Book Review: Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs

In a slim new volume, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli argues that there is a market failure in how firms match up their demand for work with the supply of skills. The underlying problem that occupies most of Cappelli’s analysis is that the tight labor market of the 1990s gave employers the luxury of defaulting to what he calls a “Home Depot” approach to jobs, where firms see workers as interchangeable, readily available replacement parts. Implicit in this approach are the ideas that a job description is static and that a job candidate should be able to “hit the ground running,” an ability which candidates demonstrate to hiring managers (or software) primarily by having performed the exact same duties in a previous job. The deleterious role of hiring systems has been the most widely discussed element of Cappelli’s argument. But this automation and concomitant reduced analytical capability of human resources departments is only a symptom of a bigger problem with how firms define and identify worker skill requirements