The unemployed will not be considered
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
I understand that companies get a lot of resumes these days, but the fact is that there are many, many much better ways of culling than to reject the unemployed. In point of fact, by stating up-front that you won't take resumes from those who aren't currently employed, you're cutting out what might be your best hiring pool. My experience is that people (myself included) who've been unemployed, especially for a little while, often have clearer heads going into a job, and tend to want it a whole lot more. Like I said, I was off the job recently for five months. You can take a guess as to how I attacked the work when I finally hit the job again: it was like I was living again. If I'd moved from my old job directly into the new, there would've been a longer adjustment period, I would've been more disoriented, and most importantly it would've taken longer to realign my motivation and ambition.
Being unemployed - being unable to provide for myself - focused me pretty sharply, I can tell you. And it made me eager to get back to work and dive into it. I think other people are the same; the until-recently unemployed can be some of the most motivated people on earth.
This is just to say, to anyone in a hiring position who's considering trying this to cut back on an abundance of resumes: increase the qualifications, streamline your resume review process, and even accept that you might have to pick a handful of resumes to work from at random - but don't throw away what might be the most motivated and willing pool of applicants available to you by asking for resumes only from people that are currently employed.
People who screen resumes tend to assume that you are unemployed because of one or more other undesirable traits you have, like a tendency to be irresponsible or violent and antisocial. This assumption is a mix of broken societal wisdom and an association fallacy. FWIW, there's another fallacy committed when they themselves become unemployed; everyone else unemployed is a antisocial lunatic, but they are a good person who has simply fallen on rough times -- total cognitive dissonance, but they don't notice, even when it is pointed out to them.
It is not necessarily true that a company that is employing this philosophy is necessarily cutting out the best from it's hiring pool; but the inverse isn't necessarily true either. My suspicion is that the mean quality of the unemployed applicants to a company might be slightly worse than the employed applicants, but not enough so to represent anything significant.
What I can more confidently say is true is that most companies, and for that matter most individuals, haven't thought about this at all. What we do right now is the default, and they haven't yet been fired for relying on it, nor have they been rewarded for not doing so. Until they are, nothing will change.
If you look at most discussions about how employers weed out prospective employees, and about how employees weed out prospective employers, there isn't much careful thinking involved at all. Even though it is an important decision for both parties, and time deliberately thinking about it is time well-spent, stupid heuristics are usually used.
For anyone interested, it's called the actor-observer bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-observer_bias
There's something generational in it, as well. Going on rough estimates and statistics I've heard-- although there's no hard basis for these numbers because no one can predict what the employment climate will look like in 2050-- a 22-year-old can expect, over the next 40 years:
* To be fired (not laid off, but personally fired) once.
* To be laid off, or to lose a job because his employer goes out of business, 3 times.
* To quit 3 jobs because of a negative job situation or otherwise pre-emptively (boredom, passed over for a promotion, risk of being laid off).
* To quit 3 jobs because a substantially better offer comes along.
* To quit twice because he needs a break (and won't be allowed to take ~3 months unpaid leave) or is considering career change.
* To leave 1 job to go into school.
* To have at least one spell of unemployment exceed 4 months.
That's 4 involuntary job losses, and 4-7 (the firing, and the there pre-emptive quits are the four; the layoffs are the "maybe" +3) that could be taken to reflect negatively on him and his career. This is what I suspect to be the average case over a 40-year career, with most of the disruptive breaks early on in it.
I don't think this is a bad thing. I think job volatility is, if it's limited and no one gets blackballed or rendered unable to make a living, a good thing. Just as no one is expected to marry their high school sweetheart, people are increasingly "dating" jobs and careers. And although breakups hurt like hell, the fact that they can happen when necessary (as opposed to a world where people marry in their late teens and stay together even if miserable) means people find better matches in the long run.
The result is that we're looking at a generation where everyone will have the experience of being unemployed at some point. But many people in their 40s and 50s got started in a different career environment and have never experienced it.
The homeless first started arriving in Evergreen about three months ago. At first there were only a few of them, askin' for change, sleeping in the parks. But then more showed up, and we realized there was somethin' different about them. They fed off of our change to the point that they could actually start renting apartments. We knew it wouldn't be long before the homeless actually started buying homes. And then we'd have no idea who was homeless and who wasn't! The people living in the house right next door to you could be homeless and you wouldn't even know! Nobody could trust anybody! Fights broke out. War! That's when I started suspecting that my own wife, who I'd been living with for twenty years, was actually homeless. So I had to burn her. In her bed while she slept.
The whole thing reminds me of an old story. A young man takes up with an an attractive woman who is married to a older, brutish boor. One thing leads to another and the brute catches them making out.
Honor must be satisfied, so the two men square off for a duel. The young man's aim is true, and he kills the brute, then beds the woman in a celebratory romp. In the afterglow, he asks her why she married such a noxious character.
"Well," she replies, "He won the last duel over me."
I wish these companies well in retaining their hires.
I suspect that they aren't very good at that, and are counting on the fact that most of the companies that they would like to hire people from aren't very good at it, either.
Even if that's not correct, it's still staggeringly asinine.
There are ridiculous inefficiencies, but they exist do to some completely screwed up assumptions people make, or that they just blindly follow out of deference to common wisdom.
In order for someone to make money solving these problems, they'd need to convince the parties involved that their assumptions are incorrect, and that they need to use a new approach to hiring. For instance, a hiring manager who believes that the clerk they are seeking must have a bachelors degree, n+ years of experience, and whatever else. Why; because this person has a large number of assumptions they are working off of, and each of these requirements is a manifestation of some subset of those assumptions. And, in the case of the companies tied to this article, they have to already be employed.
Changing these assumptions is amazingly hard to do, because their existence represents a cultural problem, not a knowledge problem. This would be like a company trying to make money solving racism when most everyone in society is a racist. It is incredibly hard to do; people will go bankrupt rather than give up what they've believed all their lives.
I'm reminded a number of months ago of a post you made in reply to one of mine where you discussed the cultural implications of quitting a permanent salaryman position in Japan; you pointed out that anyone who does this will likely never find themselves as more than a contractor ever again. This is really just a different manifestation of the same basic cultural bias; if you are unemployed, our cultural mores dictate that this should reflect badly upon you. If there is a solution to this problem here, I think it would have to look similar to the solution to Japan's bias toward unemployed salarymen.
But, I could be wrong about this; in fact, I'd like to be wrong. It would provide me additional faith in the resiliency of humanity. I just can't see us being that ruthlessly introspective without something far more horrible than high unemployment to motivate us.
I think one side effect of suburban alienation is that, because this geography thwarts organic friendships and also maintains social class barriers, people fall out of touch with people who are less (or more) fortunate than they are. Their talented but unlucky high school classmates who end up in shit jobs fall completely off the radar. This is what enables Americans to personalize individual success and failure (which are 50-65% luck) to a degree that other free societies would find unconscionable.
I think the post-Facebook generation isn't buying it, though. An internet connection is all you need to see that there are a lot of people getting screwed, and a few being rewarded, for no good reason.
This seems to be a very popular idea in some circles, actually.
Also, a ridiculously amount of money is already made compensating for this, and we tend to hate the industries that make it. Consider this: almost the entire higher education industry is devoted to letting unemployed young people signal that they are, in fact, fit for the labor market despite never having held any job. The certification industry takes over that function for older workers, letting them signal that despite being out of work or wanting to switch fields, they can perform the job they're being hired for. A major portion of the open-source industry is driven by programmers who do that more directly: by writing code on their own time, not locked up by NDA, they signal future employers that they can write good code and increase their value on the open market.
Another interesting observation: one way to get rid of the problem would be to make all information public. If all of your past work products, private statements, interactions, personal beliefs, etc. were always available to anyone who wished to look, then prospective employers could always completely and thoroughly evaluate whether they wished to work with you. And vice versa: companies that act blatantly stupidly or crookedly would have their stupidity and malfeasance exposed to the world, and everyone would refuse to do business with them. It's like Foucault's Panopticon, yet instead of having a single authority watch everybody, everybody can watch everybody else.
Somehow I don't see this being politically acceptable, though.
If you want to learn more about this, check out Ken Binmore's Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, which is pretty readable, and one of the major original books, Theory of games and economic behavior, by John Von Neumann.
He also blogs here http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/
If you enjoyed the Freakonomics books you'll probably like them (and no, I don't work for anyone related, nor for Amazon :P )
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/tv-advertisem...
Unemployed people also have limited resources and cannot apply for every job. Isn't it better to know you won't be considered instead of wasting your time trying to get through invisible filters?
Employers employ all sorts of arbitrary mechanisms to narrow their choices. And so do you, most likely, when you make your economic decisions.
When people honestly tell us the truth that they will not entertain applications for employment from those currently unemployed, we express outrage because that is just {dickish,unconscionable,idiotic}.
If it makes you feel better, I give them full credit for being honest about their moral bankruptcy.
Frankly, I don't see how that's immoral. Its acting in what one thinks is in one's own best interest. There is nothing wrong with that. The job seekers do it all the time whenever they decide to pursue a job at a more stable company rather than one that's been through hard times.
You may not want to present your criteria for hiring openly because you don't want to hurt people's feelings. That's your prerogative.
Just make sure you're consistent about that and avoid giving people feedback that might hurt their feelings while they're employed and when you finally have to let them go.
When I'm not in the fulltime employ of one company, I'm generally working on my own projects, freelancing, consulting, etc. My resume never looks to have blank sections even if I get laid off and the income keeps flowing that way too.
But what does it mean to be employed? Receiving a paycheck? RMS doesn't take a paycheck from MIT, so he's both homeless and unemployed by the standard of receiving a paycheck and having an apartment/home. Yet for the right position, he's infinitely qualified.
Then again, I don't think I want to work for any company that has shitty hiring standards and is so elitist as to not even consider edge cases.
We never considered simply tossing out the unemployed, but I get why they're doing it. Particularly at companies that aren't trying to hire absolute top-level talent.
It does absolutely suck for anyone looking for a job tho.
Experience says that "HR" and "competence" go together approximately as well as "military" and "intelligence" however.
And the applicants come in, just out of university, never had a job, have never even heard of ProductX, and have no experience........ what are you to do? I mean, if they put in a good cover letter explaining that they recognize that they don't seem to match the qualifications, but explaining why they want a shot at an interview, or something like that, fine.... but they don't.
They hit monster.com or whatever, look for "sysadmin" or "IT" anywhere in the text and then spam out resumes with complete disregard for the requirements.
How did they get an interview? You don't interview everyone who applies. And if they don't put in a good cover letter, and the resume doesn't look good, why bother?
If they have technical skills that need dealing with, there are other ways to go about testing those technical skills quickly and without an interview process.
RMS may not get a paycheck from MIT, but he is making money. He has at least one book for sale and charges for signed pictures of himself.
I am pretty sure he also makes money speaking at various events.
For $500/mo. you can "work" for me.
The process is similar to basic hosting sites. You can pick from a variety of "companies" and "jobs". They range from BigCo type companies to small startups. Jobs range from developer to management.
We provide a phone number to call for reference checks as well.
Employment is only a click away!
Sending out 300 resumés in a month is the wrong strategy, as it shows you don't care about the posting. If you are willing to invest that little effort, you are basically playing a lottery against all the other people doing the same thing. You are far better off being selective and persistant. If instead of sending out 75 resumes a week, you spend a concerted effort on applying to a couple postings - and doing more than just sending your resume, I'm sure you'll have better results.
That's not always true. It depends on what your skills are and what the position requires. More applications means more people looking at your resume. Getting past HR is basically a gamble anyway, and I can't begin to tell you how many times I never heard back on jobs I'm exactly qualified for, while getting excited responses from teams in wholly different areas of software development.
One of my principles used to be to only apply to jobs for which I was very qualified. Now, I could care less. Next time I'm seeking work, I'm going to spam the hell out of every position I'm even remotely qualified for. Why? Because I need a job, and I care less about stressing HR than I do about paying for food.
That's not much. Oh, and OUCH!
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
Which is why using a black man for the picture isn't particularly smart. It's offensive because it's true, and nearly any conclusion you can draw from it is going to piss off someone.
Something about that sentence isn't right.
A Western study shows that black people with a criminal history are half as likely to get a return call than whites with similar history in low level positions. Further, even for blacks without a criminal history,this same study shows that they are about half as likely to get a return call than whites with the same background.
This doesn't even include the roughly 15% of the black population currently being held in U.S. prisons who may or may not eventually be released and find that no one will hire them.
Source: UC Irvine Criminology, Law & Society C7 taught by Professor Seron Spring 2010.
Realistically, a company would take a person with the skillset and credentials they're looking for even if they're unemployed. They just don't want 500 irrelevant submissions for every 5 good ones, and "UNEMPLOYED NOT CONSIDERED" probably works more effective than "PLEASE ACTUALLY FRIGGING READ OUR POSTING AND ONLY APPLY IF YOU'RE A REAL CANDIDATE" - I'd still apply if I thought I was a relevant candidate and wanted a job though, I think this is largely much ado about nothing.
UNEMPLOYED NOR CONSIDERED is rude, discriminatory, and barely legal, if at all. Not to mention is bad PR for the company in question.
HR fat cats who push this things on should be fired so they can enjoy their own stupidity first hand.
This wouldn't be fair to the employer or the employee. How would you really be able to get a grasp of a potential employee's experience/fit for a position if you can't look at their previous jobs (and years of experience)?