CareerBuilder had a new survey out today, and on first glance, it will make you cringe.
Here’s the headline: “More Than Half of Unemployed Workers With Job Offers Said the Pay Was Over 25 Percent Below Previous Salary.”
Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well perhaps, but could it be possible that as bad as that sounds that it is simply a reflection of our free market system at work?
According to a new survey from Personified, the talent consulting arm of CareerBuilder (and I’m sorry they are not making it available so I can link to it here), unemployed workers may be eager to find a new job, but many are opting to hold out for a better offer. It details the following:
“Employers are adding jobs at a gradual, but steady pace and workers are feeling a greater sense of optimism in their job prospects,” said Mary Delaney, President of Personified, in a press release about the survey. “Rather than jumping on the first job offer that comes their way, workers are assessing which opportunities really make the most sense for them in terms of compensation and long-term potential.”
While all of that is certainly true, this survey underlines something we all also know to be true: with a glut of unemployed workers available, employers are low-balling many of them when they have job openings and are offering a lot less money than the workers were previously making.
In response, some workers (those who can afford to wait for something better) are opting to pass on the low-ball job offer and wait until something that pays more comes along.
I’m not sure how many unemployed employees are actually that picky, but one shouldn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that there is something wrong with organizations offering unemployed people less money than they were getting before.
They are simply doing it because of the law of supply and demand; that is, there’s a huge supply of workers and not a huge demand for them. That means that the price of those workers – the wages or salary they are paid – goes down.
No one working today likes to hear that, but it is no different than when we encounter a glut of anything, whether it be bananas or big-screen televisions. When supply overwhelms demand, the price goes down.
I even heard the CEO of a company I used to work for make this point when he was asked about what a company-wide pay cut was doing to morale. Wasn’t he worried about employees leaving?
His response was simple: where are they going to go? Where are the jobs they are going to jump to if they are unhappy here?
He was right about that, of course, although I always felt that such an attitude wasn’t good for employment engagement or keeping your best people around in the long-run. And as we’ve seen from other surveys, such an attitude simply delays the day of reckoning when employees DO have other jobs they can jump to.
But in the short term, all of this simply shows that our free-market system is alive, well, and working. I remember all too well the other side of this coin – the hiring frenzy during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s — and although I don’t expect to see that again anytime soon, I don’t remember many workers complaining about all the jobs floating around back then.
Yes, this survey just reinforces that our system works, bad times or not. As painful as it is right now, we should at least take solace in the fact that it will eventually turn around again – because that’s what a free-market system is all about.
