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When the economy and job market began storming back, we were inundated with inbound requests for our services. Our perseverance seemed to be paying off. Except now we were hit with a new gut punch: “The Great Resignation.” Now our workers were reticent to come back to work. And if they did accept a job, they’d often leave after only a few days.

As in the workers you placed, employees of 70MR? Why would they leave after a few days? Can you expand on this?

It became obvious that we lacked the resources to weather this new storm while hoping and praying the world would normalize soon. (It still hasn’t.)

What does normalize mean to you (or 70MR)?




Going to third the "need more information on this."

Are they job hopping, in which case wouldn't that also be a revenue stream for 70MR? Did they find that it was such a sellers' market that they didn't need 70MR's services to get good jobs anymore?

I never really understood this "shortage of workers / great resignation" phenomenon to begin with, so perhaps this specific situation would be a good one to use as a concrete example.


I would imagine the recruiting company that provides the placement only gets paid after the employee has been with the company for a certain period of time.

The same way companies offer a bonus to current employees if they recommend some for hire and they maintained their employment for 90 days or so.


From their website, employers pay $135-$145 per 1 month ad. Which is very reasonable, I current pay Indeed over $3k a month for 1 job listing (based on a daily sponsor rate).

But if the applicant pool is bad with the majority quitting then I could see employers leaving the platform.

https://www.70millionjobs.com/page/pricing


Or if the employer pool is bad and workers leave as soon as they find better options.


I would also like more information about this phenomenon.

What’s the scale of this? For example, how many people accepted a job and then quit within a few days?

How did it impact these people’s lives? For example, did this result in increased recidivism? If so, at what scale?


I had a conversation with an HR friend of mine recently. According to her, she is inundated with fake requests for unemployment from people that never worked at her employer. Or people join, then quit promptly and apply for unemployment. This is in California.

I would think the state would have protections against this type of thing, but maybe not.


The sibling comment includes a link to the requirements, but UI in California looks at your total income for the past twelve months. Quitting after a couple days wouldn't help.


You have to be "unemployed through no fault of your own" to be eligible for unemployment.

https://edd.ca.gov/en/unemployment/eligibility/


Yes, that is the law. A nanny I employed in CA had put her two weeks in with us, then the last day of work she no-showed last minute. With two working parents you can imagine how well that was received. Anyhow, I told her to not come finish out her last day. So then she applies for unemployment a few weeks later. I got a notice from EDD and responded to it with the facts around her unemployment request, thinking surely they will deny her. There should have been two flags on her request: 1 - she quit, 2 - she no-showed the last day. It was processed and she was granted 26 weeks.

I think they are so overwhelmed at EDD that her request was just pushed along through the process. There are so many stories of fraud at EDD that you have to wonder how much time the claims processors are spending on each application.


You can appeal the ruling, all the way up to presenting your case before a judge(at least in AZ).


Probably hard to justify spending the time to pursue it in most cases.


I have and do, otherwise my unemployment insurance rates rise the following year, if that isn't a concern for you then sure. I also only fire for cause.


I have heard CA EDD is now sending out some letters requesting more information. They are probably backlogged, but they might respond.


That's what I thought. Turns out constructive dismissal, choosing to quit due to poor conditions or breach of contract, qualifies for unemployment. I'd have quit a couple jobs way sooner if I'd been aware.

My claim in CA was approved in 2020; I don't recall if that language was on the page or not at the time. Although I never got paid anything due to ID verification failure later in the process (clogged phone lines meant I never learned the reason, I gave up after a few weeks and a couple snail mails).

I was also fired in 2016 and paid out at that time, having told the UI interviewer that the employer didn't follow their dispute resolution process (breach of contract, in retrospect).


> You have to be "unemployed through no fault of your own" to be eligible for unemployment.

Technically, yes, but the system is so overwhelmed in many locations that unemployment requests are almost automatically approved. You have to work hard to appeal it after the fact and a lot of employers just give up.


The Great Resignation is curious, if I could speculate maybe it was the pandemic bailout and markets bubble (crypto too) making people think "I've got money now!". Now that everything is tumbling down, I wonder if people will start returning to work. Except now most businesses have seemingly stopped hiring yet again (even retail/hospitality?), so I guess whichever way it goes, OP is in trouble.


> The Great Resignation is curious, if I could speculate maybe it was the pandemic bailout and markets bubble (crypto too) making people think "I've got money now!"

I dunno if it’s even about money. The pandemic and the way it was handled REALLY messed with a lot of people’s heads. I’d say a not insignificant number of people had what amounts to a religious awakening of sorts. I’ve seen it myself, several people just deciding to make drastic life changes out of the blue.


how large was the "pandemic bailout"? it looked like two checks from the govt and < 1 year of increased (doubled?) unemployment. seems like a total of $8,000 or less for most people, with a wide variance from person to person.

Was this enough to make a large number of people stop working, even now into mid-2022? I really feel like the impact of several thousand dollars would be gone after a year, at most. yet many businesses near me are still under staffed and having trouble hiring.


I often read /r/povertyfinance, and they were not hiding the fact that it was a damn bonanza. Most people made it perfectly clear that they were doing very responsible things with the "free" money, but you know...

A lot of people for various reasons have never seen more than a thousand or two in their checking account at once (typically, from tax refunds). So, 8000 is a once-in-a-lifetime amount of wealth. It's sad to think of what's happening at a higher level of course. The government was borrowing money on behalf of everyone and telling everyone to go spend it. Thanks, uncle, I wasn't stupid enough already.


What does that have to do with people no longer wanting to work shit jobs in 2022? If anything this should increase the incentive to work as that money is already spent and the government hasn’t been handing out any more


I don't know how it relates, but I feel compelled to mention the PPP loan program as the largest part of the "pandemic bailout". It was $400 billion dollars in loans given out and forgiven with no repayment, to individual business owners and self-employed persons just as much as corporations. The average "loan" was just under $100K.


The idea that it's caused by "bailouts" is just a talking point. Personally I think it boils down to a few things:

1. Older people taking retirement early when the pandemic hit.

2. People in service/public-facing industries leaving for jobs that could be done remotely, or going back to school.

3. Several hundred thousand working age people dying from COVID.


For 3:

a. The official number is ~254,000 (in the USA) which is certainly a major over-estimate. True number is certainly far less.

b. Employees who died or retired don't count as resigned.


https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

Can you point me to your source(s) indicating the lower number you’re referring to?


https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Then summing the 18-65 buckets (working age).


For 3: the vast majority of those who died were over 60.


4. People have woken up to the current form of slavery called Capitalism. For a start, if the Govt wanted people to succeed they would teach law at school and update the public with the latest case law and legislation every few months, but the fact is, that doesn't happen, ergo the righteous can inflict their sadism on the uneducated, just like religion is psychological warfare on the uneducated.

It all boils down to survival of the fittest and history repeatedly shows and the the US Govt & US Mil demonstrates, violence always wins the day.


Direct Payments was part of the story.

I saw more than a few people that when from 2 income house holds to 1 because of Student Loan payment defers and the increase cost of Child care made is possible for one of the parents to just stay home..

We also sadly lost a lot of people to covid, and many older people have chosen to retire rather than return to the office.

I think these 3 things are more impactful on the employment market than the direct payments


$4T in total spending, plus debt/rent forbearance which effectively adds on top of this.

You're forgetting the child tax credit as well, which was effectively a monthly stimulus check for many, and student loan forbearance, which nets out to something like $10B/month in increased consumer spending power


The great resignation was mostly about us who could survive a paycheck or two, leveraging the chaos to demand our value: if the current employer wouldn’t pay it, others would. We didn’t hesitate to move and make the previous employer pay for their neglect of us.


I manage IT for an office and one of our hires said they got covid, took a month to join, and then when she showed up her manager decided to move her desk. I think maybe I got the desktop and a monitor moved before I was told to stop because she just quit. I can think of maybe 3 people in my office that have stayed for over a year, none on bad terms, just hopping jobs.


This seems like it relates a lot to the bizarre structure of hiring and salaries. You need to get any job and then any other employer will offer you a ~20% better one but no one will match inflation the next year let alone give you what they would offer if you worked somewhere else.


I was really impressed with my employer this review period. I got a 17% raise. Other people I talked to got similar raises.


Back to the way it was pre-pandemic. I work for a Fortune 100 company with great pay and fantastic benefits (I am on a 6 week paid sabbatical right now). But whereas before people would stay with the company for 5-10 years, now they are leaving in droves (not because anything bad is happening at the company, we are doing great) and nobody is sticking around.


Yes.. but we are talking of people leaving after a few days, this is not the great resignation here.


Looking at some of the jobs on 70m I see listings for dishwashers, line cooks, etc. I had these jobs in my youth and saw plenty of people leaving in days or weeks. Post-pandemic I can definitely see people leaving these jobs quickly for a whole host of reasons.


> I am on a 6 week paid sabbatical right now

Here in Europe we call that vacation.


Well, I have enough vacation saved up that I could take 2 and a half months of vacation. That, plus my sabbatical, plus the 10 days of holidays we are given a year, plus the week off we get each summer means I could take nearly 5 months of vacation. On top of that, we get every Friday off as a paid day between Memorial Day and Labor Day (June-August).


> On top of that, we get every Friday off as a paid day between Memorial Day and Labor Day (June-August).

That's pretty neat and not common here.




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