According to today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, the unemployment rate remained at 6.7%, but 20,100,000 remained either unemployed or underemployed!
Some sectors did add employment including:
- Professional and business services gaining 57,000 last months for an average of 56,000 new jobs over the last 12 months.
- Food Services and Drinking Places adding 30,000 new jobs last month and 323,000 over the past 12 months!
- Construction adding 19,000 new workers last month bringing the total to 151,000 over the past year.
- Health Care grew by 19,000 in March on top of the 10,000 added in February.
- Mining and Logging also added 7,000 for an average increase of 3,000 over the past 12 months.
However, with such miniscule employment growth and many job candidates to choose from, a wide range of companies is increasingly and wrongly using SAT scores to screen out job candidates. This includes both a) top management-consulting firms like Bane & Co. McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group and b) leading investment bankers like Goldman Saks.
Unfortunately, the SAT was not developed to judge employment performance. Instead, it was only formulated to predict high school students’ first year academic success including literacy and writing skills. Therefore, according to our engineering recruiters, scientific recruiters, R&D recruiters, IT recruiters, technical recruiters and manufacturing recruiters these companies are making a major blunder with this misuse of the SAT!
For more details, please go to http://allaboutjobs.newsvine.com/_news/2014/03/15/23102357-executive-recruitment-teams-wrongly-adopting-sat-scores for my recent publication on this topic.
