The Big Freeze on hiring

I have some good news, and I have some bad news.

First, the good news: Employers have more job openings today than they’ve had at any time since the Great Recession began.

The bad news: Employers may be posting jobs, but they’re taking longer than ever before to fill them.

It now takes 24 working days for the average job opening to be filled. That’s the longest hiring delay since at least 2001, the first year for which numbers are available, according to a recent report from Dice Holdings based on research by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman and John C. Haltiwanger. To give you some context, when the recovery began five years ago, the average opening took about 16 days to fill.

This means employers are dragging their feet making hires, despite having 10 million jobless workers to choose from (not to mention many more already-employed applicants looking to job-hop). I’ve spoken to workers who have been called back for as many as nine or 10 interviews for a given position, only to be told at the end of the process that the firm had decided to hold off on making a decision “for now.”