Small Businesses Having Trouble Hiring

From the Dallas News:

In a report last month, the National Federation of Independent Business found that in November, nearly half of small-business operators had hired or had tried to hire.

Nearly three-quarters of those firms that wanted to add workers "reported few or no qualified applicants for the job openings they were trying to fill," and 8 percent said finding the right hires was a top business problem.

Similarly, a recent TriNet HR Trends survey of more than 500 U.S. small and medium-size businesses found that more than 80 percent said they tried to hire this year and more than two-thirds of smaller businesses still plan to hire in 2009.

This surprised me. In previous posts, I said now would be a good time to begin think of starting a business because there is a deep well of talented workers aching to get back to work (see here and here). One argument against this is that there is a mismatch between the people who are getting laid off and those firms that are looking for employees.

Many tech workers have been laid off, but many more construction workers and manufacturing jobs have been lost. For a while some of the people that had been working in residential construction could work in nonresidential construction, but now those jobs are gone as well. So depending on what sectors of the economy are hiring, it is possible that a mismatch could occur and could continue for a long time.