Myth: High-skill Vacant Jobs

There will always be some flux in staffing levels, an unfilled jobs level of 8,000 in a corporation of 80,000 employees shouldn’t be surprising.  Employees  change jobs for a myriad of different reasons; corporations also may also find the need to create new positions.

This analysis got buried in an earlier blog.

Here are some Vacancy Rates for IT related firms from the 2006 – 2007 era.

Hewlett Packard = 0.81
IBM = 0.58%
Microsoft = 4.85%
EDS = 0.97%
Google Internet = 8.44%
Cisco = 2.33%

In fact, the average of 30 companies with supposedly large Vacancy Rates averaged 2.27%.  Two vacancies in one hundred seems reasonable to me, especially from my experience of sitting on hiring committees, filling a position can easily take six months. Paralyses by analysis tends to prevail on hiring committees.

30 U.S. Companies With Job Most Openings for Skilled Positions
(click image to enlarge)

The “job opening” source data for the table above came from the pro-immigration think “Nationational foundation for American Policy” (NFAP).  I went to Yahoo Finance to find the size of each corporation, and then simply found the Vacany Rate for each Corporation.

The NFAP source data (published Jan 2008) was collected over 2006 and 2007 found 140,233 open jobs in a 13 page list of S&P 500 companies.  The following Unemployment rates and levels are included below for those with Bachelor’s degrees and above.

Unemployed College Graduates for the period in question:

December 2007 = 2.2% (972,000)

January 2008 = 2.1% (953,000)
February 2008 = 2.1% (944,000)

Series Id: LNS14027662

Seasonal Adjusted
Series title: (Seas)
Unemployment Rate – Bachelor’s degree and higher, 25 yrs. & over
Labor force status: Unemployment rate
Type of data: Percent
Age: 25 years and over Educational attainment: College graduates

When the H-1B immigration pundits throw-out tidbits of data in the media, they always seem to leave out information required to make an infomed opinion.  In this case, the number of employes per open position.