“Who Hired All These People? Why Aren’t They Trained?”

The beautiful lie that is “hiring to grow” and/or “hiring before revenue.”

Josh Bersin, who once stiff-armed me walking by me at a HR Tech trade show, has a good summary of something I think many of us know, but bury our heads in the sand about: boom/bust layoff cycles. Some good examples in this article, which is sadly ultimately a plug for his new book (isn’t everything?), but he has a couple of decent charts. To wit, here’s one on how the “free money” period of 2010 to 2021 represented perhaps the lowest interest rates in, oh, 700 years:

If you look at the general state of the macro-economy right now, especially around “Big Tech” (most of those companies are really “Big Advertising Platform,” but whatever), you see that the American economy is generally only truly functional when there’s a bunch of free money to go around. Even when we raise rates 0.25%, executives lose their mind. It’s almost as if they’re not really that strategic and only know how to play the game when the money is free and risk-taking seems to be rewarded, not penalized. Otherwise, we keep doing these boom and bust cycles of “hire to…