Unemployment Crisis Irony: You Must Have a Job to Get a Job

The somewhat peculiar results of the Challenger Labor Shortage Survey showed that 77% of the approximately 100 human resources executives polled said their companies were having difficulty filling open positions due to a shortage of available talent. And 45% said they were having a hard time filling tech jobs, which run the gamut from software engineers to medical technicians. About half of the companies offered some sort of incentive, from referral and sign-on bonuses to relocation assistance, to get people to jump ship.
Peculiar because there are still many millions of Americans who are unemployed. But hey, the report was the opinion of only a tiny group of select HR executives. So not exactly a universal statement.
But today, I ran into something that put that report in a different light, via Rebekah Campbell’s article in the New York Times, which describes her experiences in trying to rope in potential investors for her company, Posse. It was a story of how time and money – two commodities a startup CEO is desperately short of – went down the drain during her pursuit of VC, angel, and corporate investors.
A successful pitch led to lunches, dinners, and drinks, and to meetings, and some took weeks to set up, and more meetings with different people, and everything was exciting, and big money was being dangled out in front of her eyes, and then there would have to be a meeting with the senior guy, who was on vacation. Due diligence had started, and she and her team got peppered with questions, spreadsheets had to be redone, projections were challenged, but there was still no term sheet that would nail down the deal. And after months of seeing money and time spiraling down the drain, she ended up without a deal.

This post was published at Wolf Street on September 4, 2014.