Businesses are still struggling to attract workers, but it isn't because employers and job seekers have mismatched goals

• Some businesses are finding it tough to find the workers they need.
• A new analysis from Indeed sees whether occupational mismatch is the reason behind this struggle.

Millions of Americans have quit their jobs and moved on to new positions. In the tight labor market and about two years since the start of the pandemic, some employers are still struggling to find talent.

Americans month after month are joining the Great Resignation. Workers might not be leaving the labor force completely, but they are searching for better jobs. Some have even thought about leaving simply because of conversations and news about this phenomenon.

But despite record-high quits, there are millions of job openings waiting to be filled each month. Employers are struggling to attract and keep employees around as Americans leave for other jobs where they could make more money, be less stressed, have more flexibility, or not be part of a toxic office.

As employees leave their jobs, businesses are saying they have few or no qualified candidates. While companies are competing to find talent, some businesses are having trouble getting applicants to even show up for interviews. One common explanation is that workers aren't looking for the types of jobs employers have on offer and potential employees lack the skills for the positions that are open.

But a new study from Indeed Hiring Lab suggests that the mismatch between potential employers and employees is overblown.

"I hear a lot of people say, 'oh, well, job seekers just don't want the kinds of jobs that are on offer. They want other kinds of jobs.' I hear that anecdote quite a lot," Tara Sinclair, a senior fellow at the Indeed Hiring Lab and author of the report, told Insider. "And I really feel like this report says that although there are persistent problems in terms of matching what job seekers want and what employers want, that's not explaining what's happening right now."

The report analyzes this idea of occupational mismatch. "So this isn't about how many job seekers are available for a particular job," Sinclair said. "It's rather, is the mix correct — do we have the same shares of job seekers and the same shares of jobs?"

The struggle of finding workers during the pandemic isn't due to a spike in mismatches between the kinds of jobs people are looking to apply to and the kinds of positions employers have advertised as they seek out new workers.

Mismatches between employees and employers actually had a smaller response to the pandemic than other wildly-swinging labor-market indicators, Sinclair said.

"Any sense that mismatch has gotten worse lately, I think is a perception that's deviating from what we're seeing in the data," she said.

Indeed's mismatch metric, Sinclair said, compares the "distribution of job seekers that are out there and what they're looking for with the types of job opportunities that are out there." The new research highlights that occupational mismatch hasn't become a bigger problem during the pandemic.

The following chart using Indeed data shared with Insider shows just what occupational mismatch has looked like — even before the pandemic:

Sinclair wrote in the report that "workers and employers got more in sync in 2021." As seen in the chart, Indeed's measure of occupational mismatch was 20.6% in January 2022. This means, Sinclair said, we would need to reallocate about a fifth of job-seekers' clicks "to balance the market so that the job seekers' interests and employers' interests aligned."

She said pay could be one reason that "mismatch isn't worse than it is" and has been declining, as businesses have boosted wages to attract and keep workers during the tight labor market.

Sinclair, who's also an economics professor at the George Washington University, told Insider that these results are "quite different than the common narrative" of employers not being able to find the right types of workers and job seekers not being able to find the right types of positions.

"A lot of people have said that there's been increasing mismatch, particularly in the last couple of years," Sinclair said. "And that's actually not what we've seen. In fact, as the labor market has tightened, generally, we've actually seen mismatch decline somewhat."

"It might still be perceived as more of a problem because the labor market is tighter and it's just harder for employers to hire in general, but from the perspective of the contribution of job seekers' interests shifting dramatically, we're not seeing that," she added.