Attention Economy


Wednesday, March 17, 2021

US Labor Market - Oddities and Puzzles

Knowledge workers who could be productive at home had an easier time than retail employees and small-business owners.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/condoleezza-rice-on-the-pandemic-year-the-inequalities-of-american-work-11616159166

The Curious Case of Hard-to-Find Workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-17/the-curious-case-of-hard-to-find-workers
Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research Inc., speculated March 11 in a note to clients that if workers are hard to find, it could be that their skills don’t match employers’ needs, or that people who could work are choosing to survive on extended unemployment benefits instead”.

Educated Men Are Finding More Degrees Don’t Always Bring More Jobs
 
The Role of Job Screening Technologies:
Tackle the Big Problem with Hiring Workers in 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/opinion/ai-employment-bias-nyc.html
Over the past few years, an increasing number of employers have started using artificial intelligence and other automated tools to speed up hiring, save money and screen job applicants without in-person interaction. These are all features that are increasingly attractive during the pandemic. These technologies include screeners that scan résumés for key words, games that claim to assess attributes such as generosity and appetite for risk, and even emotion analyzers that claim to read facial and vocal cues to predict if candidates will be engaged and team players.
In most cases, vendors train these tools to analyze workers who are deemed successful by their employer and to measure whether job applicants have similar traits”.