Expert says there aren’t enough people to fill the large number of open jobs

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - Employers across the country are having trouble hiring right now. Even with plenty of jobs and positions available, the unemployment rate remains low.

The latest reporting from the Alabama Department of Labor shows a 2.6% unemployment rate. Most people have jobs, yet positions remain unfilled.

“There’s such a wide gulf between the number of job openings and the number of unemployed people,” said Ty West, Editor-In-Chief of The Playbook which helps business owners grow and protect their businesses.

He says jobs are going unfilled because there’s not enough people to fill them.

“You have a large generation of Baby Boomers who are exiting the workforce,” he explains. “You have a relatively smaller Generation Z entering the workforce.”

Those numbers, he says, don’t add up.

“The situation we’ve been in for the past decade or so is, two large generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials, relatively speaking just in sheer numbers, those are pretty large generations,” explained West. “You had them sandwiching Gen X which is a small generation. Once you flash forward ahead, the Baby Boomers get out, you’re going to have two small generations sandwiching the Millennials in the middle which is larger. That alone is going to make it harder to find talent.”

West says employers need to get creative and some are already doing that.

“They’ve started going to nontraditional places and they’ve really started focusing a little bit more on workforce development and career training and upskilling,” he said.

It’s only going to get more difficult to fill open jobs in the coming years so West says employers need to prepare now.

“It’s really going to challenge businesses and they really need to be thinking now about what their talent pipeline looks like five years from now,” said West.

He goes on to say the dynamic of the hiring market is one of the contributors to inflation right now. Some employers are increasing pay in hopes to fill these open positions.

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