One More Reason You Can’t Find a Job

Posted on | November 5, 2009 | No Comments

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly Productivity and Costs report which revealed that, in the nonfarm business sector, worker productivity was up 9.5%, worker output was up 4%, and the cost of labor was down 5.2% during Q3 2009.  In the manufacturing sector, productivity increased 13.6%, output increased 7.7% (in spite of a 5.2% drop in hours worked), and labor costs fell 7.1%.

This is great news for employers, business owners and investors, but not so great for job-seekers.

Hourly compensation is rising at a slower level than compensation, which means our employed brethren are jacking up employers’ productivity expectations and lowering the bar on compensation required to land top talent.  Think about it.  If your business was hiring, would you pay more for the same level of productivity.  Of course, we’d all argue that we can produce even more than current employees, but that would be a tough argument since many of us have been producing nothing but sighs lately (5.4M people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more).

That’s disappointing.  But, that doesn’t mean that talented, qualified people cannot or will not find jobs.  It just means that employers are in fighting form now.  They’re down to just those employees that they need, just the few who produce the most, and they can now be very, very picky about when and who they hire, and how much they’ll pay.  Any job-hunting strategy or tactic that you employ must take this into account.  You must convince employers that you can continue the trend–doing more with less–while simultaneously convincing them that you’re worth more based on your ability to, and demonstrable history of, increasing productivity and/or improving the quality of production.

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