Delta Air Lines Expecting Flood of Applicants for Job Openings

According to a recent article on Bloomberg.com (link below), Delta Air Lines Inc. is expecting to receive 65,000 applications for its 1,000 airport job openings.

Delta said that the new 1,000 hires will be dispersed across 25 of the largest airports in the United States to “help with planes that are flying with near-record percentages of seats filled and cope with weather disruptions”.

Now, this news isn’t particularly shocking - everybody realizes that unemployment rates are very high right now and that many people are currently looking for work.

However, a few things immediately popped into my head when I read this article:

1) While I would expect that the number of job applicants would be multiples higher than the number of job openings in most economic circumstances, a 65 to 1 ratio seems outrageously high.

2) What hope do younger workers have when they are faced with this type of competition? I’m sure that Delta Air Lines will cherry-pick the most experienced and talented of the applicants (as they have every right to do), but that doesn’t leave much hope for younger workers or those with lesser skills who are looking for experience.

3) People are going to get disillusioned pretty quickly if there continues to be this kind of competition for job openings in the country.

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I hear about stories like these over all the country right now - as a matter of fact, we wrote about a similar situation a few months back.

The fact of the matter is that the United States needs to add X amount of jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. Not only has the economy not been able to add these jobs over the past 2 1/2 years, but it has also lost millions upon millions of jobs as well.

The United States currently has a national unemployment rate of 9.5%, which is down slightly from a peak of 10.2% in October of 2009. However, long-term unemployed numbers remain astonishingly high, and there really doesn’t appear to be any improvement on the horizon. The Congressional Budget Office recently stated that they don’t expect the national unemployment rate to dip below 9% until 2012.

What is making matters even worse is that there is a consensus building that the United States is hurtling towards a “double dip recession”, which will just serve to make the unemployment situation even worse in the country. Every day in the media, somebody new is going on TV or writing an article in which they state that the US will soon fall back into another recession. This is causing businesses to hold back on hiring any new people because they aren’t buying in to the possibility of a sustained economic recovery taking hold in the country.

I really feel for the people who are trying to find a job in this economy. It’s extremely tough out there right now, and things don’t really seem to be improving.

The current unemployment situation in the United States right now really makes you wonder - where will all of the new jobs come from? Which industries will have the need to hire the millions of people who are currently sitting on the sidelines? What can the government do to help people get back to work? Are we destined to live through a long period of perpetually high unemployment in the United States?

Reading articles like this one about Delta Air Lines really makes me wonder when things will actually start to improve in the country..

Source: Bloomberg.com - Delta Air Expects 65,000 Applicants for 1,000 Job Openings

Filed under: The Economic Meltdown