During a recent month in the U.S. — say, July 2012 — 4,229,000 people found work. But, at the end of that month, there were still 3,664,000 job openings that remained unfilled.

This happens month after month. The traditional explanation for this last fact is that employers are just unable to find job-hunters with the skills the employer was looking for.  Oh, my! This claim bears closer examination.

Ask employers what kinds of “skills” they are talking about, and often you will discover they mean such things as, “I needed someone with experience in using social media for marketing my product with 24-27 year olds.”  In other words, they are not talking about “skills,” in any traditional, historic use of that word. They are talking about experience. And why is that so important to them? The answer is Time.

Employers, generally speaking, are anxious to shorten the time between hiring and when the employee starts to be productive.  They haven’t the patience to train the person or to allow them to learn on the job. Time is their issue; and thus it is that while a pool of trainable employees may be available in their geographical area, who could be trained or learn on the job, employers haven’t time for this.

But that’s not the whole explanation of why 3,664,000 job openings remain unfilled at the end of a month.  The burden for discovering those vacancies and applying for them, rests more and more — in this 21st century — on the shoulders of the job-hunter.  But they, again, haven’t time. Therefore they tend to use what they already know — outmoded 20th century job-hunting methods to discover vacancies — rather than taking the time to learn how to search in the 21st century.

They, typically, try to inventory the job-market, instead of first inventorying themselves —doing a fresh 21st century inventory of their gifts and preferred skills plus knowledges. They haven’t time for that. 

They, typically, wait for a company to announce its vacancies, instead of choosing what companies they want to go after, known vacancy or not. They haven’t the time for that research.

The 21st century job-hunter typically uses pieces of paper to approach a place — their resume, or curriculum vita, or cover letter, all 20th century job-hunting methods — rather than using a person, a bridge person who knows them and also knows the company they have targeted, using a site like LinkedIn, or other contacts —which works best in the 21st century.  They haven’t time for that painstaking process. So, in a 2009 survey of college grads who lived at home while hunting for work, it turned out the average time they spent on their job-hunt was one hour a week!

Time is the culprit. Or rather impatience and unwillingness to spend more time on the part of both employers and job-hunters leaves millions of jobs unfilled each month, and our unemployment rate higher than it needs to be. There is a simple remedy: Give more time to your hiring, and to your hunting. Come into the 21st century.