Why Good People Can't Get Jobs

Why read it

• You will see how the simple view of hiring, find a candidate and pay the wage, differs from the real job market
• You will stop believing that young workers lack basic skills, a claim the statistics contradict
• You will understand how a long chain of hiring hurdles screens out many good candidates

Who it is for

• A job seeker who keeps being rejected despite good skills
• An employer with vacancies that stay open for months
• A policy maker deciding whether to fund more skills training

Contents

1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. A Failure of Imagination
4. Chapter 1: Why Aren’t the Vacancies Being Filled?
5. The Home Depot Syndrome
6. A Real-World Job Market
7. Competition for Jobs in the Market Is Relative
8. Chapter 2: The Skills Gap Debate: Deconstructing Demand
9. Myth: Employers can’t find workers with adequate skills to fill available jobs.
10. Myth: Employers can’t find workers willing to take jobs at the going wages.
11. Myth: Skill shortages are only part of the problem. Employers must also deal with a lack of knowledge and experience.
12. Myth: Even when workers are skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced—and the pay is commensurate with talent—they are often reluctant to go where the good jobs are.
13. Chapter 3: Workforce Facts and Myths: Parsing Supply
14. Myth: Students lack the basic competency needed to succeed in the workplace.
15. Myth: Public schools are failing their students, their families, the nation’s employers, and society as a whole.
16. Myth: Not enough Americans are graduating from college.
17. Myth: Even among college graduates, too many didn’t major in fields where the jobs are.
18. Myth: As we enter a knowledge economy that will demand ever more sophisticated skill sets for survival, things will only get worse.
19. Chapter 4: Something Is Wrong with the Hiring Process
20. Software-Driven Hiring
21. Beat the Software
22. Hiring by the Numbers
23. Chapter 5: A Training Gap, Not a Skills Gap
24. The Skills Standoff
25. The Enemy of the Good
26. The Real Skills Failure
27. Chapter 6: The Way Forward
28. A Not-So-Novel Idea: Developing Skills on and for the Job
29. Flying Blind
30. Money Talks
31. About Wharton Digital Press
32. About The Wharton School

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