Most recently, I thought about it when I read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a survey of managers in which 84% of respondents said hiring for administrative and staff jobs in the last year had become more difficult. One respondent called the applicant pools in higher education “shallow and weak,” a sentiment echoed in the article’s headline. That language bothered me. It reminded me of those notes restaurant owners had taped to their doors early in the pandemic-era worker shortages: “Closing early today. No one wants to work!” The frequent retort to those notes was that plenty of people wanted to work, they just found better jobs elsewhere. The same is true for higher education searches.
