Job Openings Are at a Record High, But People Aren't Applying
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Here's your money briefing for Monday, July 12th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. More than 9 million Americans say they're looking for work, and as it turns out, employers are trying to fill roughly that many open positions. That might sound like the perfect formula for matching up people with jobs, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
We're seeing demand for jobs where there aren't enough people in those places or with those skills. And we're seeing people demanding jobs where they might not be the right fit right now.
Our senior writer, John Hilson Rath, and the WSJ economics team have been studying how this mismatch is affecting employers' ability to find skilled workers in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. We'll ask him about it after the break.
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The Help Wanted sign is up, but nobody's knocking on the door.
What is causing millions of open jobs while millions of people seek work?
After a rush of hiring last year following the nationwide shutdown, many employers can't find workers. At the same time, millions of people out of work can't find a job they like. And that mismatch has the jobs recovery stuck in neutral. So what does all this mean for job seekers? Let's bring in WSJ senior writer John Hilsenrath to talk about it. John, thanks for coming on the show.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, John, we've got millions of open jobs and millions of people looking for jobs. Why are economists calling this job market a mismatch?
So I talked to Julia Pollack, who's the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, and she made an important point, which is that the labor market isn't like other markets, like a market for shoes or a market for pizzas, where basically you only have one side of the equation. In a labor market, you need people to choose something, and you also need people to be chosen by somebody. And so it's a matching game, and that matching game takes time. It's a complicated process. that takes more time than, say, going out and buying oranges or pizzas. The best explanation is that you're just not finding people in the places or with the skills or with the preferences for the jobs that are open. So one good example of that is in the food and hospitality industry.
The ZipRecruiter survey, it says 70% of people who worked in that industry before the pandemic now say they want a job in another industry. The food and hospitality industry has more than a million openings. So preferences are shifting, company needs are shifting, and people have moved. There's a lot of dislocation left over from the pandemic that's got to get sorted through.
You know, John, in past economic recoveries, people out of work would try to scoop up any open job they could find. How has the pandemic changed the mindset of job seekers this time around?
Well, there's a few things that's going on. The most obvious one is that the federal government extended mass amounts of support to Americans left out of work as a result of the pandemic in the form of relief checks and
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