The national time-to-fill average rose in February to the highest level in 15 years.
Sponsored by the career sites publisher Dice Holdings, the Dice-DFH Vacancy Duration Measure says it took an average of 26.8 working days to fill jobs in February. In January, according to the report, the average (as revised) was 25.7 working days.
“We are continuing to see signs of a tightening labor market,” said Michael Durney, president and CEO of Dice Holdings. “
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He added: “Unemployment rates are declining across several core industries, such as tech and health care, and the time-to-fill-open positions has hit an all-time high in the 15 years the data has been tracked.”
Jobs in the financial services sector took the longest to fill, averaging 43.1 days. Health care jobs averaged 42.6 days to fill. Both are historic highs for their respective industry sectors.
John,
Thanks for the update on the labor statistics. This is completely in line with with what we see in the market at a recruiting firm. One challenge that companies see is that they become hyper-focused on past experience and less on innate ability and passion.
At my workplace, a manager notifies a candidate and HR that a job offer has been verbally extended. Then, HR takes over to handle the formalities of onboarding the employee.
A coworker just told me today that she extended an offer to an employee, and four weeks later, HR had not contacted the employee about onboarding. In that time, the employee had found another job.
And it was a miracle that the employee had managed to get his application into the computer system: the HR software that manages applications at my organization is so glitchy and onerous that hiring managers are scheduling pre-interviews to help candidates officially submit their application, because they need 90 minutes of “tech support” to figure out the forms.
Also, the applicant tracking systems, pass over people who are qualified but who haven’t figured out how to use keywords so they are not disqualified by
the system.
The issue is that 99% of companies haven’t really defined what they want so they default to wanting Superman or Wonder Woman … and they aren’t available.
Attributing this to lower unemployment is wrong, wrong, wrong. So it took less time to fill positions before the Great Recession in a far better job market than now? It is obvious to any recent job hunter that companies are inept at hiring, including as AP noted, onboarding. Peter Cappelli’s research confirmed what we intuitively knew: companies are too picky, suck at hiring, and won’t pay competitive wages.