My company operates/ed a job board and a staffing business. Both ran like traditional job boards (Indeed, Zip Recruiter, etc) and staffing companies (Kelly, Adecco, etc.), except being focused entirely on the formerly incarcerated. This is how large employers source many, many employees.
The staffing business was much larger. In this model, we serve as the hirer-of-record, and essentially lease out the workers to our client employers, who cover all our costs (wages, unemployment insurance, taxes, etc.) plus our mark-up (profit). It's a high volume, low margin business.
During the Great Resignation, we found it took 10x the time and effort to get someone placed, eroding our already thin margins. Plus, if a worker left (which they began doing at a great rate), we're obligated to replace them. All of this made it pretty much impossible for us to make money. (Again, we're a for-profit business). I hope this clarifies things.
If you click the ‘wage level’ button you can see that workers everywhere are seeing growth but workers in the lowest quartile are seeing higher growth.
A few explanations other than the one you don’t see evidence for:
- the growth is in nominal dollars, inflation explains the spike and everyone is down in real terms, so even though the lowest-paid are doing better, they still aren’t seeing wage growth (but you are also observing nominal pay with your open eyes…)
- the lowest-paid are quitting, or the number of workers is decreasing in the higher quartile such that the average individual chosen from the first quartile would not have seen wage growth but rather higher-paid people are now counting as part of their quartile and pushing up the averages