August may have disappointed labor analysts with its unexpectedly low count of new jobs, but for recruiters, the evidence out of Washington and elsewhere says recruiting difficulty is only going to get worse.
Nationally, it took 24.9 business days (Monday-Saturday are business days for this report) to fill a job in July, according to the Dice-DFH Vacancy Duration Measure. That’s a bare tick off June’s 25.1 days. Meanwhile, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, put July’s openings rate at 3.3, a 22 percent increase over the 2.7 in July 2013.
What these numbers mean is that the average number of of openings, expressed as a percent of total employment, is increasing. Or, to put it more simply, the number of open jobs is creeping up.
With the size of the labor force shrinking, it’s no wonder that it is taking longer and longer to fill a job.
Now Wanted Technologies, which analyzes online job postings from corporate sites, job boards, and elsewhere, found that for the most in-demand jobs, as determined by the number of ads posted online, job posting time alone can be more than double the national average of time to fill.
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. 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, which uses the time it takes from the announcement of a job opening to an offer being accepted, says July’s 24.9 average was almost 9 percent longer than in July the year before.
For some industries, the time to fill can be 50 percent 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.