Help Needed

A week ago today we got a look at the latest employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Click here to see what we wrote regarding the strong report.  While parsing through the data, it became clear that the labor market is very tight.  But then another report issued by the BLS subsequently, and Atlas couldn’t help but add another note on employment.

Let’s start by looking at a couple of factoids found deep within the original employment situation report before touching on the second release.  Available workers in the American economy without a high school diploma are becoming scarce.  As of July, the unemployment rate for this cohort is 5.1 percent.  Put another way, 94.9 percent of willing workers with less than a diploma have a job.

Another buried statistic standing out in the first report calculates the number of willing workers who don't have a job.  The BLS estimates 6.3 million are classified as unemployed in July.  This is a decline of 284,000 versus a month earlier.  Here is where things get even more interesting.

The second report produced by the BLS measures, among other things, the number of job openings in America.  Their most recent estimate, as of Tuesday, suggests some 6.7 million jobs available in America.  In other words, every unemployed person could technically have a job and employers would still be looking for another 300,000 workers.  Technically is the key word here.  You see, one of the primary issues hiring managers face today is the gap between technical skills required to meet the needs of a job and the knowhow of the unemployed workforce.

Complaints about labor quality are at all-time highs according to another indicator Atlas follows.  In the June National Federation of Independent Business release (see our note on it here), 87 percent of those small businesses surveyed reported few or no qualified applicants for their open positions.  Help is wanted by companies across the nation but for a large segment of Americans looking for a job, help is needed in order to compete in today’s labor market.