They're not in our labor force now, particularly an issue that's affecting staffing, especially if you're feeling jobs that are typically lower skilled is that we have an incredible mismatch of the kind of jobs that we're creating in this country versus the people that are available. All of this demand for people that, as I said before, really don't exist right now. But when you see it graphically, it really is kind of mind blowing to see. Ron Hetrick: So that's the one thing you keep hearing over and over again, is these astounding numbers of job openings. And when you're missing 5 million people, what used to be a tremendous amount of job openings that we've considered record breaking 7 million prior to COVID kind of becoming a thing in March of 2020 we've blown that number completely out of the water. Ron Hetrick: Basically, what it equates to is you have 5 million people that were missing from our labor force. And this is not only here, it's happened in a couple other countries as well, but it's particularly acute here in the US so when you have this labor force participation rate that goes down. Issues affecting staffing of all kinds is that our labor force participation rate went way down once COVID kicked in and then it got stuck. Ron Hetrick: So, really one of the biggest drivers. Why are we in this kind of acute pain? Now, this is not my normal demographic drought speech, but I am going to kind of break down the core things that seem to be hitting us right now. Ron Hetrick: This is just a couple slides, but just to make sure I know that a lot of people out there are kind of in a bit of a frenetic energy that you know, what's happening. So before I go in and start to talk about, you know, the data itself, let's get an understanding for just what's happening right now. Now I travel around the country and join news programs, constantly talking about the issues of why we don't seem to have many people around to employ right now. That article pretty much changed my life. Ron Hetrick: We published this article called the Demographic Drought of which I was the lead author.
A lot of what's going to guide our conversations today is the least of the lessons I've learned basically throughout my career about what seems to matter to people. Ron Hetrick: I've been on every side of it. At one point in my career, I spent a significant amount of time designing rate cards, consulting on rate cards, publishing basically approaches to how you do rate cards. They kind of evolved beyond me as the years went on, but kind of did that and then oversaw that as a product director for the data science team. Ron Hetrick: I then spent 20 years at the allegiance group working to kind of start most of the market analytics functions that were there in that company. Apparently not that many jobs that we're adding came out of the group that I was supervising. The one that comes out every month and tells you how many jobs we've added, or if it's recent months. Ron Hetrick: My background, I spent eight years with the bureau of labor statistics in Washington, DC.
So first off, who am I? You know, who are you talking to right now? Ron Hettrick, I'm a senior labor economist and the director of staffing products here at Emsi Burning Glass. Ron Hetrick: To basically this is about kind of winning business, getting higher bill rates. I'm going to be walking through a little bit of what it looks like to kind of pull data together and show it to clients. I'm going to be talking a little bit about economics, a little bit about data, what to show people.