[haidut]

Talent shortage and sucker shortage are not mutually exclusive. In fact, there is good evidence that the former can drive the latter. Basically, most of the talentless people also tend to lie about their experience, educational background, knowledge level, previous salaries, career preferences, etc to compensate for their lack of talent. It does NOT work of course, most of the time, but what do they stand to lose? So, when this goes on for some time the HR departments start to assume everybody is a talentless, lying, P.O.S. as it is simply cheaper and less taxing on corporate resources to go with that assumption if the majority of interviewers truly are like that. Yes, they may miss a star here and there, but they will also save themselves an HR-wide (and beyound) burnout and a ton of wasted money. I will be the "negative Nancy" in this thread and say that unfortunately there has been a drastic drop in IQ scores around the world over the last 30 years. https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/iq-scores-have-be...

That is bound to manifest itself in the generally quality of prospective employees. The term "idiocracy" takes that idea to the extreme...but unfortunately is not far from the truth. In my experience, a general rule of thumb in Fortune 500 HR (and even large federal agencies) is that a star will almost never apply directly through the front door. There will be either recommended by a trusted insider or will find an ingenious way to demonstrate their talent. For all the rest, the assumption (mostly correct) is that they are junk or at the very least significantly overrating their self-professed abilities/talents/worth/salary/etc. So, what looks like a sucker shortage is simply the trend for lower value default offers most HR departments will put out there based on the (reasonable) assumption of the (low) quality of the person up against them.