The Hot Market for Jobs No One Wants

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Growing up in a small town in Kansas, Danielle Norwood loved listening to the radio. But she didn't predict it would become her career. I had an opportunity to babysit for the general manager of a radio station in town. He said, you have a really interesting voice. Have you ever thought about getting into radio? She gave it a try and soon she was hooked. She started out as a board operator and worked her way up the radio ranks in Salina, Kansas. Back in the day, you're pushing commercials and you would give the weather. And I actually had a radio show, so I was playing records.

1:46Eventually, she moved to Topeka to host her own talk show. By last fall, she was nearly 40 years into her radio career and hosting an award-winning morning show for a local station. But last November, her station told her they were letting her go. She was disappointed, upset, but she thought that given her experience, she'd be able to get a new job at another station before too long. And I wasn't even going to just stay in just Kansas or the central area. I was open to going anywhere to get a good job. How long did you expect it to take to find a new job? It was in the holiday season. So I thought, you know, maybe by the end of January, I would be doing something radio related.

2:38And when that didn't happen, I'm like, okay, well, wait a second. So my next thought was, OK, I've got public relations experience. I could do marketing. I have all these other things that are a part of being in broadcasting that I could apply for. But as weeks turned into months, Danielle started to get demoralized. Nobody was even thinking to give me an interview. After a long time, it really, your ego takes a hit. She realized she might have to pivot. When all of the rejections had gotten into the hundreds, like maybe this is not working for me. She started looking at jobs she'd never have considered before, jobs outside of radio and marketing.

3:26And Danielle is one of many job hunters right now in that position, who are navigating a uniquely challenging time in the American labor market. Bloomberg's Mike Sasso says, Some of them are expanding their job search in ways they wouldn't have expected. I think when you do see people line up to be traffic flaggers and you hear that jobs at recyclable centers are much more easily filled now, it's a sign that things are rough out there.

3:59I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, inside an unusual dynamic playing out in one corner of the American labor market, jobs once considered undesirable are suddenly seeing higher applications and lower turnover.

4:19Mike Sasso covers the economy for Bloomberg. And to get a pulse on how the economy is doing, he looks at things like the unemployment rate, sure, but also at less formal indicators of how real people are experiencing the economy right now. And a few weeks back, an interesting data point caught his eye. Indeed, the big giant job board just put out some news about Christmas, Thanksgiving, kind of holiday season jobs. They're able to monitor, you know, how many people click on seasonal job postings on Indeed. And they were showing a spike. A nearly 30 % spike year over year in clicks on seasonal job postings on Indeed.

5:05Sometimes you just operate on hunches as a reporter. And seasonal jobs, by their nature, are kind of your second choice. Most people would like to have a permanent job. So I just got to wondering. Wondering if there are other jobs that are typically hard to fill that might now be seeing more interest. A lot of these are blue-collar-oriented roles that I happen to know that they have very high turnover rates. They often have something that makes them less appealing. Like, stereotypically, the waste industry, solid waste, can be a difficult role to fill. Traffic flaggers, you're kind of out there flagging traffic in 30-degree weather or 95-degree weather, and often for 12 hours at a time.

5:53The military, for example, it's a job that it can be dangerous, obviously. You can be torn away from your family for months or, you know, a year on end if you're deployed. So high turnover, potentially dangerous, unpleasant, temporary, and lower pay are some of the... That's pretty much, you pretty much wrapped it up. There was something unappealing about these jobs that would require a second look in a kind of a weaker market. And sure enough, there was some evidence that they are seeing more interest in more applications. Waste management companies are reporting higher employee retention rates.

6:32According to the solid waste giant, Waste Management, turnover among garbage truck drivers is at an all-time company low. Military branches are reaching their recruiting goals ahead of schedule this year. And traffic flagger companies, who send people to direct traffic at construction sites, are having a good year too. Two, three years ago, the head of an Atlanta flagging company was sort of lucky if he could get 10 applications a week. And so he's now getting up to 80 a week, which is a six or seven fold increase. I don't want to overplay it and say that people are lining up and banging down the door to get into solid waste jobs or to be traffic flaggers.

7:12But at the least, they're telling me that some of the real strain they saw from a couple of years ago has alleviated. The head of the Atlanta-based traffic flagging company told Mike he's gotten so much interest, he's actually starting to be more selective about who he hires. He used to basically hire anyone who could pass a drug test and pass a certification test three, four years ago. Now he's only able to hire 15 percent of the people applying to be traffic flaggers. A 15 percent acceptance rate is as selective as the top U.S. universities admissions for their first year classes. Some of the other jobs Mike is tracking are more traditional, but they have certain features that economists call disamenities that make them less appealing.

8:00Jobs like substitute teaching. It's a hard role to fill. I know they have historically had high vacancy rates. It's really irregular work, generally low pay,$17,$18 an hour. I can remember flicking staples at the substitute teachers or shooting spitballs back in the day. I can tell you everything I'm nervous about because it's not in my comfort zone to be in charge of a bunch of kids. That's Danielle Norwood again. After she was laid off from the local radio station, she spent months applying to job after job. And when nobody got back to her, she started thinking outside the box. She drove Uber for a while.

8:45She'd already been doing that to supplement her radio income. But she found that she couldn't make a living from it. So this summer, she decided she'd apply to get her teaching license and become a substitute teacher. It's the only thing where the door is open. they still need a lot of substitute teachers to help out. She can see the disamenities clearly. No paid time off. No health insurance. Lack of consistency. So, I mean, there's all these considerations to have to think about. And it's like, well, do I really want to do this? And I'm not getting what I used to get. But at the same time, I need to check.

9:26A little money is better than no money at this particular point. According to the latest median wage data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, substitute teachers make about$18.50 an hour.

9:40Coming up, how the labour market got to this point, and what it means for the economy.

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10:48Bloomberg's Mike Sasso has been tracking how traditionally hard to fill jobs are starting to get a lot more appealing. It's a sign that employers are back in the driver's seat. Used to be there was this concept about three years ago or something, it was called labor hoarding. And it was basically the concept that employers had had such a hard time filling roles during the pandemic that even if things slowed down and they were a little top-heavy with people, they were not going to let workers go. It was a great time to be an employee. We saw wage rates rise 5 % a year. Pretty much that's all gone away now.

11:26It's gotten ugly out there. That ugliness in the labor market is showing up in economic data in subtle and not so subtle ways. The unemployment rate is somewhat, economists will say that it's somewhat misleading because there has been this low hire, low fire phenomenon going on, which basically means there's very, very little hiring. You're seeing people sit in the unemployment line for six months, eight months, nine months. The rate of hiring is actually at recessionary levels. So while the unemployment level at 4.3 % is still fairly low, the rate at which companies are filling roles is at recessionary levels.

12:09And so that makes it extremely hard to get a job. Now, there's a metric where they study how long unemployed people have been unemployed. And about 26 % of unemployed people have been out of work for about a half year, over a half year now. That's a very high level. It's one of the highest in the past decade, excluding, of course, the pandemic when things are off the charts. But I think what it says, it's a sign of how challenging it is to find work right now. Workers' confidence about finding a new job is also waning. A recent Harris poll conducted for Bloomberg found that nearly half of employed respondents said it would take them four months or more to find a job of similar quality if they lost their jobs today.

12:58For a widening pool of American workers, that's not a hypothetical. Companies from Amazon and Target to UPS and Starbucks have collectively announced tens of thousands of layoffs this year. My colleague just did an article. He studied something called a WARN notice. When companies make a mass layoff, they're supposed to notify their state government. And it shows up in these things called WARN notices. And he noted that in October, nationally, there were some of the highest readings for WARN notices in the past 20 years. What we talked about earlier is the fact that the power dynamic had switched from the hands of workers into the hands of employers.

13:41What would it take to actually reverse that dynamic again? Boy, that's hard to say. I mean, you'd have to have some shock. I mean, certainly everyone's kind of watching immigration right now. And some of the data has shown a disappearance, at least from the labor rolls of something like two million workers. and there has been a lot of confusion over the impacts of that. And certainly, if those industries are potentially at risk of losing a lot of manpower, that kind of a shock to the labor market could put power in the hands of workers if there's some major shortage. I mean, that would probably be limited.

14:23There are certain roles like construction, like hospitality, you know, hotels, of course. those who would be likely to see it first. In the meantime, job seekers who are flocking to jobs that haven't always been desirable can take comfort in knowing that even if they're not full-time with benefits, they might have a better chance of being around for the foreseeable future. That's because it's harder to replace them with AI, unlike some of the jobs that have been eliminated recently. We have seen some companies specifically acknowledge AI and automation being a factor And some actually mentioned specifically targeting some roles for automation.

15:05And so some companies seem to be taking advantage of the increases in automation in AI right now to reduce their costs. It's a little bit worrying if you're caught up in that. And so we're kind of watching to see how much of that happens. It's just a passing phase. Danielle Norwood is trying to look on the bright side. She took her licensing exam to teach in the state of Missouri. And she just got her score back. Which was 96.15, which I was screaming to Jesus because it was almost like for me taking the bar. It was not an easy test to take. She's working on getting her Kansas license now, too.

15:45And soon she'll be able to start teaching. And while subbing isn't her top pick of jobs, there are aspects that Danielle says she's looking forward to. being able to hopefully influence kids and to let them know that there are people cheering for them. And if they have challenging situations, because I grew up in a challenging situation too economically, but you don't have to be the situation you're in. You could always rise above and push through. And I just hope to be a lot of that for the kids that I deal with.

16:21This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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