The jobs you cannot fill, and which ones an agent can hold

How hard hiring is

Most owners are trying to hire, and about half of them cannot find anyone qualified.

The NFIB Jobs Report found 56% of its member owners were hiring or trying to hire. Of those, 47% said they found few or no qualified applicants, with 29% saying few and 18% saying none, in the same NFIB survey. The NFIB also found 23% of owners named labor quality or availability as their single biggest problem, and another 7% named labor costs.

The whole country looks about the same. The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which samples about 21,000 employers, counted 7.3 million open jobs and only 5.1 million hires in a single month. In that same BLS count, 3.1 million people quit their jobs. The BLS also found hiring in professional and business services fell by 188,000 over the month, so office help is not getting easier to find either.

Skilled seats stay empty

The open jobs are mostly skilled ones, and that limits what software can do about them.

In the NFIB Jobs Report, 31% of owners had an opening for a skilled worker and only 13% had one for unskilled labor. That matters because the skilled seats are the ones an agent can hold the least. An estimator earns a mean of $85,390 a year by the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics count, and we found no independent source that documents an agent holding that seat.

Owners are paying more to keep the people they have. A net 31% of NFIB member owners raised pay in the survey month, and a net 18% plan to raise it in the next three months, per the same NFIB report. Raising pay works on a seat you can fill. It does nothing for the seat nobody applies to.

What each seat pays

Here is what the front office seats pay by the BLS count, and what part of each an agent can take.

Every wage above is a national figure from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. The all occupations, estimator and marketing rows are means from the BLS Table 1 release, and the bookkeeper row is a median from an older BLS occupation profile page, so do not compare them as equals. The BLS has no marketing coordinator code, so the 13-1161 marketing specialist code is the nearest proxy. For the hiring side, the NFIB Jobs Report says 35% of owners have an unfilled opening and 47% of those hiring find few or no qualified applicants.

Which seats an agent can hold

An agent takes the intake and entry work from two seats, and none of the judgment.

The receptionist seat splits in two. The phone ringing, the appointment being set, the address being written down, an agent can hold that part all day. The caller who is angry, who wants to argue a price, or who asks for a person goes to a human. That is the split, and the bank story below shows what happens when you skip it.

The bookkeeper seat splits the same way. An agent can pull the invoice off the email, put it in the ledger and code it to the job. A human still closes the books and answers the accountant. The BLS occupation profile puts bookkeeper pay between $32,460 at the 10th percentile and $68,860 at the 90th, so the hours you save on entry are real hours.

The marketing seat splits too. An agent can draft the post, schedule it and draft the email. A human decides what the company sounds like and what it promises. The estimator seat does not split. The estimate is the judgment, so it stays with a person.

When a bank backed up

One bank cut 45 phone jobs for a bot and brought them back within about a month.

ABC News in Australia reported that Commonwealth Bank cut 45 call center roles after putting in a voice bot, then reversed the cuts about a month later because call volumes went up. The bank told ABC News it "did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations." Staff told ABC News they worked overtime and team leaders were pulled onto the phones. That is what replacing a seat looks like when you should have replaced a task.

Most firms kept their people

The Census count says most businesses using this software did not change their headcount.

The US Census Bureau Business Trends and Outlook Survey found 19.8% of US businesses use AI to make goods or services. Under 20% of firms with 4 or fewer employees use it, against 37% of firms with 250 or more, in the same Census survey. Most of the firms that use it told the Census Bureau it changed neither their headcount nor the skill level of their workers. Read that as agents absorb tasks, not seats.

What stays human

The estimate, the close, the judgment call and the customer who asks for a person.

Someone has to look at the job and say what it will cost. Someone has to close the month and sign off on the numbers. Someone has to take the call from the customer who is upset or who just wants a person. Those three things are the job, and the agent is the part around the job.

What we got wrong

I started this article thinking an agent could hold an unfilled seat, and the research said otherwise.

I went looking for proof that an agent holds a dispatcher, estimator or bookkeeper seat somewhere in production. I did not find one non-vendor source that says so. The one production case I could read, Commonwealth Bank in the ABC News report, is a reversal. The Census finding that most adopting firms changed neither headcount nor skill level pushed the same way.

I also could not find a trustworthy number for how many days a seat sits open. The BLS JOLTS does not measure it and the NFIB does not publish it, so I left it out. The same goes for the dispatcher wage, which I could not open at the BLS, and the receptionist wage, which I had from memory and would not print. When a number is missing here, it is missing on purpose.

What this costs with us

The software is priced by the month, and the consult is priced once.

VuseDesk's Contractor plan is $39.99 a month and the General Contractor plan is $99.99 a month, by our own price list. A consult is $199. VuseDesk records payments and never processes or moves money, so the close still belongs to your bookkeeper.

If you want to see which of your seats splits, read the role pages on the site first, then book the audit. We will map the intake and entry work to an agent and leave the judgment where it belongs. That is the whole service.