As a part-time retirement job seeker, the job search process appears to be seriously broken. This causes me to doubt a lot of government labor market analysis.
I think there is much less of a labor market shortage, than
- extreme barriers to getting to the interview and hiring stage, and
- little to no tolerance among young people for shitty jobs or demeaning working conditions.
I follow a couple of Reddit threads regularly where workers and job seekers document their experiences.
When I was looking for full-time professional work in the past, you could expect to submit a lot of applications to get one interview. In these forums, I am seeing early career job seekers talking about submitting over 1000 online applications, going through multiple panel interviews, having to provide a free work sample, and pass sketchy personality tests, only to get ghosted at the hiring stage. They are extremely discouraged and angry about it.
I didn't expect my part-time retirement job search to be so difficult, but then I am also leery of Covid right now, so looking for isolated jobs. But I cannot remember a time when it was SO hard to get a call back from an employer.
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