I can say that its not because demand for labor isn’t out there. But the actual process of matching employers and staff has been a train-wreck for a while. My HR department gets thousands of applications a day that are pure spam. We get deluged with solicitations from headhunters who serve up any warm body with a half-written resume. I can point to half a dozen people we did hire who were hired and gone inside a few months, because they were either incapable of doing the work or just fucking around looking for the next rung on the ladder.

There’s a certain paralysis that comes with trying to find candidates in a river of shit. In the end, we tend to pull directly from college through our Analyst Development Program or through contractors without non-compete clauses, because its easier than fishing in the scams pond.

When you do find people qualified in the wild, its like hitting a gold mine. The folks who have been on-boarded successfully will often bring on two or three people behind them, simply because managers trust them to find like-minded and like-talented people.