It looks like we are in a hiring dark ages. Barely anyone can remember how to actually hire someone. Just this weekend I was talking to an electrical engineer who recently retired. He told his company that he wanted to retire FIFTEEN years ago. They never were able to find a replacement. Not that they didn't try. They hired senior engineers but they couldn't do the job. They hired grads right out of school but none of them knew calculus and didn't want to learn. From my point of view, something happened during the Great Recession and its hasn't recovered. At a couple of jobs I've seen those HR work anniversary emails and it's always interesting to see the cliff that coincides with 2008. I want to believe in Hanlon's razor, but I find it strains credulity that all companies are that stupid all at the same time. I also have a hard time believing that its sabotage, because that would be conspiracy theory zone which at this scale is unbelievable as well. Yet companies are saying they can't find anyone to hire. I am part of a job group with 25-30 people, most of which I would consider to be highly qualified. So I am thinking that something is going on that is causing companies to select against the very people they are trying to attract. But also it's not a new problem. Just after WWII the economy was flooded with veterans and companies didn't know what to do with them because military jargon is not corporate speak. Bernard Haldane came up with the Seven Stories Exercise to help veterans to figure out what they are good at, the transferable skills they have, and how to present that to companies in a way they can understand. We do know that 60% of postings are for ghost jobs that exist only to fool investors and/or employees. We also know that HR writes job descriptions and does screening without any knowledge of what the job actually entails. Obviously this is a failure in management, but it doesn't seem to affect them because reasons even though they are losing money from not getting the work done. It'll come to a head eventually but who knows when, probably not until after the US election.