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?"
If we take the "increasingly desperate" seriously, there's a simple explanation: lots of utterly unqualified jobless people applying. Sure, there are probably people who are both unemployed and good, but throwing all resumes from unemployed people in the trash may save a lot of time.
I'm not saying this is morally right, or even smart; but it explains the observed behavior at least as well as "they would be a problem" (which, as you point out, isn't that strong an argument.)
I had a discussion with my friend who's in a tech hiring position, and he said exactly this: It's actually harder to hire now because all advertisements are flooded by less-qualified people. The recession may have increased the pool of qualified people, but it has decreased the S/N in the stack of applications far more.
Isn't something akin to Fizzbuzz the obvious solution to this problem? An unemployed person whether skilled or unskilled is still unemployed and doesn't really have grounds for saying a test is beneath them.
If we can filter out a large percentage of the unskilled with a litmus test like Fizzbuzz that should be a big win. Bigger, in fact, because we've stipulated that the unskilled are far more common than the skilled in today's labor market. I would think that this would be a much better solution than throwing out all resumes from the unemployed.
A barebones, 30-minute (5 minutes if you're good) FizzBuzz-esque puzzle given to candidates up front has drastically reduced the number phone interviews that leave me paralytically depressed at the state of CS education.
One of the companies I applied at recently required candidates to write a CRUD app from scratch. It was just 1 page, and really simple, but had to be done within 48 hours of receiving it. (Which obviously gives lots of time to still have a life and a job.)
They also had a puzzle that you didn't have to code for, but had to tell HOW you could code for it.
I think it took more time than you should ask of an applicant (they sure can't apply very many places!) but it definitely weeds out the unqualified. (And possibly the qualified that won't jump through hoops to work for average wages.)
Unqualified people applying is not a problem. The real problem is your application filter. For example, ask every applicant to include a certain character string (maybe the solution to a trivial assignment) in the body of their cover letter, and discriminate accordingly. I'm sure it would work great at most companies.
That's unfair. I know a few people who have worked HR, and they were largely of above average intelligence and aptitude. However, they are responsible for a wide variety of tasks, of which hiring and sourcing, from janitor to director to .NET programmer.
They often lack the scope of the target ___domain, but that does not equate to a lack of common sense.
That's funny. Just about every HR person I've ever worked with has (a) been convinced that they're Doing The Most Important Job In The World and (b) completely incompetent and unable to deal with geeks.
they were largely of above average intelligence and aptitude
From which pool? Certainly if you look at all people on this planet they may be above average, especially as related to computer technology. But if you take a sample from the technology-oriented people, they may well turn out to be at the bottom.
Recruiting tools for HR people are typically designed by non-recruiters. Most HR department get overwhelmed by volume past a certain point but the tools don't eliminate bottlenecks.
Why so cynical? I didn't mean that at all. I thought the parent poster was showing a typo and I figured it'd be relevant to show they had fixed it in the meantime. (It does help to use square brackets to indicate change from the original quote.)
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.
A goal of social policy is to modify the incentives that make "cruel" and "unavoidable" the logical choices. When child labor was legal, working them long hours was a cruel, unavoidable, and rational decision by employers too.
Child labor was induced by very specific incentives, and it was easy to spot. After the ban on those labor practices, there was no competitive advantage in being the guy who openly hires children and gets slapped down.
Adverse selection problems in the job market are not so tractable. When we ban discrimination against traits that are very valuable to discriminate against, the ban just isn't going to be very effective: employers will find new and more subtle ways to continue their discrimination.
Bans against discrimination on race and religion were effective because employers were hurting themselves with their bad decisions, and it was hard to hide discriminatory practices. The incentives lined up to encourage a diverse workplace.
As a counter-example, bans on age-based discrimination have been very ineffective. Age-based discrimination can be subtle, yet hugely profitable for employers.
I've heard it mentioned on HN that big companies use mass layoffs in bad times to cut a lot of people that the don't want but can't fire. Unless a whole department gets axed, the valuable employees are usually retained.
That's true, but it would be a short term operation at best. Why set up a system for two years maximum?
And while a recession could happen at any time, there is often an employment lag. There would be time to set it up. There are more fundamental problems to this off-the-cuff idea. :)
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?).
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.
It's perfectly sound logic: being already married is social proof that you were a good enough mate for at least one person to marry you. If you had to pick mates blindly, that wouldn't be a bad way to do it.
There is a special reason that we don't apply that heuristic to marriage candidates in real life. We typically value loyalty very highly in a mate, so married candidates who would leave their mates for us destroy their own value.
The same is not true of employees. Loyalty is a nice-to-have, but competence is essential.
It's interesting to see the flipside of this (he said, veering wildly offtopic). On OKCupid and other dating sites there is a particularly style of picture many girls use, cropped but obviously they're with a male, like his arm is around her or something. Projecting female values, they think they're saying "look, I've had a boyfriend, that proves I'm not crazy". Unfortunately the message received by a male is "she's not over her ex".
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.
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.
If the practice is widespread, it's more likely it just increases the time taken to fill open positions as companies spend some time looking to fill the spot of whoever left. It doesn't necessarily have to end with hiring someone who is unemployed, it may just have the effect of decreasing the mean number of employed as the "hole" propagates from place to place.
I think we are in agreement. I like the idea of a "hole". Basically, if a new job is created at some company, then in the long run eventually someone unemployed has to get hired, it just might not be at the company where the new job was created.
That's what I was thinking. Surely in the end it makes no difference. I suppose it might make it easier for employed people with lower skills to move up, when they have to compete with unemployed people with greater skills.
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?
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 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.
Are you making it clear on your resume that they are volunteer positions? If you do that then I think you're fine. I have a two volunteer/unpaid work experience items on my resume, and I haven't had any negative feedback.
You need to make it clear this is something that is volunteer work. You don't want potential employers calling and asking about you and they say "We don't have an employee named xyz", red flags.
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?"