Can someone explain why HR managers have such a severe prejudice against hiring unemployed people? Imho, its their job, to select those people from the unemployemnt pool that fits the company, and have the skills. A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.
I think this quote from Keynes sums it up best:
>"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men."
The Ivy league is a conventional and orthodox disaster. Nobody can blame you for hiring them, their credentials were impeccable!
That previously unemployed guy, on the other hand...
Given a competent A student is there knowledge you will gain from the finance department at say Harvard that you wouldn't see at state university?
A better example might be what's the measurable difference between an engineering degree at a low tier school versus MIT?
Note that the process she suggests (one phone screen, one on site and a decision) is good for unemployed applicants as well.
Quick hiring decisions are good for all parties involved, as long as they are thorough.
Its terribly difficult to get hired when unemployed because of this bias.
But the reverse is also true. HR managers that devise a recruitment process so arduous only the unemployed (and possibly then only the involuntary unemployed) will consider participating in it is doing a bad job. There are good unemployed candidates, but there are more good employed candidates, and most of the good unemployed candidates also have better options than your 6-8 interview process, which also screams of bureaucracy, indecisiveness and pedantry further down the line.
One local employer, always looking for people, and not a bad place to work, has 3% of people pass the on-site interview, and it's not especially onerous: It shows you have general programming competency. Everything their exercise asks is something you'll use on the job. But most people that apply fail, because there is a local glut of people that know less than a proper entry level candidate, but ask for senior level salary. Those people tend to be the first to get laid off, and the ones that stay unemployed the longest.
There are great unemployed people out there sometimes: A SF startup that is 95% remote laid off 60% of their staff three weeks ago, and anyone would be fortunate to get that unemployed talent when they can. HR has to shift through a lot of unemployed people that you probably don't want to hire to find a great programmer, and a great programmer probably already has a network that gets them snapped up in days.
It's absolutely not fair to the good programmers that end up being unemployed for one reason or another, but given my experience interviewing, it's not hard to see why someone unemployed and without a good network gets passed up far more often than they deserve.
How can you say that? All being emoyed means is that you got through the interview process and haven't annoyed anyone with the power to fire you. That hire may well be incompetent and looking to move out before they get fired.
How many people who apply get an on-site interview? Has this company considered if their prescreening process is broken and is actually filtering out mos of the people who could pass the on-site interviews?
I think I have to call Base Rate Neglect Fallacy here. Being already-employed may be evidence that someone is competent, but without knowing the strength of that evidence (ie: how many incompetents get hired anyway) and the base rate of competence/incompetence among all job-seekers, employed or not, we can't really say much about whether it's a good practice to poach rather than hire from the general pool.
The other HR stupidity is, that its much easier to get a raise, if you switch jobs often, then if you stay in a job long enough to be productive.
The result are projects broken by HR causing to much fluctuation.
That's grossly overgeneralized.