During COVID, laypeople learned about the R0 parameter, which is the number of subjects that can be infected by a single individual during his or her entire infection period.
R0 becomes dangerous when it is greater than or equal to 1. It means that one person infects two people. In this article, the subject is not a viral agent, but a behavior that has negative consequences. And there are deniers on this topic too, but they make much less news. Fortunately, the R0 of this behavior does not imply virulence, but it must be kept an eye on.
As a risk factor here we do not have aerosols and proximity but a mix of ignorance, market dynamics and cognitive biases.
Instead of social distancing and personal protective equipment, here we need cultural rapprochement, which also reduces a bit of ignorance in good faith and a corporate protector, Enterprise Statistics in this case but others can be found.
Below is the graph of a search key that can trace the R0 of the context, therefore a lookalike variable (proxy):
As anticipated, even if the curves have to do with something else, we do not have an exponential phenomenon, but timidly linear, therefore potentially manageable without drastic measures.
This is not a new phenomenon, you can find articles older than 10 years
A study (Modestino, Shoag, Ballanca, 2019) showed that the phenomenon of “ridiculous” job posts is linked to the unemployment rate, and the great recession raised it in various countries. But even when the rate went down, the habit of inflated requirements remained more or less.
This is to say that there is probably an excess of supply, but not only at an aggregate level, therefore for all jobs: my university faculty, even before 2020, spoke of x new graduates, in Italy, against y required for our degree profile. I don’t remember the numbers exactly but there was an excess, on the supply side, of more than 25%. Surely those paid courses to “become a data analyst in 3 months” are worsening the excess, with the difference that those who come from there, hopefully, have preferential entry into certain large companies.
In a 2017 study, Fuller and Raman argue that educational inflation is undermining the competitiveness of the United States and harming its middle class.
Bottom line: higher unemployment leads companies to ask for workers with more degrees, skills, even if they are not needed, and this also leads to unnecessary costs. A paradox.
All of us males know another area where the imbalance between supply and demand leads those who create the demand to become more picky: relationships. And just as in the apps for finding relationships, those who deal with human resources often do not know how to use GPT to write the job post, nor the site they use to post the ad, nor do they know how to set up the algorithms to filter the candidates.
But if trawling does not work with relationships, why should it work with finding workers? In this case the metaphor means creating job posts with an unreasonable number of required skills.
If you want a figure like a data analyst or data scientist, start with the company symptoms that make you think you might need them, not the skills that even an entire department doesn’t have. I can help you recognize those symptoms in a free call and help you write a job post.