Ugh, come on humanity, stop letting me down. Reminds me of the South Park episode "Night of the Living Homeless":
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 fact that there are people writing brilliant satires like this might give some hope for humanity; that, and the fact that there are companies creating jobs that people want, even if hiring policies can be foul, discriminatory, and stupid.
My reaction to this is that it's not so much "unconscionable" as mind-numbingly stupid. Yeah, I agree that it's unfair to those of us who are looking for work (I was myself most recently) but from the perspective of those doing the hiring this seems like a weird sort of overcautiousness. Some of the most intelligent, accomplished, and qualified people I know have found themselves unemployed at some point in the last two years. Heck, I just got employed again three months ago after five months of unemployment.
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.
It is mind-numbingly stupid, because there wasn't much thinking involved in coming up with the policy. The companies who post this policy are simply codifying what individual resume screeners have done for eons now.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I wonder whether the companies that only hire people who are currently employed would also fire any of their existing staff who were looking for a job elsewhere?
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 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.
You're preaching to a choirboy! Some of the unemployed have been laid off because they were the most expensive people on staff when a company needed to cut costs. Sometimes that means that the best people were let go. Other times entire departments get the ax because of a power play, so it's a reflection on the lack of political knife fighting skills of a manager several rungs higher up the ladder.
Or the political machinations of lousy management. Not to mention the typical bait and switch that most tech companies pull on talented staff, as was my experience at amazon (which as far as I can tell is the rule there):
Job description: develop a sophisticated new system to replace the barely-functional bug-ridden nightmare we're stuck with now
Actual job duties: wade into the bug-ridden nightmare and add features to the framework that's designed to break as much as possible if you touch anything.
If you needed further evidence, this suggests that there are ridiculous inefficiencies in matching up labor and jobs that you could make money solving. (In this case, caused by the dating site conundrum: there are more men then women, causing men to send out lots of messages without much thought, causing women to be very choosy in responding to messages, causing frustrated men to send more messages, causing women to be even more choosy in replying, etc etc. Though "must already be in a relationship" would not be a very mainstream criteria for dating sites. I hope.)
If you needed further evidence, this suggests that there are ridiculous inefficiencies in matching up labor and jobs that you could make money solving.
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 situation makes up a good portion of an intro game theory course - the section is usually titled "games with asymmetric information", the problem is described as "the market for lemons", and the solution is described as "signaling devices", all of which are ridiculously un-Googlable terms, unfortunately. The economists who noticed this phenomena won a Nobel Prize for it, so there's a good indication that it's well recognized.
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.
This situation makes up a good portion of an intro game theory course - the section is usually titled "games with asymmetric information", the problem is described as "the market for lemons", and the solution is described as "signaling devices", all of which are ridiculously un-Googlable terms, unfortunately.
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.
The problem on the "market for lemons" is written in layman-understandable terms by economist/columnist Tim Harford on his book "The Undercover Economist" (similar to the Freakonomics books). It's even one of the main advertising blurbs: "Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor--and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car"
We value honesty and telling the truth. And when people do, we express outrage.
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.
We value honesty and telling the truth because deception and lying are commonly considered to be bad things.
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.
When someone is offering a service and everybody wants it, its not unreasonable to conclude that it might be worth more to you than a service that has no line of people waiting to pay for it.
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.
How is it immoral? Ok, lets see. Its cruel. Its selfish. Its corrosive to the social contract. Its probably discrimination. And its unnecessary. Honestly, I get chills when I see so many postings that claim to find morality invisible or unknowable.
I wonder how they look at people that were starting their own company, freelancing, etc...?
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.
I get where they are coming from. I was heavily involved in a big hiring spree shortly after the telecom implosion in Dallas. The sheer volume of resumes that we received was staggering. We'd have literally 100's of resumes within an hour of posting a job ad. Maybe 2% of those actually had anything resembling the qualifications we we're looking for (and had clearly spelled out in the ad). It really did seem like folks, out of desperation, where simply shotgunning resumes and hoping for the best.
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.
One issue is that lots of job ads are really poorly worded or have shoot-for-the-moon requirements that are not really requirements. There are plenty of cases where the most qualified person for the job may be someone that doesn't meet most of the requirements in the posting. Though this is more of a commentary on the state of affairs with respect to the composition of job postings.
Sure - employers pad out job openings a bit - but man, people will shotgun-apply for jobs that they are very clearly, to anyone reading the job description, by no stretch of the imagination qualified for. I'm not talking about ridiculous requirements like more years with a technology than the tech has existed, but when you say things like "SENIOR SYSTEMS MANAGER" and "MUST have at last 8 years professional experience" and "MUST have an expert level of knowledge of ProductX"
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.
It works the other way too. On a local portal, I get at least one php coder position offer a month, even though I don't do any web stuff (I'm a voip devops, let's say).
"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."
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.
Even though I upvoted you, one of HR's core competencies should be knowledge of employment laws. Since unemployment rates are much higher for blacks, I think if this hiring practice became widespread it could open up these companies to discrimination lawsuits.
"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."
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.
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.
Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month?
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.
This is probably true. But then again, if you know that most of your resumes are thrown out at random, you know you need to send out a large population of them in order to have a just few of them end up being read.
> Sending out 300 resumés in a month is the wrong strategy, as it shows you don't care about the posting
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.
I was offended as well, I thought they were portraying a black guy as the befuddled hiring manager who won't interview anyone who isn't currently employed.
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.
If you account for blacks who are ex-felons or on parole who can't get jobs, black people are much more likely to be unemployed than whites.
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.
I've put up job postings in the past and you get a lot of mindlessly submitted resumes that have nothing to do with what you're looking for. I can only imagine that number of mindless, irrelevant submissions has increased with the recession.
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.
UNQUALIFIED APPLICANTS WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED is a neutral, uncontroversial statement that most people would consider fair and reasonable. You can also request the applicant to fill a company specific form so you can search for "qualifiedness" using grep.
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.
I'm surprised that you can even compel someone to produce this information in an interview setting, considering some other things that are not legal to ask ("how much do you weigh, how tall are you . . .").
They are explicitely denying applicants the chance to present their work history. They only look at a largely irrelevant single bit of information: you don't have a job now.
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)?
Yes, HuffPo is leftist, but I don't see how rage over this particular issue has jack-all to do with where you lie on the partisan spectrum. I'd expect even many full-bore libertarians to find that policy stupid, discriminatory or both (though they would more fully support an employer's right to be as stupid and discriminatory as they wish).
I think those characterizations are rather context-dependent, though. Restating my point somewhat differently, the "what should be done about it" reaction lies on a somewhat independent axis from the "how angry am I about this" reaction.
For example: A business that refused to hire gun owners would probably get a far more rage-filled reaction from a rightist than a leftist, but it's very roughly analogous.
I look at it as a self-correcting problem. It's a brain-dead stupid HR policy and firms that adopt brain-dead policies will eventually be beaten out by firms that don't.
At the risk of turning this into a political argument... your characterization of the left is simply untrue. A 'leftist' (whatever that means) would most likely view business with a measure of caution, preferring a regulatory power keeping a careful (but generally distant) watch over those business practices.
Very few on 'the left' are full bore socialists, and even fewer are anti-commerce.
Sony Ericsson, a global phone manufacturer that recently announced that it would be bringing 180 new jobs to the Buckhead, Ga. area, also recently posted an ad for a __marketing__ position on The People Place.
A Craigslist ad for __assistant restaurant managers__ in Edgewater,
These don't sound like highly technical fields to me.
It's probably just a tactic to reduce resume spam. After being unemployed for awhile, people tend to apply to everything to increase their chances of success.
How hard is it to check the work chronology and just bong any resume that doesn't look like it would be anywhere near a good fit? It's not like H/R people are overworked filling hundreds of positions in their companies at the moment.
This is actually an indication of economic recovery. The H.R. folks that I know are MASSIVELY overworked right now. As their companies begin to start a new hiring cycle they are being just blasted with candidates.
I was talking to an accounting recruiter the other day. They're finally starting to have a decent flow of jobs in the pipeline, but he's being killed by the number of applicants... many of which merely had an accounting class or two in college on the way to their marketing degree.
My wife's employer recently received 650 applications for three low-paying, entry-level legal positions. Not that I don't think it's a lousy thing to do, and probably will not screen for the best applicants, but I could see a justification for doing _something_ to stem the tide if the number becomes overwhelming.
Right on. Google's got a rather good system for automatically sorting and filtering applicants before they ever cross an HR Manager's desk. Why not have a system like this if you're so overwhelmed in hiring?
Because it would take work and time to put such a system in place, and they are overwhelmed right now. Plus, it would certainly cost money which is probably not in budgets that have been cut to the bone.
There's also a cost/benefit analysis. Having gone through a few hundred such applications, they have probably come to the conclusion that the likelihood of finding a gem is too low to be worth the effort. If you are employed, you are likely only sending out resumes if it's a very good fit; therefore, from the hiring HR guy's point of view, there's a lot of value in that self-selection.
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.