I saw these two articles going viral, but I think they are related or causal:
You’re Not Imagining It—Job Hunting Is Getting Worse
The “men dropping out” epidemic is possibly related to society becoming too hard, whether it’s home ownership, finding decent-paying jobs without a degree, student loan debt, difficult dating market, etc.
There are so many hurdles–especially for average people without exceptional, sought skills or talents or infinite patience–that they just say ‘fuck it’ and either move in with parents or other family, move in with friends, go on disability, or drop out of society in other ways.
Employers are always talking out of both sides of their mouths. They signal they want more workers yet are more choosy than ever in terms of pre-employment screening. It’s like someone who wants to work at McDonald’s has to go through a huge gauntlet of background checks , interviews, and tests, yet companies insist there is a shortage. It’s like you have to pass the equivalent of a CIA background check or be smart enough to qualify for MENSA to flip burgers or work at a rental car company. Maybe try lowering the requirements a bit. And then once you get the job, it’s more requirements and rules. A lot of low-skilled ppl would rather just not work than deal with all that crap for a minimum wage job.
There so much pre-employment screening, such as:
-Multiple interview rounds
-Phone interviews (which you must pass in order to get a ‘real’ interview)
-Drug tests (understandable, yet also another hurdle)
-Personality testing/inventory
-Cognitive screening (such as the Wonderlic, which is sometimes called a ‘personality test’, but it’s an IQ test)
-Background checks
-Automated resume filtering/screening
It’s understandable why such hurdles and screening exists. It’s perfectly rational for companies to be choosy. Firing is hard, and a bad employee is not just a waste of time, but also a liability. Yet from the perspective of the job seeker, especially for mediocre, unskilled men, the proposition is unappealing. Hence, alternatives such as ‘hustles’ (such as making videos on YouTube touting cryptocurrencies or gambling them with whatever money can be scrounged from family and credit cards) or just dropping out.
For all the talk about DEI and wokeness at the workplace as evidence of lowered standards, employers are still very picky. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. is often invoked as an example of companies abolishing IQ testing or IQ testing for employment being illegal, which is a common misconception. Companies have many ways to screen for ‘socially desirable traits’, many of which are effectively IQ tests or correlated with IQ in some way, such as background checks. Or exclude men who fail to fit within a certain politically correct mold or are ‘too disagreeable’. And compared to decades ago, the number of roadblocks has only increased. Studies from the ’90s and ’80s ago that purport ‘low correlations between IQ and job market success’ are based off of old data, before many of these filtering mechanisms came into effect.