Help wanted — jobless need not apply

Fred: "If they were fired or laid off, they would be a problem. Don't interview the unemployed."

Wilma: "If they are currently working, they are disloyal. The unemployed may have been laid off for no fault of their own. Don't interview the employed."

Bjarne: "...Maybe instead of guessing, we should just interview the ones that seem qualified, and if they're unemployed we can ask what happened at their last job, and if they're employed we can ask why they're looking for a new job?"

This story, which has come around for the second time in less than six months, is pretty blatantly an example of what PG was talking about here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Some recruiting firm is paying whoever Zachary Graham works for to write this story. Dead giveaway:

"...said Matt Derp of recruiting_company.com, which brings recruiters together to collaborate in finding jobs for candidates..."

My best friend applied to Twitter last year and was told that they were only seeking people who were already employed.

The argument that everyone who deserves a job already has it is discriminatory and silly. Those of you who agree with this practice will feel very differently when the startup you're working at runs out of money and suddenly you want to go work for someone else.

Employers with absurdly rigid hiring criteria (like ruling out candidates who've been jobless for more than 6 months) are most likely NOT worth working for. One has to wonder what other ridiculous rules are in store for the hires that decide to come on board.

As harsh as this sounds, it's perfectly rational behaviour on the part of companies.

Job applications are a perfect example of an adverse selection problem. Bad candidates are more likely to laid off, so they enter the job market more often. Bad candidates stay on the market longer than good ones, because they have trouble getting hired. Because they're on the market longer, bad candidates apply for more jobs than good ones.

These ugly truths guarantee that 99% of your applications are from bad candidates: people you would never, ever employ, under any circumstance. The sooner you can sort out the remaining 1%, the better. It's expensive to evaluate candidates, and each stage of evaluation is more expensive than the last. (keyword scan, human reading a resume, HR screen, phone screen, interview...)

If you use crude, ugly heuristics that flag false positives on half of your target population, but you save labor by not evaluating 85% or 90% of the applicants, you come out way ahead. Rational companies are bound to throw out a few babies with millions of gallons of bathwater. Cruel, but unavoidable.

I presume that those without jobs are significantly more likely to accept a job offer than those who are comparing it against their current job given that all other factors are the same. Given this, I wonder whether HR department's disinterest in the unemployed is rational. Let's formulate the problem:

Presume the following:

1. The cost of assessing the qualifications of both the employed and the unemployed is identical and that the company can do this with perfect precision. Calls this cost I.

2. The position is unique in the organization, so only one job offer may be extended at any given time.

3. There is a known, positive cost C for each day the position goes un-filled.

4. An unemployed person takes N days to evaluate a job offer letter and an employed person takes M. I would presume that M > N given that the opportunity loss of an employed person is greater.

5. The probability that a candidate accepts an offer is X if unemployed and Y if employed. Obviously, I would presume that X > Y

6. The probability that a candidate is found to be qualified after the interview process is A for the unemployed and B for the employed. For the sake of argument, presume A < B.

7. It is known with certainty and at the start whether any given candidate is currently employed.

So, for some set of costs I and C and probabilities (N,M), (X,Y), and (A,B) I think one could compute whether it is more rational to prefer the employed or the unemployed. Of course, I am ignoring all goodwill-esque costs (bad reputation as an employer, etc.). After writing this I realize that (1) I don't even know the proper nomenclature for expressing this and (2) I can't do the math anymore to solve this (there's a dynamic programming aspect, right?).

For the next recession, if this isn't changed, I'm going to develop a business model of small businesses who hire for a fee, keeping resumes current.

Using this idiotic logic, then we should only marry people who are already married since unmarried people probably don't have prospects and on and on and on.

There were several rounds of layover at a startup where I worked and so I expressed my concern to HR that I wouldn't be able to find a job if I were laid off. Her response, which I never believed, is that employers don't look so unfavorably towards laid off workers and that finding a new job would not be so hard.

Well, this article states just what I feared. Fortunately, I have never been laid off or fired but I have never felt that it would be easy to find a job if it ever happened. Being laid off would make me feel as if I wasn't capable even if it wasn't the case. It would sure be a blow to my self-confidence.

Best of blessings to those who are unemployed and still looking.

With the economy in the tank, disqualifying the unemployed simply makes it easier to reduce the stack of resumes which must be passed to the hiring manager. It is hardly news - read Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich which covered this issue while the boom was still happening in 2006.

http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/baitandswitch.htm

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One of the things I've wondered about what the long term impact of this policy is. If company A only accepts employed people, then when someone leaves company B for company A, a spot opens up at company B and maybe unemployed people can get hired there instead. So the same number of jobs would be open to the unemployed, it just extends the pipeline.

FTA: "People who are currently employed … are the kind of people you want as opposed to people who get cut," one recruiter told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in October.

This is what recruiters... people who are supposed to be experts at hiring, are saying?

Wow.

To me, this is all pretty irrelevant. The only way to reduce unemploymnent is to grow the number of jobs. Not all jobs can be open to already-employed applicants, otherwise they all couldn't be filled.

For eveyone not accepting an unemployed person, there must be someone who will, if the unemployment rate is to go down.

The simple solution if you can't get a job at your company of choice is to find someone else to employ you, and then apply at company of choice. Yes, it's more difficult, but it works better than complaining about it and expecting them to change.

Were I to find myself unemployed for longer than a couple of months, my resume would acquire a new item--consulting contract at a defense contractor that I cannot name due to an NDA.

If the company does hire an already-employed person, isn't that person's previous employer likely to look for a replacement? If the total number of jobs increases by one, the total number of unemployed people should decrease by one. This seems like a way for one company's HR department to offload some of their work to another company's HR department. Of course, the added cost of training a new worker might mean that the previous employer does not replace the employee.

The whole industry of recruiters and head hunting is pretty shady to begin with. I'm surprised the head hunter didn't just blatantly lie about her past to get her the job.

I've always to used "freelancing" as a way to sidestep times of unemployment. The fact that it's half-true is merely a bonus.

Why aren't people lying about this on their resumes then? I wonder this every time a story like this one makes the rounds.

It all depends on how you define "jobless"...

I am currently unemployed, yet I still work. I am volunteering at the United Way and other similar organisations for positions they need filled. Now, I am a computer literacy teacher, 5th grade mathematics program helper, and also providing computer work for a non-profit.

I also am constantly filling out applications for positions which I am way overqualified (fast food and retail). I am receiving unemployment, and who knows when I'll actually obtain a job. But I know this: my current volunteer work is being listed as current jobs. Is this dishonest? Perhaps... But it is work regardless.