The US economy is turning into a nightmare for recruiters

The US economy is turning into a nightmare for recruiters: They just can't find enough qualified people to fill jobs.

In a recent note to clients, Macquarie Research analyst David Doyle cited a survey of HR executives conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggesting that firms are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting workers and filling positions.

Both the manufacturing and the services sectors are having a harder time recruiting people today than they did during the credit bubble in the mid-2000s. HR folks are particularly struggling in the services sector, which follows the larger trend of the US services sector outperforming US manufacturing as of late.

As Doyle points out, the net share of services firms that are reporting difficulty is almost triple that of 2005-2007's average, which can be seen in the chart below.

This is a high-quality problem in that it's the result of an improving economy in which the unemployment rate is collapsing and all of the qualified labor available to work is now working.

For quite some time now, small businesses have been pointing out the difficulty in attracting qualified workers.

In the most recent NFIB report, 48% of respondents reported that there are "few or no qualified applications" for the positions they were trying to fill, slightly up from September's 45%. This number has been hovering in the mid-to-upper 40s since May 2014, and has trended higher since 2009.

Additionally, many small businesses have increasingly singled out "labor quality" as a bigger concern than "sales." This shift toward labor quality becoming the most important problem for more employers suggests that economic concerns are shifting from weak demand to tight supply.

Theoretically, this suggests that American workers could be seeing higher wages soon. To put it simply, if HR people can't find qualified workers on the market, then they could try and incentivize a broader field people by offering more money.

On a related note, the BLS's latest Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey report showed that the ratio of unemployed job seekers to job openings had plunged significantly from its financial-crisis peak, which David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff previously pointed out.

"Wage acceleration either starts real soon or we can simply take the laws of supply and demand and throw them in the dustbin," Rosenberg wrote at the time.

Notably, the latest jobs report last Friday suggested that we might finally be at that point: Average hourly earnings grew 2.5% from October 2014 to October 2015 - the highest growth rate since the recession.