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CHART: Employers Aren’t Trying Hard To Find New Employees

Republicans have repeatedly claimed that unemployed Americans aren’t looking hard enough for work — usually implicating unemployment benefits as a discincentive — but Mike Konczal at Next New Deal just pointed to recent studies suggesting the GOP is laying the accusation on the wrong suspect. It turns out that the amount of effort employers have put into finding new hires collapsed with the recession and has yet to recover. “Recruiting intensity” is a measure of employer behavior that encompasses advertising expenditures, screening methods, hiring standards, and the attractiveness of compensation packages. Those in turn affect the number and quality of people applying to job openings, the speed with which their applications are processed, and their acceptance rate when job offers are actually made:

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