perspective employees are not meeting the standards of the businesses they apply to work for.
Some of this is the government's fault. They require licensees or certifications that many feel are unnecessary. I saw this first hand. For a job I've been doing for 15 years, I suddenly was incompetent until I received this new certification. It cost me 2k and over a 100 hours. Imo it is a money grab.
This should lead to increased wages. If the available labor pool is shrinking, then companies will need to offer more competitive pay. It could also lead to quicker adoption of automation.
If pay does increase it could coax people to reenter the job market.
I've noticed the phenomenon of government getting more involved as well. Past a very limited point, restrictions on workers only serve to make the economy less efficient.
I also suspect a lot of the problems with unemployment and discouraged workers come from workers who can't pass a drug test. While many companies fully support barring pot-smokers from working for them, that can mostly be blamed on the policies of insurance companies. Insurance itself is only a problem because of a judicial system where any idiot who slips on some stairs or spills their coffee can take you for millions.
If I was an employer I would not want to hire a meth-head, but for some basic office work I wouldn't care less about some guy to smokes weed or drops some acid on his own time, as long as their work was good. Its just unfortunate that insurance companies treat all of those people as being the same level of liability.
Our insurance company requires us to drug test. I'll ask applicants of they require additional time prior to the test.
It's a dumb standard but there is nothing I can do about it.
What does this say about employers, perspective employees, and the types of jobs? It would be easy to take this at face value and assume its a good sign.
Since the BLS only considers someone unemployed if they have applied for a job in the last 4 weeks, this would imply that businesses would rather hire nobody than the people applying, or that the people applying are fighting over a very small portion of those openings.
This leads me to believe that some businesses are not offering enough money for starting positions, and/or perspective employees are not meeting the standards of the businesses they apply to work for.