It seems all you need to get hired in America today is a pulse, and a COVID-19 vaccination. Employers are lowering most traditional standards for new employees, like background checks and education or experience requirements. Meanwhile, employers are being forced to limit the pool of employees they can hire to the vaccinated. Lauren Weber and Chip Cutter report in The Wall Street Journal:
Loosening requirements opens opportunities to some of the nearly two-thirds of American adults who don’t have bachelor’s degrees but may have the skills or aptitude to perform many well-paying jobs.
The shift may already be narrowing the gap in unemployment rates between college graduates and those without degrees. In October, the jobless rate for workers with only a high-school diploma fell to 5.4% from 5.8% in September, according to the Labor Department. The rate for college graduates dropped to 2.4% in October from 2.5% a month earlier.
Employers and economists are divided over whether the changes are temporary. “When you have a labor market like this, it’s not uncommon for employers to start relaxing hiring requirements,” said Jason Tyszko, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Center for Education and Workforce. “When the market tightens up, and they can reintroduce some of those additional requirements, that tends to happen.”
On the other hand, a shrinking American workforce could recast hiring practices. The U.S. labor force has declined by millions since the Covid-19 pandemic, and some economists say workforce participation rates will never return to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, more employers have reconsidered the value of college-degree requirements, focusing instead on skill-based hiring.
One consequence of such a shift would be to draw formerly overlooked applicants into the workforce. “That’s the silver lining in all this,” Mr. Tyszko said.
Companies absorbing workers with little experience may have to spend more time on training. And some of the newly hired may find they don’t like the work. Yet in the tight labor market, businesses already struggling with employee turnover may have little choice.
In retail and fast-food industries, keeping employees for even 90 days is difficult, human-resources executives said, one reason some companies offer bonuses to workers who stay on the job that long.
Open call
In 2019, when the U.S. unemployment rate hovered around 3.6%, The Body Shop introduced a pilot program at a distribution center in Wake Forest, N.C., to remove nearly every hiring requirement, from drug tests and background checks to education and work experience.
The company said it was trying to address inequality by opening positions to workers seeking a second chance or needing extra support. It consulted with Greyston Bakery, a business in Yonkers, N.Y., that has used open hiring for decades. More than 200 seasonal employees came aboard.
Last year, The Body Shop expanded open hiring to all seasonal entry-level retail jobs. Since its launch, the rate of performance-related terminations of people hired in the pilot program has been about the same as the rate among people hired through the routine screening process, said Nicolas Debray, The Body Shop president for the Americas.
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