New Non-Profit Takes On The Federal Reserve

Update  01/10/15: Because I've ceased publishing ECOMINOES, I've removed a great many articles I believe have become less relevant over time. I've deleted as many links that were broken as I could find...I apologize if I missed any. Also, due to the proliferation of spam, I've closed comments and deleted the ECOMINOES Facebook page and Twitter account.

It's been a pleasure promoting economic and individual liberty here on ECOMINOES. Now, I'm taking my passion to the next level by launching Solidus.Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that promotes economic strength and stability, sound money, equality of opportunity, and reduced government debt by limiting the Federal Reserve System’s influence on the American economy.

The following is a brief video explaining this new venture:

 

Solidus.Center is currently in the start-up phase, and we're looking for help. If you or anyone you know might be interested in board, fellowship, or volunteer opportunities, please contact me at seth@solidus.center.

Thank you so much for following ECOMINOES! I hope you'll join me on the next level.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

The Psychological Struggle Of Long-Term UNDERemployment

 I've written dozens of articles about the epidemic of unemployment and underemployment in this country. In the articles, I've cited numerous statistics. We have to keep in mind that those stats represent people.

There are many accounts of the psychological toll of long-term unemployment. But little has been said about the toll of long-term UNDERemployment. Lest we forget that Gallup pegs the underemployment rate at nearly 20%. Nearly 1 in 5 members of the American workforce is working below--sometimes well below--his potential. And that's only if you count people who work part-time but want to work full-time. That doesn't count the millions of Americans working below their potential in full-time jobs. MBAs working retail. Law degree holders filing papers. Mike Alberti of Remapping Debate tells us what that can do to a person psychologically over time. As you read this, keep in mind that getting a breadwinner job in America has become a lottery in which the best and brightest don't get chosen up to 50% of the time and opportunities for promotion have been limited by the large number of people staying in their jobs.

The many impacts of unemployment — including social and psychological ones — have long been catalogued. But much less is known about the consequences of “underemployment.” Millions of Americans — at least as many as are unemployed, and perhaps more — have either been forced to take part-time work because full-time jobs are not available, or are forced to work in jobs for which they are overqualified.

“We have never experienced anything like this,” said Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. It is “not something that as a society we’re used to dealing with.”

Since the recession, researchers have begun to take more of an interest in the psychological effects of underemployment, and what they have found is not encouraging. In the short-term, it appears that those who are underemployed — like those who are unemployed — have an increased risk of depression, increased stress, and lowered self-esteem.

And there may be long-term negative effects, too. On the psychological side, there are intriguing hints of a downward spiral that might affect underemployed workers in their family, social, and employment relationships. In economic terms, there is already data that show that the effects of being underemployed directly after graduating from college can linger for more than 10 years.

“Unemployment is an emergency,” Van Horn said. “Underemployment is a crisis.” Nevertheless, the United States, unlike other countries, is not gathering the data needed to pinpoint what the full costs of underemployment actually are. Making it difficult to know which policies might be effective in helping those affected.

What’s wrong with me?

Douglas Maynard, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York in New Paltz is one of only a few psychologists who has studied the mental health effects of underemployment.

“There are a few things that we know for sure,” he said. “We see very clear evidence of lower self-esteem, greater stress, and less job satisfaction,” he said.

To illustrate those effects, David Pedulla, a doctoral candidate at Princeton who is writing his dissertation on the consequences of underemployment, suggested considering the case of a worker with a degree in accounting who is laid off from an accounting firm and has to take a new job working in retail.

“Imagine going from a situation where you had gained some status and control over your day-to-day life, and then moving into a retail job with a boss with less education than you,” Pedulla said. “That person might feel like he had lost control over his life.” The theme of loss of control is one that numerous experts cited repeatedly.

Pedulla said that the result is often that underemployed workers internalize a sense of shame, and begin to blame themselves for their situation. Psychologists have long recognized that shame is a very powerful emotion, and that people who feel a strong sense of shame tend to cope with it in different ways.

The ex-accountant working retail, Maynard said, “might start blaming himself for it. He might wonder, what’s wrong with me that I’m here?”

That sense of shame intensifies if the individual has been forced to take a pay cut, Maynard said. Underemployed workers will often feel a greater financial strain, which can be exacerbated because their new jobs may not provide the same levels of health or retirement benefits as their old jobs, while at the same time making them ineligible for government assistance programs.

Pedulla said that, for men, the implications of becoming underemployed and earning less money can have profound effects on their perception of their masculinity, especially if they find themselves struggling to provide for their families.

“The breadwinner model is still very present,” he said. Men who feel that their masculinity is being threatened are more likely to lash out at their families. There is evidence that underemployment can cause marital strain, Pedulla said, and that when older children perceive that there has been a reduction in income or status, they may “inherit” the sense of shame.

“Kids may feel like they can no longer have the newest clothes, or that they can’t do certain activities with their friends because their family can’t afford it anymore,” he said.

Social isolation

One of the strongest effects of the shame and lowered self-esteem that can result from underemployment is that the worker may become socially isolated — in the workplace and outside of it — and that the isolation can, in turn, reinforce those feelings because the worker is not receiving social support, experts said.

“Your social interactions might change,” Pedulla said. “If you were laid off from a job where you had friends, you might feel less inclined to see your former co-workers because you might fear that they would look down on you.”

Some research has found that workers who have been laid off and found new jobs that are unsatisfactory are less likely to engage in social activities. In 1988, Katherine Newman, a sociologist and the current dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, wrote an influential book called Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence, in which she interviewed hundreds of people who had, for various reasons, fallen out of the middle class.

Several people reported that the social consequences of underemployment can be particularly challenging.

“If your old friends are going out for drinks or going to the theater or playing golf or doing other things that you can no longer afford to do, then that can be a very isolating experience,” she said.

Berrin Erdogan, an associate professor of management at Portland State University, said that underemployed people might find themselves isolated within the workplace as well. “You would probably feel like a misfit, especially if you are surrounded by people who are less educated than you,” she said.

She used the example of a young worker who graduated from college but could not find a job in her field, and had to start working at a coffee house. “After work, [your co-workers] might go out or spend time together on the weekends, but you might be less inclined to go because you feel like you don’t fit in,” she said. “At the same time, there’s a great chance that your co-workers might feel intimidated by you, and won’t want to invest in a relationship with you.”

Erdogan said that that situation could quickly lead to anger and “self-defeating behavior,” which could affect the way that underemployed workers do their jobs. “If you don’t feel appreciated in your job, and feel like it’s unfair to be there, you might not do your job as well. If you’re working in a coffee house, in the end you may not end up treating your customers very well,” she said.

In his research, Maynard has found that workers who perceive themselves to be overqualified for their jobs report less job satisfaction even than workers who are involuntarily employed part-time.

Erdogan said that evidence also exists that workers who are overqualified for their jobs are more likely to have bad relationships with their managers and co-workers, and that this can make them more likely to get fired from their jobs.

“If you don’t leave a job on good terms,” she said, “that in turn diminishes your chances of finding another job.”

Depression and boredom

Psychologists stress that the duration of underemployment is a very important factor. If a person finds a better job within a few weeks or months, said Daniel Feldman, associate dean of the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, the negative psychological impacts are more likely to be limited.

But if the worker remains underemployed for more than six months, Feldman said, it would be a short step from the combination of boredom and self-doubt to clinical depression. Researchers have shown that depression is strongly associated with underemployment, especially if the person is making less money than he or she had come to expect. Others have also found that underemployed workers are just as likely as the unemployed to show signs of depression.

Going back to the example of a worker who went from an accounting job to a retail job, Feldman said that a huge factor would be the dissonance in the worker’s mind between his present situation and the future that he had imagined.

“You went from doing something where you were using your skills to folding shirts,” he said.  “That’s a very strong contradiction [of] the idea that you had of where you were going to end up.”

“You’re going to be constantly bored with that job,” he said. “You’re never going to be happy working there.”

Depression has long been linked to self-destructive behavior such as an increased incidence of alcoholism, drug use, aggression toward family members, and suicide. While little research has been done examining the incidence of these behaviors among underemployed people, the connection between self-destructive behavior and unemployment is quite strong.

“We would expect to see many of the same effects in some underemployment situations,” said Meghna Virick, an associate professor of management at San Jose State University.

Feldman has also found that if workers who are laid off blame themselves for losing their jobs, there is an increased likelihood that they will engage in self-destructive behavior.

Characteristically, people who suffer from depression can have strong feelings of shame, guilt and worthlessness, as well as fatigue and irritability. They can also lose interest in things that were once important to them, such as their families, friends, and hobbies.

“People spend a huge number of their hours at work,” Pedulla said. “It’s central to the construction of their identity. If that work is making them depressed, then it’s easy for that to affect other parts of their lives.”

Unfulfilled hopes and diminished expectations

Though many researchers speculate that underemployment can have long-term psychological effects, it is an issue that has not been studied in depth. But several experts worried that, if the situation does not improve quickly, it could lead to a sense of unfulfilled hopes and diminished expectations, especially among young people.

“If you’re going into the labor market and have a particular idea of what your future is going to look like, and what you actually find is quite different, that has an effect on how you perceive yourself and how you perceive your chances for the future,” said Sarah Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of South Australia who has long studied underemployment.

Returning to the example of the ex-accountant who works in retail, Feldman said that after a certain amount of time the worker might start to become discouraged. “If you don’t get out of the job after six months, you become increasingly pessimistic that you’re going to get out of it at all,” he said.

That could mean that the worker stops looking for other jobs, or approaches the job search with “less gusto,” Maynard said.  Because the job search can quickly become an exhausting process, especially while an applicant is working at another job, he or she may not put in as much effort after a prolonged period of time, he added.

“Some people might cope with being underemployed by changing their expectations, and saying, ‘I guess this is as good as it gets for me,’” Maynard said.

The job search can reinforce that sense. Several experts in management said that employers might be less likely to hire an applicant for a job if the applicant has been clearly underemployed, leading to a vicious cycle from which the worker cannot extricate him or herself.

If the worker is ensnared in this vicious cycle, Maynard said that he or she might begin to feel a sense of “learned helplessness” in which the person stops trying to actively change his or her situation. “If you’ve been applying to jobs and hearing nothing back, you may start to feel like you have no control over your life,” he said.

And many researchers have noted that the mental health effects of underemployment are most severe if workers feel that they have lost control over their situation — if they begin to feel trapped in their current jobs. “That is the point when we would expect to see the worst mental health outcomes,” Maynard said.

In the current context, that is particularly disturbing. There is some evidence that shows that during a recession, workers are less likely to quit their current jobs, because they are less likely to believe that they will be able to find another one. Before the recession, an average of three million people quit their jobs each month; in September, that number was slightly over two million.

Lack of data

While the understanding of the consequences of underemployment is growing, many of the experts interviewed for this article said that there is still a long way to go.

“There is much less empirical research than we would like,” said Pedulla. “Before we know how to respond effectively, we need to understand the contours of the problem better.”

“In Europe,” said Portland State’s Berrin Erdogan, “underemployment is treated as a social problem. We don’t even pay attention to it that much.”

One reason why so little research is done on underemployment is that it is important to have what’s called a “longitudinal” data source to draw from, which means data that follows individuals through time to measure what effects result from changes in their situations.

While the U.S. does have a few longitudinal data sources, they are generally limited in the amount of information they contain. Much of what is known comes from data from other countries, especially in regard to mental health and to more subjective measures like perceived well being.

Longitudinal data collection is more expensive and more time-consuming than normal survey studies, and while a few universities have the resources to conduct them, the responsibility generally falls to the government to provide the funding and support. Virick of the San Jose State University said that the recession should have served as a wake-up call to policy makers that this is an issue that demands attention.

“We haven’t had any kind of organized response to this,” she said.

According to Erdogan, the United States is paying much less attention to the issue than European countries. “In Europe, underemployment is treated as a social problem. We don’t even pay attention to it that much.”

Whose fault is it, really?

Few people would suggest that mass underemployment is somehow the “fault” of the people who are underemployed.

“Underemployment is now a structural feature of our society,” said Newman of Johns Hopkins. “Structural problems demand structural solutions.”

Nevertheless, several researchers said that, in the United States, there is a strong impulse for underemployed workers to blame themselves for their situation, which is the source of many of the negative mental health effects associated with underemployment.

“If people don’t understand that there is a way that the system has become rigged against them, they may start feeling like they’re to blame for their issues,” said Anderson of the University of South Australia.

Anderson said that appreciating the broader structures that created underemployment was an important part of a strategy to avoid falling into the trap of self-blame.

“I like to hope that we’re starting to see people realize that the ways the workplace has changed in the last few decades have not been positive for most workers, and to try to change that” she said.

Newman agreed. Seeking to address the systemic causes of problems “can be a very healthy coping strategy,” she said.

"Underemployment is now a structural feature of our society." Truly tragic. The result of the wicked trifecta of impediments to prosperity that have been the modern Fed, federal government, and American hiring paradigm.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Another Biz Reporter Rips Applicant Tracking Systems

As many of you know, I firmly believe that HR hiring software--AKA "applicant tracking systems"--, which far too many American enterprises offer job seekers as their only port-of-entry, exacerbate our nation's unemployment problem and detract from companies' bottom lines (and therefore detract from the economy as a whole). So any article I come across that's critical of ATSes gets my attention.

In this article, CIO's Meridith Levinson describes applicant tracking systems as capricious and fundamentally-flawed. She hammers home the fact that the expensive, unwieldy software American enterprises often "employ" as their exclusive employment gatekeepers arbitrarily reject potentially great employees. As you read the article, keep in mind that half of Americans ages 18-29 are either unemployed or underemployed. Think about how younger Americans who have less experience (and therefore have fewer keywords and numbers on their applicant profiles) and who have a smaller professional network (not that that matters much when hiring managers direct applicants to their ATSes) might be at a significant disadvantage under this hiring paradigm. This is, after all, a paradigm in which even the most talented applicants are judged by poorly-designed computer software based on experiential criteria only. Remember, an ATS will always select someone with more degrees or experience over someone with more accomplishments. Why? Because ATSes CAN'T IDENTIFY ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

Lou Adler, entrepreneur and best-selling author, best summarized this phenomenon in an article he recently published on LinkedIn:

“Successful candidate will develop a new approach for reducing water usage by 50%,” is a lot better than saying “Must have 5-10 years of environmental engineering background including 3-5 years of wastewater management."

- See more at: http://www.ecominoes.com/2013/05/the-american-hiring-paradigm-is-broken.html#sthash.KkCw7bIz.dpuf

Lest we forget what Lou Adler, entrepreneur and best-selling author, recently stated on LinkedIn:

“Successful candidate will develop a new approach for reducing water usage by 50%,” is a lot better than saying “Must have 5-10 years of environmental engineering background including 3-5 years of wastewater management."

In this case, ATSes would always choose candidates with more years of experience over those with more accomplishments that would suggest the capability of reaching the goal of reducing water usage by 50%. In fact, many ATSes require applicants to list "responsibilities". Anyone can have responsibilities. Only a select (read: overlooked) few have bona fide accomplishments. But the people most capable of identifying accomplishments relevant to the job, hiring managers, all too often go out of their way to conceal themselves from the applicant pool. Anyway, on to the article:

Applicant tracking systems are the bane of legions of job seekers. These systems, which employers use to manage job openings across their enterprises and screen incoming resumes from job seekers, kill 75 percent of candidates' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes, according to job search services provider Preptel.

The problem with applicant tracking systems, as many job seekers know, is that they are flawed. Very flawed. If a job seeker's resume isn't formatted the right way and doesn't contain the right keywords and phrases, the applicant tracking system will misread it and rank it as a bad match with the job opening, regardless of the candidate's qualifications.

Bersin & Associates, an Oakland, Calif.-based research and advisory services firm specializing in talent management, confirmed the weaknesses of applicant tracking systems. In a test conducted last year, Bersin & Associates created a perfect resume for an ideal candidate for a clinical scientist position. The research firm matched the resume to the job description and submitted the resume to an applicant tracking system from Taleo, arguably the leading maker of these systems.

Taleo is notorious for producing ridiculously buggy software. There used to be a great blog that described in detail the numerous functional problems with Taleo's products. Some of these problems have been fixed with recent releases. Many have not. And the fundamental flaws persist, as they do with all ATSes:

When Bersin & Associates studied how the resume rendered in the applicant tracking system, the company saw that one of the candidate's work experiences was lost entirely because the resume had the date typed before the employer. The applicant tracking system also failed to read several educational degrees the putative candidate held, which would have given a recruiter the impression that the candidate lacked the educational experience necessary for the job. The end result: The resume Bersin & Associates submitted only scored a 43 percent relevance ranking to the job because the applicant tracking system misread it.

Every American hiring manager should read that last sentence.

Josh Bersin, CEO and president of the firm, notes that since all applicant tracking systems use the same parsing software to read resumes, the results his company found would be typical of most systems, not just Taleo's.

The problems with applicant tracking systems beg the question: If they're so flawed and if they filter out good candidates, why do employers bother to use them? The answer is simple: Bersin says they still make recruiters' lives easier. 

Stop right there. American enterprises don't use ATSes to find the best potential employees. They use them to make recruiters' lives easier.  Let's analyze that in terms of risk and reward: To reduce the workload of their recruiters, organizations spend billions of dollars annually on buggy software that arbitrarily eliminates a significant number of talented applicants. Under that paradigm, up to 50% of new hires "don't work out". Does the end of convenience for HR workers justify a unquestionably broken means of hiring? Levinson goes on:

Applicant tracking systems save recruiters days' worth of time by performing the initial evaluation and by narrowing down the candidate pool to the top 10 candidates whose resumes the system ranks as the most relevant. Even if some good candidates get filtered out, recruiters still have a place to start. 

Better said, recruiters have a good "place to start" with the applicants who are lucky enough to win the ATS lottery and get through to a hiring manager. Those applicants may or may not be the best candidates.

PBS's "Ask the Headhunter" Nick Corcodilos said it best:

Unemployment is made in America by employers who have given up control over their competitive edge -- recruiting and hiring -- to a handful of database jockeys who are funded by HR executives, who in turn have no idea how to recruit or hire themselves.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

PBS's "Ask the Headhunter" Blasts Applicant Tracking Systems

I recently wrote an article critical of American companies' tendencies to use applicant tracking systems to seek keywords rather than allowing candidates to demonstrate potential added value to their bottom lines. I noted that the current hiring paradigm suffers a failure rate of up to 50%.

Today, ambitious job seekers have scant opportunities to walk into a company and make a pitch directly to a hiring manager. The personable aspect of hiring has been replaced with buggy software programs and cookie cutter online psychological exams that stigmatize creativity and innovative thinking.

Clearly, the American hiring paradigm is broken. PBS's "Ask the Headhunter" Nick Corcodilos has been quite outspoken on the subject. Here's one of his most thoughtful articles:

Last week, I published the 500th edition of my weekly Ask The Headhunter Newsletter, which I started in 2002. (Check the footer of this column if you'd like to subscribe. It's free.) Why does the newsletter keep going? Because America's employment system still doesn't work, and employers are clueless about why.

The emperor still has no clothes, and that's a big part of why over 25 million Americans are unemployed or under-employed. (According to the Business Desk, that's how many Americans say they want but can't find a full-time job.) Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 3.9 million jobs were vacant in September.

HR executives have a special term for this 6:1 market advantage when they're trying to fill jobs today: They call it a "talent shortage."

Gimme a break.

Human resources executives run around in their corporate offices with their eyes closed, throwing billions of dollars at applicant tracking systems (ATSes) and job boards like Taleo, Monster.com and LinkedIn, and they pretend no one can see they are dancing in circles buck naked. HR keeps talking about a talent shortage, but the only talent shortage is in the HR offices. HR executives need to learn how to match up the 3.9 million vacancies with some of the 25 million under-employed.

What's going on?

The economy is certainly one factor, but businesses, the media and the federal government continue to ignore the structural problems in our employment system. I'll tell you what I think the main problems are.

Companies Don't Hire Anymore

Employers don't do their own hiring, and that's the number one problem. They outsource their competitive edge (recruiting and hiring) to third parties like Taleo, Kenexa, LinkedIn, Monster.com and CareerBuilder. Monster and LinkedIn alone sucked almost $2 billion out of the employment system in 2012. These vendors offer little more than trivial technologies and cheap string-search routines masquerading as "algorithms" for finding "hidden talent" and "matching people to jobs."

HR executives are spending billions on those systems, so why are almost 4 million jobs vacant? Because these vendors sell databases -- not recruiting, not headhunting, not jobs, not hires and not matchmaking.

Somewhere, right now, the chairman of the board of some corporation is pounding the podium at a shareholders' meeting, exclaiming, "People are our most important asset!"

Meanwhile, HR executives are funding programs that mingle their companies' most important assets in databases shared with all their competitors via a handful of applicant tracking systems that can't get the job done.

Heads-up to boards of directors: Where is your competitive edge? Take control of your hiring again, like it matters!

Employers Don't Know How to Recruit

Here's how human resources departments across America "recruit." They put impossible mixes of keywords about jobs into a computer. They press a button and pay billions of dollars for a chance that Prince Charming will materialize on their computer displays. When the prince fails to appear, they double their bets and keep gambling. (Last year, companies polled said just 1.3 percent of their hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder. See "Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?")

Meanwhile, in the real world, over 25 million people, many of them immensely talented and capable of quickly learning how to do new jobs, are ready to work.

Employers need to get away from their desks, remove the ATS straps from around their necks, and go outside to actually find, meet, recruit, cajole, seduce and convince good workers to come work for them.

The Employment System Vendors Are Lying

The big job boards and the ATSes tell employers that sophisticated database technology will find the perfect hire.

• "Don't settle for teaching a good worker anything about doing a job. Hire only the perfect fit!"
• "We make that possible when you use more keywords for a job!"
• "The database handles it all!"

When matches fail to appear, these vendors blame "the talent shortage" and contend that job seekers lack the specific skills employers need.

Except that's a lie. Job descriptions heavily larded with keywords make it virtually impossible to find acceptable candidates. Wharton researcher Peter Cappelli tells about an employer that got 25,000 applicants for a routine engineering position. The ATS rejected every single one of them. Every day that an impossible job requisition remains unfilled, the employment system vendors make more money while companies keep advertising for the perfect hires.

Millions of jobs are vacant, thanks to the empty promises of algorithms. Ignoring the role of the systems behind this failure is a costly mistake.

If the U.S. Congress wants answers about the jobs crisis, it should launch an investigation into the workings of America's employment system infrastructure, which is effectively controlled by a handful of companies.

Employers Have No Business Plan

Employers claim job applicants lack the requisite skills and talents for today's jobs. But in "Why Good People Can't Get Jobs," Peter Cappelli reports that they are wrong. The quality of the American worker pool has not diminished. Rather, American companies:

• Don't want to pay market value to hire the right workers.
• Don't want to train talented workers to do a new job.
• Are content to keep using ATSes that don't get the job done.

Cappelli points out that employers believe they save money when they leave jobs vacant because their accounting systems track the cost of having workers on the payroll, but they fail to track the cost of leaving work undone. Employers run the numbers, and they seem to come up with junk profitability: Fewer Employees = Lower Costs = Higher Profits.

Employers who believe this are misguided or downright foolish. They should stop regarding workers as a cost, start treating them as investments and ensure that each worker pays off in higher profits.
Employers should get a business plan and make their employment systems accountable.

America Counts Jobs, Not Profitable Work

The federal government tracks the number of people who have jobs and the number of vacant jobs. But tallying jobs to assess the economy is like counting chickens before they hatch. The federal government has no idea which jobs or which work is actually profitable and contributing to a healthy economy.

It's no secret that the weekly employment figures are questionable and misleading. The definitions of jobs and "who is employed" are so manipulated that no one knows what is going on.

It's time to re-think how companies find and pay people to do work that produces profit. A better indicator of economic success would be the measure of how profitable all the work in America actually is -- and how much profit is left behind on the table each month when work is left undone.

People Must Stop Begging for Jobs

It's time for people to stop thinking about jobs, and high time to start thinking about how -- and where -- they can create profit.

For example, if I run a company, I'll hire you to do work -- if it pays off more than what I pay you to do it. Today, few employers know which jobs actually pay off. That's why you need to know how to walk into a manager's office and demonstrate, hands down, how you will contribute profit to the manager's business. That's right: Be smarter than the manager about his own business. Stop begging for jobs. Start offering profit.

If you can't do that, you have no business applying for any job, in any company. In the book "Fearless Job Hunting: The Interview -- Be The Profitable Hire" (available in the Ask The Headhunter Bookstore), I explain it like this:

A good employer wants to see what you can do. If he doesn't ask, help him out and show him. It'll turn your interview into a working meeting where you both roll up your sleeves, and during which the employer can do a direct assessment of your worth to his business. Here's how to say it:

"Please lay out a live problem you'd want me to handle if you hired me. I'll do my best to show you how I'd do the work so it will pay off for both of us."

Think you can generate lots of profit without working for someone else? Then bet your future on your plan, and start your own business.

What Is Going On

Here's the simple truth: Unemployment is made in America by employers who have given up control over their competitive edge -- recruiting and hiring -- to a handful of database jockeys who are funded by HR executives, who in turn have no idea how to recruit or hire themselves.

American ingenuity starts with the individual who has an idea, blossoms with a plan that will produce profit -- for yourself and your boss and your customer -- and results in more money for everybody.

So to be truly competitive, American employers must themselves do the hard work of identifying, attracting, recruiting, hiring and further training workers who can ride a fast learning curve without falling off. Outsourcing these critical tasks dulls a company's competitive edge.

Business leaders, the media and the government must revisit their assumptions that automated employment systems are the answer and that the problem is with American workers. Until the structural problems with these systems are addressed, those 3.9 million vacant jobs point to the harsh truth that American employers are a leading cause of unemployment.

"Unemployment is made in America by employers who have given up control over their competitive edge -- recruiting and hiring -- to a handful of database jockeys who are funded by HR executives, who in turn have no idea how to recruit or hire themselves." I couldn't have said it better myself. The American hiring paradigm is broken indeed.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Jobs Depression Year 6: More Americans Worse Off Financially

Gallup reports that, in the last year, more Americans have become worse off financially than better off. This revelation--five and a half years after the fall of Lehman--is just the latest evidence that our jobs depression continues. (Article continues after chart.)

For years, I've been calling this period of American history a jobs depression. Before calling me a Chicken Little for using the "D" word, please keep in mind that, while there's no official definition for "depression" in an economic sense, most economists call protracted periods of economic malaise "depressions".

And the last 6 years have absolutely been a protracted period of economic malaise.

Years after the economy bottomed in 2009, the epidemic of long-term unemployment and underemployment continues to afflict the American workforce. Incredibly, 5 years into "recovery", fewer jobs were created last year than the year before. And, as has been the case throughout this depression, the vast majority of jobs created last year were menial in nature. Very few new "breadwinner" jobs.

Keep in mind that the unacceptably tepid jobs recovery that we have had has been merely a result of the inflation of the Fed's latest asset bubble. The Fed's balance sheet just passed $4 trillion...that's 22% of the entire economy! The Fed has been feigning healthy economic growth for years by inflating what Nouriel Roubini is calling the "mother of all bubbles".

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

More Bureau Of Labor Statistics Data Manipulation?

Last month, I predicted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would remove from the workforce many of the 1.3 million Americans who lost their unemployment benefits this month. And that's exactly what happened. According to the BLS, 5 people left the workforce for every job added last month. And yet, the unemployment rate mysteriously fell from 7% to 6.7%.

The BLS, which is under investigation for data manipulation, has been proven wrong before. According to ZeroHedge, here's what the "headline" unemployment rate would look like if the bureau used the 30-year average labor force participation rate as opposed to its current 1970s rate. Keep in mind that this chart DOESN'T COUNT the tens of millions of UNDERemployed Americans. Lest we forget, a woefully insufficient number of "breadwinner" jobs have been created since the economy crashed.

Using the 30 year average labor force participation rate, we get a headline unemployment rate hovering between 11 and 12 percent. And, again, that doesn't count the tens of millions of Americans working below their capabilities. Gallup pegs the UNDERemployment rate at 17.2%. Recalculating the underemployment rate using the 30-year average participation rate, we get a number closer to 20%.

The BLS, of course, has been crushing down the headline unemployment rate by crushing down the labor force participation rate, as evidenced by the following chart:

Considering this next chart, it's highly unlikely that unemployment has dropped from 10% to 6% over the last few years, as the BLS has been reporting.

No Recovery For "Breadwinner" Jobs

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman has been quite outspoken about the Federal Reserve's role in collapsing the economy. Much of his new book, The Great Deformation, explains how the Fed led us into this economic depression and how our central bank is now inflating an asset bubble that will eclipse the mid-2000s housing bubble. This new, larger bubble, Stockman says, will eventually burst and crash the economy once more.
 
In The Great Deformation, Stockman frequently notes that the post-Great Recession "recovery" has been nothing but rampant Fed-fueled asset speculation. In Chapter 31, the former budget director explains that, while the speculation has been a windfall for the wealthiest among us, it's done next to nothing to improve the atrocious job market:

After the US economy liquidated excess inventory and labor and hit its natural bottom in June 2009, it embarked upon a halting but wholly unnatural “recovery.” The artificial prolongation of the Bush tax cuts, the 2 percent payroll tax abatement and the spend-out of the Obama stimulus pilfered several trillions from future taxpayers in order to gift America’s present day “consumption units” with the wherewithal to buy more shoes and soda pop.

But there has been no recovery of the Main Street economy where it counts; that is, no revival of breadwinner jobs and earned incomes on the free market.

What we have once again is faux prosperity. In fact, the current Bernanke Bubble is an even sketchier version of the last one and consists essentially of the deliberate and relentless reflation of financial asset prices.

In practice, this amounts to a monetary version of “trickle down” economics. By September 2012, personal consumption expenditure (PCE) was up by $1.2 trillion from the prior peak, representing a modest 2.2 percent per year (0.6 percent after inflation) gain from the level of late 2007. Yet half of this gain—more than $600 billion—reflected the massive growth of government transfer payments, and much of the rebound which did occur in private consumption spending was concentrated in the top 10–20 percent of households. In short, the Fed’s financial repression policies enabled Uncle Sam to fund transfer payments for the bottom rungs of society at virtually no carry cost on the debt, while they juiced the top rungs with a wealth effects tonic that boosted spending at Nordstrom’s and Coach.

The Fed’s post-Lehman money printing spree has thus failed to revive Main Street, but it has ignited yet another round of rampant speculation in the risk asset classes. Accordingly, the net worth of the 1 percent is temporarily back to the pre-crisis status quo ante.

Conservatives often scoff at the phrase "1 percent". But it's absolutely true that Fed liquidity pumping has been great for the wealthiest Americans but bad for the rest of us. The reason is simple: 1) inflation--a natural byproduct of liquidity pumping--is good for most investment classes but bad for nearly every other sector of the economy, and 2) the wealthiest among us have the majority of their net worth in investments that benefit most from inflation: equities, commodities, and real estate.

Needless to say, successful speculation in the fast money complex is not a sign of honest economic recovery: it merely marks the prelude to another spectacular meltdown in the canyons of Wall Street next time the music stops.

In the following subsection, Stockman details the sunset of American "breadwinner" jobs:

The precarious foundation of the Bernanke Bubble is starkly evident in the internal composition of the jobs numbers. At the time the US economy peaked in December 2007, there were 71.8 million “breadwinner” jobs in construction, manufacturing, white-collar professions, government, and full-time private services. These jobs accounted for more than half of the nation’s 138 million total payroll and on average paid about $50,000 per year—just enough to support a family.

Breadwinner jobs also generated more than 65 percent of earned wage and salary income and are thus the foundation of the Main Street economy. Yet after a brutal 5.6 million loss of breadwinner jobs during the Great Recession, a startling fact stands out: less than 4 percent of that loss had been recovered after 40 months of so-called recovery.

The 3 million jobs recovered since the recession ended in June 2009, in fact, have been entirely concentrated in the two far more marginal categories that comprise the balance of the national payroll. More than half of the recovery (1.6 million jobs) occurred in what is essentially the “part-time economy.” It presently includes 36.4 million jobs in retail, hotels, restaurants, shoe-shine stands, and temporary help agencies where average annualized compensation was only $19,000. This vast swath of the jobs economy—27 percent of the total—is thus comprised of entry level, second earner, and episodic jobs that enable their holders to barely scrape by.

The April jobs report exemplifies the dearth of good jobs. While April is historically the strongest month for hiring, this April saw a woefully insufficient number of jobs created, more than half of the new jobs in either the hospitality industry (think: bartenders, waitresses, etc.) or temp jobs. Again, that was in the strongest month for hiring 5 years after Lehman.

The balance of the pick-up (1.1 million jobs) was in the HES Complex, which consists of 30.7 million jobs in health, education, and social services. Average compensation is slightly better at about $35,000 annually and this category has grown steadily for years. Its increasingly salient disability, however, is that it is almost entirely dependent on government spending and tax subsidies, and thus faces the headwind of the nation’s growing fiscal insolvency.

When viewed in this three category framework, the nation’s job picture reveals a lopsided aspect that thoroughly belies the headline claims of recovery. A healthy Main Street economy self-evidently depends upon growth in breadwinner jobs, but there has been none, even during the bubble years before the financial crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported 71.8 million breadwinner jobs in January 2000, yet seven years later in December 2007—after the huge boom in housing, real estate, household consumption, and the stock market—the number was still exactly 71.8 million.

Stockman is saying what I've been saying all along: the economy hasn't been "right" since the Fed's tech bubble burst in the early 2000s. He's saying that all we've seen in the new millennium has been cycles of artificial booms and busts built on shaky fundamentals that have never allowed a full recovery of the job market. Stockman elaborates on the shaky fundamentals in the concluding paragraphs of the subsection:

The faux prosperity of the Fed’s bubble finance is thus starkly evident. This is the single most important metric of Main Street economic health, and not only had there been zero new breadwinner jobs on a peak-to-peak basis, but that alarming fact had been completely ignored by the smugly confident monetary politburo.

Alas, the latter was blithely tracking a feedback loop of its own making. Flooding Wall Street with easy money, it saw the stock averages soar and pronounced itself pleased with the resulting “wealth effects.” Turning the nation’s homes into debt-dispensing ATMs, it witnessed a household consumption spree and marveled that the “incoming” macroeconomic data was better than expected. That these deformations were mistaken for prosperity and sustainable economic growth gives witness to the everlasting folly of the monetary doctrines now in vogue in the Eccles Building.

To be sure, nominal GDP did grow by 40 percent, or about $4 trillion, between 2000 and 2007. Yet there should be no mystery as to how it happened. As has been noted, total debt outstanding grew by $20 trillion during that same period. The American economy was thus being pushed forward by a bow wave of debt, not pulled higher by rising productivity and earned income.

Indeed, the modest gain of 7.5 million jobs during those seven years reflected exactly this debt-driven dynamic and explains why none of these job gains were in the breadwinner categories. Instead, about 2.5 million were accounted for by the part-time economy jobs described above. On an income-equivalent basis these were actually “40 percent jobs” because they represented an average of twenty-five hours per week and paid $14 per hour, compared to a standard forty-hour work week and a national average wage rate of $22 per hour. Thus, spending their trillions of MEW windfalls at malls, bars, restaurants, vacation spots, and athletic clubs, homeowners and the prosperous classes, in effect, temporarily hired the renters and the increasing legions of marginal workers left behind.

Likewise, another 5 million jobs were generated in the HES (health, education, and social services) complex. Here the job count grew by 20 percent, but it was mainly due to the fact that the sector’s paymasters - government budgets and tax-preferred employer health plans - were temporarily flush.

However, these, too, were “debt-push” jobs that paid modest wages. While the steady 2.6 percent annual growth of HES jobs during the second Greenspan Bubble did flatter the monthly employment “print,” it was possible only so long as government and health plans could keep spending at rates far higher than the growth rate of the national economy.

Fed-fueled rampant asset speculation inflated the housing bubble, which burst and crashed the economy, making the prospect of securing a "breadwinner" job but a dream for many intelligent, educated, perfectly employable Americans. Now, the Fed is enabling what notable economist Nouriel Roubini is calling the "mother of all bubbles".

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

April Employment Increase: Nothing But Menial Jobs

Readers of this blog know that Washington's employment data should be scrutinized. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is notorious for crushing down the labor force participation rate in order to make it appear that the unemployment rate is falling, and the agency's survey methodology is fundamentally-flawed, according to a former BLS leader. But, even if you take the government's word on unemployment as the "Gospel truth", a 50,000-150,000 monthly net increase in jobs--as Uncle Sam has been reporting for years--is woefully insufficient. At this rate of increase--with the unemployment rate dropping by a tenth of a percent each month--, it would take until 2017 to get back to the lower end of the "full employment" range. And that's IF the economy has no additional difficulties and WITH the help of a crushed-down labor participation rate. And, that's if you consider 5% unemployment and 10% underemployment "full employment".

But the raw jobs numbers don't tell the full story anyway. What does it matter if 50,000 or 150,000 or even 1,000,000 jobs are created each month if the jobs are menial in nature? And make no mistake: we've been seeing for years little but a monthly increase in low-wage, low-skill jobs. The April jobs report showed more of the same.

The overwhelming majority of jobs created last month were in leisure and hospitality (waiters, bartenders, hotel employees, etc.) and temp jobs. Industries that actually produce something, whether it be information or physical goods, actually lost jobs:

There was a net decrease in jobs for Americans of prime working age, i.e. there was a net decrease in "career" jobs. But there was a net increase in jobs for Americans of prime restaurant worker and Walmart greeter ages:

In fact, the number of jobs for Americans of prime working age (i.e. career age) has been flat since the economy collapsed:

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Economy Creating Lost Generation

I don't seek out bad economic data; bad economic data find me. I gather data from numerous reputable sources, and, sometimes, reputable sources send them to me. One of these reputable sources is John Lounsbury, Founding Partner and Managing Editor at Econintersect LLC. This morning, John sent me the following article about the lost generation that the current economic depression has been creating:

The inordinate growth of student loans – and its effect on the economy – is killing consumption (autos) and the housing sector.  This is no short term dynamic, but will effect the economy for decades.

The USA is a consumer driven economy.  A study released this week authored by Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell stated:

As a result of tighter underwriting standards, higher delinquency rates, and lower credit scores, consumers with educational debt may have more limited access to housing and auto debt and, as a result, more limited options in the housing and vehicle markets, despite their comparatively high earning potential.

Both these factors—lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit—may have broad implications for the ongoing recovery of the housing and vehicle markets, and of U.S. consumer spending more generally. While highly skilled young workers have traditionally provided a vital influx of new, affluent consumers to U.S. housing and auto markets, unprecedented student debt may dampen their influence in today’s marketplace.

Some believe the lack of jobs is causing a higher than normal attendance in schools – but historical data from the BLS shows attendance appears moderating.

And there seems little correlation between the ability of the young to get jobs and enrollment in colleges / universities.

The student loan growth phenomenon seems to be directly related to cost inflation of education outstripping the general rate of inflation by significant multiples.  The following table is from a study by Jordan Bowersox and Jonathan Breazeale.

Yearly Cost of Colleges / Universities

This study appears to correlate well with the associated BLS education cost index.

It is interesting to this author that economists talk about the economic drag by the baby boomers on the economy, but yet ignore the built in drag of higher education on the economy.  The young are historically higher consumers than the old – yet the cost of education is weakening the ability of the young to consume.

It's important to note that ever-expensive higher education not leading to good-paying jobs not only prevents younger people from contributing to the economy as consumers; it impedes their ability to achieve life milestones that contribute to the economy: getting married, having children, etc.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

Keynesian-Monetarist Economist: Fed Responsible For High Unemployment

Keynesian-Monetarist Stanford economist John B. Tayor, an advocate of heavy Fed intervention in the economy, has come to believe that the Fed's ultra-loose monetary policy was responsible for the 2008 economic implosion and the subsequent protracted period of high unemployment. Furthermore, he believes that the Fed's "solution" to the economic depression and high unemployment we've experienced over the past 5 years, massive money printing and record-low interest rates, will ultimately result in additional harm to the economy and even more unemployment:

What's your assessment of the Federal Reserve's recent actions to help spur the economy? 

The Fed has engaged in extraordinarily loose monetary policy, including two rounds of so-called quantitative easing.

These large-scale purchases of mortgages and Treasury debt were aimed at lifting the value of those securities, thereby bringing down interest rates. I believe quantitative easing has been ineffective at best and potentially harmful.

Harmful how?
 
The Fed has effectively replaced large segments of the market with itself -- it bought 77% of new federal debt in 2011, my calculations show. By doing so, the Fed has created great uncertainty about the impact of its actions on inflation, the dollar, and the economy.

The existence of quantitative easing as a policy tool creates uncertainty, as traders speculate on whether and when the Fed is going to intervene. It's bad for the U.S. stock market, which should reflect the earnings of corporations.

You believe the Fed's mission needs to be changed.
 
The Fed needs to focus on a single goal of long-run price stability. We should remove the Fed's dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices, which was put into effect in the 1970s.

From 2003 to 2005, the Fed held interest rates too low for too long. A primary reason was its concern that raising rates would increase unemployment.

The unintended consequence was that low rates fueled the housing bubble, which in turn led to the recession and high unemployment.

More recently, the Fed has cited concerns over employment to justify its interventions, including quantitative easing. Removing the dual mandate would take away that excuse.

That came from a Keynesian!

Seth Mason, Charleston SC

The Falling Unemployment Rate Lie Visualized

If you get your business/economics news from sources outside of the MSM, you're likely aware that the BLS has been crushing down the labor force participation rate in order to lower the unemployment rate. But even the well-informed may not have seen a chart of the data massaging.

Washington has been selling the narrative that a population the size of New York City--approximately 10 million people--have thought that an economic depression would be a good time in which to either retire, stop looking for work, or reach working age but not even look for a job. As you can see, since the Great Depression, the unemployment rate has never fallen in tandem with the labor force participation rate like it has since the Great Recession:

America Remains In A Jobs Depression

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, business mogul Mort Zuckerman recently penned an editorial that argues that the United States remains in the depths of a protracted "jobs depression" that's far worse than the mainstream media reports:

Jobs! President Obama has set a record. In his speech to Congress on Tuesday, he uttered the word "jobs" more than in any of his previous four State of the Union addresses. His 45 mentions were more than double the references to any of the other policy ambitions encapsulated in his speech by such words as health, education, immigration, guns, deficit, debt, energy, climate, economy, Afghanistan, wage, spend or tax (the runner-up).
If only the president's record on unemployment were as good.

After four years America remains in a jobs depression as great as the Great Depression. 

Notice that Zuckerman said "as great as the Great Depression". Comparisons of this economic depression to the Great Depression are apt.

But the crisis isn't seen in that light because the country isn't confronted daily by scenes of despair like the 1930s photographs of bread lines and soup kitchens and thousands of men (very few women then) waiting all day outside a factory in a forlorn quest for work.
But the jobless are still in the millions across the land, little changed in their total since the 1930s: 12.3 million today officially fully unemployed compared with 12.8 million in 1933 at the depth of the Depression.

Yes, the U.S. population is much larger now, but 12 million out of work still means 12 million lives devastated. And that number masks the true vastness of the modern disaster.

The jobless today are much less visible than they were in the 1930s because relief is organized differently. Today in the "recovery," the millions are being assisted, out of sight, by government checks, unemployment checks, Social Security disability checks and food stamps.

He's correct: Entitlements are the new soup lines. Not seeing the desperate masses doesn't mean that they don't exist.

More than 48 million Americans are in the food-stamp program—an almost incredible record. That is 15% of the total population compared with the 7.9% participation in food stamps from 1970-2000. Then there are the more than 11 million Americans who are collecting Social Security checks to compensate for disability, also a record. Half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers; today it is one for every 16.

Such an increase is simply impossible to connect to direct disability experienced during employment, for it is inconceivable that work in America has become so dangerous. For many, this disability program has become another form of unemployment compensation, only this time without end.

But the predicament of our times is worse than that, worse in its way than the 1930s figures might suggest. Employers are either shortening the workweek or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Neither those on disability nor those on leave are included in the unemployment numbers.

I've repeated this line a number of times: the government and the MSM discount the fact that there's a quality component to jobs as well as a quantity component. Not only is the aggregate number of unemployed people worse than reported, but the majority of jobs created during this depression have been of the part-time, menial variety.

The U.S. labor market, which peaked in November 2007 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak. The only work that has increased is part-time, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.

The broadest measure of unemployment today is approximately 14.5%, way above the 7.9% headline number. The 14.5% reflects the unemployed and three other categories: the more than eight million people who are employed part-time for economic reasons (because their hours have been cut back or because they are unable to find a full-time job), the 10 million who have stopped looking for work, and those who are "marginally attached" to the workforce.

In its latest report, Gallup, a very reliable source, reported that the underemployment rate is north of 19%:

The labor-force participation rate has dropped to the lowest level since 1981.

It reflects discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force. If it were not for the dropouts, the formally announced unemployment rate would be around 9.8%, not the headline 7.9%.

Sometimes the employment numbers that are announced are simply not understood. January was supposed to have seen 157,000 jobs created. The news provoked relief and even enthusiasm in some quarters. But the supposed hiring was based on seasonally adjusted numbers—numbers adjusted to reflect regularly occurring shifts in employment, such as increased hiring of farm workers during crop harvests or retail employees after Thanksgiving. The real, unadjusted figures for January show that nearly 2.8 million jobs disappeared, which happened to be worse than the 2.63 million lost in January 2012. Even though the 157,000 jobs created were fewer than the 311,000 of January 2012, many commentators cheered because they don't understand the effects of seasonal adjustment.

So there is no solace in the statistics. Job seekers are only one-third as likely to find work as they were five years ago, and a record number of households have at least one member looking for a job, which affects everyone. And most of the newly available jobs don't match the pay, the hours or the benefits of the millions of positions that have vanished.

It typically takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of the downturn. Yet this time, more than 60 months after employment peaked in January 2006, nonfarm unemployment is still more than three million jobs below where it started.

Sobering stuff.

Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that recovery cannot become self-perpetuated until the unemployed get good jobs and resume contributing to consumer spending at their maximum potential. Unfortunately, many of the long-term unemployed aren't finding jobs; they're falling off of the radar screen.

I can't stress this enough: Those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves among the ranks of the perennially jobless typically face a lifetime of depressed earnings. (One study suggests that long-term unemployment can cut one's lifetime earning potential by as much as 20%.) The longer that the job market remains bleak (remember, it's been 5 years and counting), the more people fall into the category of long-term unemployed, whether or not the government counts them as such. In the short term, that means a drag on the economy. In the long-term, that means the creation of a new underclass.

Seth Mason, Charleston SC