Basically, while there's been plenty of attention focused on creating jobs to begin with, I find it frustrating that there seems to be little to no focus on actually getting people into jobs. Oh sure, there are a bunch of resources out there, but they all still involve you being forced to play "The Game". And "The Game" is pretty damn complicated, and has many, many, many places where it can go wrong for even the most job-desiring, hard-working job seeker. Consider.

1. There has to be openings within your skillset to apply to begin with. Anything from being trapped in the wrong area for your skillset because you don't have the thousands of dollars needed to move somewhere that would match better (if your lower-class momma gave birth to a great <x> in a region where <x> has almost no use, sucks so much to be you), to many of the jobs you would be suited for being ones listed only internally and you not knowing anyone who can give you an in (70% of jobs are found via networking, which means someone who is skilled and capable yet has no network usable for job searching is more or less boned), can produce problems here.

2. Your resume has to get noticed. And even something as small and impossible to know beforehand as putting the job titles for each previous job in the wrong spot before or after the company's name, so that the keyword scanner of the company you're applying to doesn't properly scan your resume, can get your resume never seen.

3. The company has to not discriminate against you for reasons unrelated to your ability to do the job. Like passing you over because you've been unemployed too long even though you had a good reason (like an illness or injury, or, oh, nobody giving you a job because you've been unemployed too long), or too many jobs because all you could find was temporary work, or requiring a degree for a job with zero job requirements that require a degree, and so on.

4. If you actually get the interview, you have to nail it perfectly. And as anyone who's been job searching lately will tell you, this is difficult due to there being a crapload of different questioning tactics hiring managers employ. Anyone who's an introvert or otherwise not a natural socialite might as well give up now, even if the actual job would require less social skills.

5. And even you nail the interview, you might still lose the job because the interviewer just liked another applicant's hair better, or they decided to fill the job internally at the last minute, or such.

The end result of all of this is that currently 42.8% of unemployed people have been unemployed for 27 or more weeks. [link] These people are ready, willing, and able to work, (since the official counts are people who are actively looking for work) but issues with "playing the game" are keeping them from being able to do so.

Meanwhile, many other people are underemployed or misemployed, stuck in poor jobs that either waste their skills or are a mismatch for them, because that's what "the game" left them with.

So the question is: What can we do about this? We can create jobs until the cows come home--and should do so, for that matter--but if we're falling down on getting unemployed people into those jobs then it's not going to help much. And the fact that more than 40% of unemployed people are long-term unemployed tells me that yes, we are definitely failing miserably in getting the people who most need/want jobs actually into them.

And under- and misemployed people end up both wasting potential productivity, and blocking those jobs from people who would be better suited to them.

And even those who manage to successfully navigate The Game, it can still take weeks or even months to do so. I feel like there has to be a more efficient and less wasteful way to get people into jobs.

Now, I know by this point some of you are rolling your eyes and pfffting and not giving a shit, because "not everyone is entitled to a job", or "it's their own fault if they can't play the game", or something like that. To which I say, use your fucking brains for once. Every person who is ready, willing, and able to work yet unable to get a job to hire them due to "the game", is a person who is draining unemployment, welfare, or other public assistance budgets when they could be self-supporting and paying taxes instead. People who are underemployed also often need to rely on one form of assistance or another. If you genuinely want to cut government spending, then you support trying to find realistic ways to get these un- and underemployed people into good jobs.

And of course, like I said, there's the loss in productivity to society caused by people's skills going wasted or someone trying to do a job they're ill suited for. Which is why "well, they can just get a burger-flipping job" to an unemployed college-trained person is also a pointless argument, as it both wastes the skills of the college trained person and blocks someone without a lot of skills from being able to get a job because the college student is currently stuck filling the unskilled job that would otherwise serve as a viable opportunity for the unskilled worker.