South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Rortybomb considers the relationship between recruitment intensity and mass unemployment.

The collapse of recruitment intensity helps us understand several things. First, the issue of how job openings are increasing while wages aren’t. The research notes that “[i]ncorporating a role for the recruiting intensity index also improves the stability of the Beveridge Curve and yields a better fit to data on the job-finding rate for unemployed workers.” This helps us understand some small movements in job openings in the Beveridge Curve while other measures of supply-constraints in the labor market aren’t going off.
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The second issue it helps us understand is a common media story we see — the story of the boss who complains about the workforce but doesn’t want to raise wages. Dean Baker likes to point out these stories as lacking economic sense. This shows that employers not trying very hard to fill empty jobs, even on non-wage margins, is a general phenomenon.
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Finally, it explains why you or your friends and loved ones are having such a hard time finding a job even when you see advertisements for a perfect job that never seems to be filled. It is probably not much comfort to understand that this is a national phenomenon, one we have the tools to fix but that Republicans in Congress, bank regulators, and the FOMC are not willing to address.