When watching, reading, or hearing the news, doesn’t it seem as if there are always reports about aspects of our everyday lives getting revamped? From energy, to technology, to healthcare, to oil and gas, to education, to… you name it. Governments and companies alike are always looking for ways to make things more efficient, more sustainable, more cost-effective, more user-friendly, more… (Again, you name it). This is a good thing right? It is evolution and adaptation at its finest.

While this is all great, the one aspect of our everyday life that has NOT been revamped (and therefore, has not been newsworthy) is the way in which we find jobs and hire employees within the marketplace. We watch, read, and hear news about the economy all the time: the unemployment rate going up/down, unemployment compensation being extended, massive lay-offs by companies, etc. We NEVER hear about what is being done to ease the frustrations of current job seekers and employers. Is that because there are none? Quite the contrary.

The stats are out there if you look hard enough. Nearly 70% of the average working population remains unengaged or actively disengaged during their jobs. Translation: Over $300 Billion in lost productivity. Now, that’s for people who are employed. For the people that are unemployed and looking for work, online job boards have made it very difficult. While these boards allow companies to reach a wide variety of people, statistically speaking 98 out of 100 resumes are ignored. So why do people continue to do something that fails 98% of the time? People have a better shot winning the lottery than they do finding a job this way.

It’s funny because the Wall Street Journal featured an article on this exact phenomenon. Apparently, a Philadelphia-area human resources executive applied anonymously for a job in his own company as an experiment and he didn’t make it through the screening process! That is just proof that the way in which employers are finding employees and job seekers are finding jobs needs to be REVAMPED and the media needs to take note!