There is still significant job loss, but the economy seems to be recovering from the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. That fact that the economy may be recovering does little to console the millions of people who are laid off and having found any prospects for new employment. Nevertheless, according to an article in the New York Times, we may be experiencing a jobless economic recovery.
As in the past whenever there were massive job layoffs, employers have often decided they could function just as efficiently with fewer staff members. This is an embedded tradition where employers try to work on the cheap, until the discovery that they are both overloading their current employees and not functioning as well as first assumed. Then the hiring begins again. By then, sometimes competitors have recruited skilled workers and it is more difficult to find the employees with the skill sets you need.
Nevertheless, there is a model for the jobless economic recovery. In 2001, payrolls were still declining a good two years after the economy itself came back from a recession. However, a fair amount of the job layoffs were due to the recession. A certain amount of the layoffs were due to outmoded jobs in outmoded industries. Certain industries or at least sectors within the industries are obsolete. That being said there are new challenges in alternate energy and the technology that is being developed and will need to be developed. There are industries expanding to accommodate the challenges of the environment and the infrastructure. Will one set of modern job skills compensate for the outmoded jobs? It is difficult to say. But there is definitely movement.
There will be to some extent a new set of background checks to satisfy the updated demands of an employer’s preemployment screening program. There will be a need to assess not only employee aptitude and skill sets, but potential. Recruiting will not be merely job placement. Recruiting for industry, like recruiting for industry will require investment in time and resources into employee so that will continue to upgrade their skill sets and grow within. Testing for employee potential will become increasingly important.
As for the jobless recover, like most things, no one really knows for sure. In fact, the only thing we do understand is that we really don’t know all that much at all.
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