[eru]

> In fact, a recent survey of 1,500 job candidates by the staffing firm Aerotek found 70% of people find their current job search more difficult than the last, even though people are more qualified than before.

I wonder how much survivorship bias is in there?

If the job market is strong, then people who are candidates now are only those left who have a harder time finding a job?

Or simpler: you'd expect the reported difficulties of the average person who's currently out of a job to stay roughly constant; a really good economy will shrink that population of people. (Ie people as a whole are better off on average, but the average of that specific, and shifting sub-group won't change much.)

[Retric]

Different kinds of people find jobs more and less easily as the job market shrinks or grows.

The young grad with 2 years of job experience looking on the west coast vs the 45 year old with 20 years of boring enterprise crud on the east coast see very different things when markets are loose or tight.

Critically people experience each job market differently as they move between buckets. This happens even if not that much time passed. The guy who retired early at 45 then got bored and starts looking at 50 is just in a wildly different position.

[ianbicking]

That does seem like it would be a problem! Like if you imagine 50% of people have an easy time (1 month search) and 50% have a hard time (2 months) and each person had two searches with no correlation:

The groups will be 25% each, ie .25 EH, .25 EE, etc., if you track only people who start looking for a job during the first month of their search. In the second month it will be 50% EH and 50% HH. So a total of 3/8 EH, 3/8 HH, 1/8 HE, 1/8 EE. Or 3/8 bad, 1/2 same, 1/8 better.

[ghaff]

Hard time = looking for the better part of a year or more. Not 2 months which is pretty common outside of the tech boom.

[ianbicking]

The numbers are all made arbitrary/simple just to check if the general property is true: even if there's no change in the market, if you sample job seekers you will find more people who feel the job search is harder because a hard job search means you are on the market longer and more likely to be surveyed.

[ghaff]

Yes, but a market where it takes a month longer vs. a year longer probably implies different behaviors.

[eru]

So my original comment was to the effect that the average job seeker you can interview will always skew towards being that guy who's taking a year to find a job.

But 'that guy' will change: many more people will be 'that guy' during a downturn, than during a boom.