hiring alex smith

I play fantasy football, and as a part of that I am aware of a specific player that in my opinion illustrates a major factor impacting the national employment situation today.

The San Francisco 49ers had the first pick in the 2005 NFL draft, and they used the opportunity to draft Alex Smith.  While I don't watch college football, I do know that he had a strong couple of years with the University of Utah and received some votes for the Heisman trophy.  The 49ers certainly felt he had something with him to pick him first overall.

In the next five or six years Smith would be considered something of a bust.  He almost always played just well enough to stay the starter, but no one would think that his play ever justified a place in the first round or two of the draft, let alone first overall selection.  In fantasy, people would chuckle if someone dared to draft him as anything more than a low-level backup for their imaginary team.  No one really took him seriously as anything other than a game manager for a team that relied on its defense for wins.

While most people figured the issue was with Smith, part of the problem was that Smith had five or six offensive coordinators and offensive systems in the same number of years.  This meant that he had to essentially relearn how to do everything every year, and readjust to a system that may or may not be a good fit for him.

Before the start of the season last year the team hired Jim Harbaugh as the head coach, who just happened to be a former quarterback.  I do not know what specifically happened in the coaching process, but the evidence indicates that Harbaugh was able to help develop Smith's potential like other coaches and coordinators were unable to in the past.  In that year Smith's play improved dramatically, and his performance showed more intelligent decision-making.  This is to the point where Smith started a streak of passes without an interception toward the end of the season that surpassed any similar streak any other quarterbacks on the team have ever had.  Those other quarterbacks include Joe Montana and Steve Young.  That streak has continued this season, and he has not thrown an interception yet.  The team is widely considered one of the likeliest to reach the Super Bowl this year.

I think this points well to something that doesn't get enough attention today.  Potential workers need to be developed, and businesses need to bite the bullet and accept that.

The narrative that has taken hold in the last few years in relation to the job market is that jobs are available and there are job shortages in places, but there is a serious mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skillsets of job seekers.  This, I have read, is the a major factor for the high unemployment rate.  As a fake example that mimics what I have read, a business that makes airplane parts might state that they'd be happy to hire welders, but they just cannot find any who are qualified to weld aluminum parts.  I don't completely agree with this assessment, though.

A few months ago I read an article, and I unfortunately cannot find it now, that disputed this narrative.  It stated that there is always a bit of a jobs/skills mismatch in the economy, and there is no real statistical evidence that the mismatch is larger now than at more prosperous times.  The notion is popular because both liberals and conservatives can use it to push their particular agendas.  Those who are more liberal can use this narrative to push for more education funding, and those who are more conservative can use this narrative to shift the responsibility for the jobs situation from business to the incompetence or laziness of the those who are out of work.  At the risk of beating up a couple of strawmen I would like to look at these scenarios.

The education argument has a little bit of merit, but most of it falls apart when you really think about what the narrative implies.  It essentially states that the education system itself fails to get people into a gainfully employable state.  If this is the case, the idea that simply pouring more money into that system will solve anything is naive.  A lot more could be said about this education argument, but that's not where I want to focus.

The other argument that the potential employee pool is simply inferior interests me more, though.  Businesses have always had to expect new hires to go through some learning curve.  Perfect candidates rarely exist, and when they do they typically command top dollar.  The expectation that, even in a weak jobs market, you can be picky enough to demand a laundry list of areas of expertise and experiences with different scenarios and technologies so that you don't have to develop the new hire, then offer a low-ball wage is ridiculous.

What a business is really saying when they say there aren't any qualified candidates is that they are not capable of developing the candidates that are available.  Either that, or they're simply unwilling.  That may be true, but it is also a red flag that those businesses might not acknowledge their role in creating and nurturing star workers, and might be shirking the responsibility to develop them at all.

This is a problem because in the new economy the jobs that require little training are also the ones that will be the easiest to automate, and these jobs will therefore cease to exist.  It's possible that the remaining important roles will go unfilled, or there will be a lot of people playing the role of an undeveloped 2005 Alex Smith who can sort of but not really do their job rather than being a 2012 Alex Smith who is a borderline rock star.

I think a lot of businesses have noticed that some employees get training then leave once they have been fully developed, and that is why those businesses are hesitant to hire someone who needs some development.  I have seen the same thing happen several times myself where someone worked just long enough to get past the learning curve only to leverage that new knowledge to find a role somewhere else.  I do believe, though, that if a business gains a reputation for one that is constantly developing its employees, and also gains a reputation of not downsizing half the company when hard times hit, that this will ultimately lead to retention and recruitment of long-term employees who will give the business a return on those resources spent in development.

In conclusion I believe that workers and businesses share the responsibility that the worker be up to the task of doing their job.  If there is a skills mismatch and a business cannot find people who have the requisite skillset, that is not the fault of the pool of workers that they do not have those qualifications.  It is a failure of expectations that developed people would be ready and waiting.  In that scenario, it is the business' responsibility to find people who can be properly developed to have the needed skillsets.  The companies that know how to identify diamonds in the rough and develop them will find that there are a lot of 2012 Alex Smiths available to be discovered.  Those companies will outperform the ones who decide not to bother with hiring their own Alex Smiths in the first place.