There are many possibly stories for the degradation of the job matching function of the economy. Policy and economic uncertainty may be making employers more cautious in hiring, leading them to leave jobs vacant for a longer period of time while they wait for an ideal hire or to be sure of the policy atmosphere before committing to employ a worker. Or, it could be that employers find the large stock of long-term unemployed workers less desirable for employment, so these individuals are not filling the new vacancies as unemployed workers in the past would have. The change could also be caused by a “skill gap”, where large numbers of the unemployed do not have the skills that employers with openings are looking for, and therefore the vacancies continue even as there are more candidates to choose from