Nurses and computer professionals continue to be among the most sought after workers, with open jobs taking weeks or even months to fill.
While the national average to fill a job in July was 24.9 business days, jobs for in-demand occupations can take twice as long just to advertise. Wanted Technologies, which analyzes online job postings from corporate sites, job boards, and elsewhere, says the typical job posting for a nurse stayed up 50 days. For a software developer, it was up for 47 days.
Not surprisingly, these jobs also regularly appear on Wanted’s list of the top 10 most in-demand, meaning there are more ads for these jobs than for any other of the hundreds or thousands of positions advertised monthly. Joining them in August were ads for truck drivers, which stayed up 55 days on average, customer services reps, retail managers, and marketing managers.
The Dice-DFH Vacancy Duration Measure says it is taking longer today than at any time in more than 10 years to fill jobs. Created by University of Chicago economist Steven Davis, the index measures the time it takes from the announcement of a job opening to an offer being accepted. The average time has been creeping up. July’s 24.9 average was almost 9% longer than in July the year before.
For some industries, the time to fill can be 50% or more above the national average. Hiring information workers — a category weighted with computer occupations — it took 38.7 business days to fill a job in July.
As these indices and measure lengthen, demonstrating the challenge employers have in hiring qualified workers, one of the broadest-based measures of job openings — the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ JOLTS data — offers little evidence that the situation will do anything but continue to get tougher.
The most recent report for July showed the average job openings rate at 3.3. In July 2013, the national average was 2.7. The numbers are the number of vacancies on the last business day of the month, expressed as a percentage of total employment.
Every one of the industry categories had a higher percentage of openings in July than they did the year before. The data itself isn’t very granular, but even at the broad levels reported by the government, it’s clear that recruiting workers is getting harder on a monthly basis.
