Profusion of job seekers no boon to employers

The $8.50-per-hour job, which requires some heavy lifting and ideally a background in factory work, has attracted candidates with either too little experience or far too much, said John Kazousky, sales and engineering manager for Perma-Cast.

"Very few people have applied, roughly between 12 and 15 total," he said. "It goes from the very young to the elderly, but nothing in between."

Reba Weiner, human resources administrator for Export-based flooring company Karndean International, tells a similar story.

Over the past month, 14 people applied for a warehouse associate position. Few had experience running a forklift, some lacked adequate transportation and one candidate -- a college graduate living in Virginia -- sought far more pay than what was advertised.

"I understand the economy is bad but you shouldn't, if you see a $10-per-hour position, say 'I want $35,000 to $45,000 per year,' " Ms. Weiner said.

No one doubts that it's challenging to find a job in a labor market where laid-off professionals with advanced degrees compete with entry-level candidates fresh out of trade school for positions that may not have been either of their first choice. But what may come as a surprise is that the overabundance of talent hasn't been the boon one might think it is for employers either.

Considering there were eight unemployed or underemployed Pennsylvanians available for every open position in the state in July, according to a recent Keystone Research Center report, it would seem businesses are in a position to cherry pick from mountains of applications.

But many companies are either hiring professionals with highly specific technical or business skills or seeking entry-level candidates whose experience levels indicate they won't leave as soon as a better opportunity opens up.

Vera Krofcheck, director of the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board, said these "skills mismatches" are a primary reason that companies aren't finding the job candidates they seek.

Also, the trend toward companies completing as much work as possible with a limited number of employees has trickled over to hiring, where human resources representatives look for candidates with skill sets that go beyond traditional job titles.

"A lot of employers, since they reduced talent, need people with broader skill sets," she said. "A welder can be a welder, but has to be able to understand the job that machinists do or be able to run equipment that machinists run."

The workforce investment board sponsors several programs for employers designed to help upgrade staff skills. They include working within team environments and basic computer training before and after employees are hired. An on-the-job training program was designed to focus specifically on building technical skills.

But there haven't been many companies taking the board up on the offer.

"A number of programs are available, but what we need is to hear a demand from employers. We need to hear from them that [training] is the issue and this is what I'd like to do about it," said Ms. Krofcheck.

Keystone Research's "The State of Working Pennsylvania" report calls inadequate government intervention a greater factor in the unemployment crisis than candidates' skill sets, but the report also recognized a need to revamp unemployment compensation to include job training.

"The current U.S. system of unemployment benefits still looks basically like it did in the 1930s, paying people a portion of their lost wages with the [implicit] expectation that they don't need re-skilling because they are going to their old job," the report said. "In fact, they are not going back to their old job in most cases."

On the flip side, too much education has been an issue for thousands of highly skilled candidates.

More than 21 percent of the 12,190 people set to exhaust 99 weeks of unemployment benefits in Allegheny County in July had previously worked in professional or business careers, according to the Investment Board.

With their backs against the wall, many have been applying for service and industrial positions that would at least help them pay the bills for a while.

Employers have mixed reactions to such job candidates.

Ms. Weiner worries that an overqualified employee might not stick around long for a $10-per-hour warehouse job. But Matt Reimer, UPMC's director of talent acquisition, said the health system is open to those candidates because of a potential for growth in the organization.

Employees working with the health system for one year have the opportunity to transfer to open positions that might better suit their talents. He said several employees in the hospital's patient transport division have used the position as a pathway toward work in their field of study.

"Folks view it as an opportunity to get into the system, to learn the network we're running and to meet leadership that can help them get into a full-time nursing position," he said.

Like many other employers, UPMC uses background and reference checks to screen potential employees before bringing them on board. While these have become a staple of most help-wanted ads, Ms. Krofcheck said credit checks and even requirements that an employee must currently be working to apply for another job are becoming more common among small companies.

She said the extra checks serve as "insurance" against candidates who are desperate for money and could potentially steal or work multiple jobs without regard to the hiring company's schedule. But such requirements also sap the advertising budgets of small businesses who post the same positions week after week and dismiss hundreds of honest, hard-working candidates who have fallen on hard times.

"Hopefully, they can learn that people with credit problems aren't necessarily bad people. That's all of us at some point," she said.

Training and hiring policies aside, Allegheny County would have still needed nearly 10,000 more open positions to give all 44,000 unemployed residents a chance to work in July, according to Investment Board stats. And with national unemployment figures remaining flat at 9.1 percent, there's little indication the county will see those extra jobs anytime soon.

When and if those jobs are created, the winning regions will be those who emphasized re-training their unemployed residents when times were hardest, said Mark Price, co-author of the Keystone Research report.

"While we're in the downtime, if we search for new job training programs tied to what employers need in the local community, people will be unemployed a lot less longer," he said.

"It would be a benefit to individuals, but it would benefit society as a whole."