Employers may also reject workers for reasons unrelated to skills or geography, so for example structural unemployment can also result from discrimination, including ableism and cultural factors such as race or sexual orientation.
[4][5] This is a driver of skills gaps as technology and globalization "hollow out" many middle-skill jobs, positions that traditionally have not required a college degree.
[11] Other studies argued that a skills mismatch was a minor factor, since unemployment rose for nearly all industries and demographic groups during the "Great Recession.
"[14] Others believe that in such cases (for example, when a person is intellectually disabled or suffers a debilitating physical condition) it is the responsibility of the state to provide for the citizen in question.
Management professor Peter Cappelli blames poor human resource practices for complaints that not enough qualified job applicants are found, such as replacing skilled HR workers with software that is less capable of matching resumes that exhibit the right combination of skills but without word-for-word alignment with a job posting.
Instead, companies attempt to avoid the time and cost of on-the-job training by hiring people from who already have experience doing the same job elsewhere (including at a competitor).