages would break down to. But when I see a list of 10 jobs, and no job has been longer than maybe a year, year and a half, I start questioning, are we creating a situation where now we have people who lack experience?

[00:22:36.030] - Dan Paulson

They're not in the job long enough to gain real long term experience. They're just filling a need for the immediate. And then They're still searching online for the next best opportunity. Well, now, guess what? The next best opportunity is fewer and farther between. Now you really have to work at filling those jobs. And at the same point, people now are looking at your resumes, and they can be more critical because if they are going to fill that position, they now have tons of candidates, and they're going to look for somebody who's maybe going to be a little more loyal, maybe going to stick around longer, maybe have a lot more experience. And if they can't find that, they're just not going to fill the job.

[00:23:14.160] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, my experience was the same. I would get mad at somebody on a Monday. Call a recruiter had a new job by Tuesday. I mean, it was that quick. So it I think it goes back to, I think everything has to, you have to adapt to the changing market. And this market has definitely moved in a different way in that 20 so years since the example that I'm talking about. It's a major difference. It's a significantly different market.

[00:23:53.480] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, definitely. And if you want to change this, you just got to realize that we're reaping what we're sowing on both sides here. I think from the employee side, the lack of loyalty, a lot of that's been caused by the business side, where the moment there's been a blip in the economy, they immediately start letting go of people. And if there's no loyalty there, then the employee is thinking, well, why should I be loyal to you if you're not going to be loyal to me? So what we're seeing here is a manifestation of both sides being bad actors on this, and that's going to create a problem. So companies have to step first because they're going to need these people and they're going to have to figure out a different approach to take. And I really think that's where it comes in for us to really, as leaders, step back and figure out how to make that happen because the employees aren't going to do it until they see the olive branch come from the company side first. And there's a lot of companies out there that are looking... They're good companies with good cultures that are looking for loyal employees.

[00:24:57.590] - Dan Paulson

They maybe just don't know how to communicate that So it goes back again to that marketing thing we talk about. And of course, managing the cost of hiring new to make sure you're doing it right and to make sure that you're not putting yourself in a situation where if something in the marketplace changes, you immediately have to let a bunch of people go because that never looks good, especially if you're a small to medium-sized company. But then it's also the second part of that is the employees need to quit looking at this as just a stepping stone for the next opportunity. They need to find a career path within those companies. And if there is some longevity opportunities, they should really look at sticking it out instead of surfing for the next possible opportunity. But I'm sure we'll be talking about this multiple times. But for now, Rich, if they need to get a hold of you to make sure their finances are correct so that they're not ghosting people on jobs, and so they have the resources in the budget to hire, how do they get a hold of you?

[00:25:55.090] - Rich Veltre

I would send me an email, rveltre@veltregroup.com.

[00:25:59.600] - Dan Paulson

And my My email is too damn long. So I'm just going to say, go to danpaulsonletsgo.com, and you can leave a message for me there, and I will get back to you. If you are listening to this, we ask you to subscribe. If you're watching this on YouTube or any of the other channels, we hope that you will like, share, and subscribe it. That is it for today's episode of Books of the Business, and we will see you next time. Rich, thanks. It's always fun, and we will talk to you again soon.

[00:26:25.940] - Rich Veltre

Sounds good.

[00:26:27.090] - Dan Paulson

All right. Take care.

[00:26:28.520] - Rich Veltre

All right. You, too.