What’s the Truth About Employment in America Today?

Friday, September 14, 2018

Delray Beach, FL- In South Florida, it’s difficult to find contractors these days because the demand for new construction and renovations is stronger than it’s been in years.

It’s also tough to find qualified people for the publishing and marketing industries. It’s a good time to be looking for a job. Not a good time for finding employees.

I don’t know how this cut of the employment situation is countrywide, but in claiming “victory” for making America great again, President Trump has cited (among other things) record low unemployment statistics.

My colleague Bill Bonner had something to say about this recently on his blog https://bonnerandpartners.com.

President Reagan’s budget advisor, David Stockman, writes that, while the official unemployment rate has gone down, the number of full-time, “breadwinner” jobs in America, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in July, was 73.83 million. 

When the century began 18 years ago, the number was 72.73 million. Only 1 million decent new jobs have been created – while the U.S. population has grown by 48 million people!

Almost all the rosy jobs numbers are traceable to 1) people dropping out of the workforce, 2) low-paid, part-time jobs in the leisure and medical service sectors, and 3) inflation.

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Skills

MilkManThe idea that there are more good and qualified people who want to find jobs than there are appropriate jobs for them is a myth (perpetuated by academia). The opposite is true. There are plenty of good jobs, but most people who apply for them are unqualified to fill them.

These are people at the bottom of the employment chain, people whose “skills” have been rendered largely useless by the advance of technology. In the age of the Internet, we no longer need people to open and sort mail. Nor do we need people to enter data when it is done automatically.

What we need are people who have learned to think rationally and communicate effectively — things our educational system is not set up to teach people to do. So they are put out into the marketplace, a marketplace that has no room for them.

Unless education radically changes, the poor will always be with us.

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IF YOU’RE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME, DON’T DO THIS

He had been strongly recommended for the job. And so, when I got on the phone with him, I was expecting a sharp, take-charge guy. Instead, I got this:

“I’ve been involved in strategically important roles with communications companies for 25 years. Throughout, I’ve focused on my core competencies, building brand recognition and interfaces with key personnel.”

To which I responded: “Huh?”

He went on…

“It’s been a personal paradigm of mine that quality control and dynamic leadership are essentials in today’s globalized business environment, and that’s what I feel I can bring to any company I work for.”

I had already made an initial assessment: This guy was a fraud. But to give him a chance to redeem himself, I tried to keep the conversation going.

“So,” I said, “what, exactly, have you been doing all these years?”

I could almost hear him thinking, “What kind of dummy am I dealing with?” But this is what he said:

“Bringing in a bottom line and achieving optimal results have always been goals that resonated with me.”

“That’s enough,” I thought. “I can’t take any more.”

“I’m sorry to do this,” I said. “But I have to jump off the phone now to handle an emergency. I enjoyed talking to you. I’ll be sure to look at your resume and get back to you if something comes up that meets your qualifications.”

And with that, I bid farewell to this young man and any chance he had of ever working for me.

In their book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, authors Fugere, Hardaway, and Warshawsky say there are three reasons executives – and people applying for management positions – sometimes speak like this.

  1. Their focus is on themselves, rather than on the person they’re speaking to. “When obscurity pollutes someone’s communications it’s often because the… goal is to impress and not to inform.”
  2. They fear using concrete language, because saying exactly what they mean can make it hard to wiggle out of commitments. “Liability scares [some people], so they add endless phrases to qualify [their] views, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions to the 12 reasons we can’t make a decision now.”
  3. They want to elevate and even romanticize their thoughts and deeds, because they are afraid they aren’t impressive. They do so by using lofty language that disguises the mundane truth.

They are afraid to appear ordinary. Their solution is to attempt to bamboozle everyone they speak with – and particularly those with power.

This is a very bad strategy.

In a job interview, it makes the interviewee look pompous and vacuous – two traits any sensible employer wants to avoid.

When applying for a job, only two things really matter: what you know (your skill set) and who you are (your integrity). Pretending to know things you don’t is a waste of your time, because you will soon be found out. Getting tossed into the street after only a few weeks on the job is both embarrassing and an ugly blemish on your work history.

You can demonstrate your good character by being honest from the outset. Be candid about what you know and what you have done. But make it clear that you are confident you can quickly learn to do anything that is required of you.

In granting you an interview, your future employer is trying to find out if you can help him solve his problems and grow his business.

He isn’t looking to be impressed. He’s looking for someone who can make his life easier by doing a great job. Your job during the interview is to sell yourself as being that person.

And the first rule of successfully selling yourself is to make sure you’ve got the basics down pat:

  • You must be good at something – really good.
  • That something must be useful to the success of the business you are attempting to work for. If you’ve been reading my blog – even for a short time – you already know what I mean by that: It must be some financially valued skill. Generally speaking, that’s one of four things: marketing, selling, creating profitable products, or managing profits.
  • You must prove that you are good.

And then you must deliver.

 

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Measure for Measure

One of the many examples of government-inspired mumbo-jumbo is the idea of measuring unemployment. I’m talking about the oft-quoted unemployment rate.

Why measure unemployment? There’s really no way to do it accurately… and so many ways to fiddle with the numbers. For example, the government normally counts as unemployed only people who have looked for work within the past five weeks. It does not count the underemployed – people who have given up looking for a decent job to work bagging groceries in supermarkets.

Here’s a better idea: Measure employment — the number of people in a given economy who are actually working. Wouldn’t that make more sense? It would not only be easier to understand but also more difficult to monkey with.

Taking this a bit further, we could also measure the amount of money that employed people make, comparing sectors and time frames and so on. Wouldn’t that be more useful?

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