
Help wanted — jobless need not apply - evo_9
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110217/ts_yblog_thelookout/help-wanted-jobless-need-not-apply
======
raganwald
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?"

~~~
JoachimSchipper
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.)

~~~
bartonfink
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.

~~~
zumbojo
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.

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mattdeboard
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..."

~~~
astrofinch
I'm confused. Is Matt's company going to benefit because unemployed people
will want to use his site or because recruiters will want to use his site?

~~~
mattdeboard
Matt's company is going to benefit because news.yahoo.com mentioned his
company's name.

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stevenp
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.

------
angdis
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.

------
hapless
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.

~~~
glenjamin
Given a stack of CVs (resumes), split them into half and throw them away.

You wouldn't want to hire anyone who's unlucky.....

~~~
yummyfajitas
That has no information content. Eliminating the unemployed does, assuming you
believe that P(fired | low quality) > P(fired).

P(low quality | fired) = P(fired | low quality) P(low quality) / P(fired) >
P(low quality)

(Since P(fired | low quality)/P(fired) > 1.)

~~~
ori_b
It does, however, have a moderate amount of humor content. This is not
unexpected, given that it is a joke.

------
ShabbyDoo
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?).

------
ebiester
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.

~~~
netcan
You should do it now:

1- If it has potential, it should work to some extent in any market.

2- The post recession period will have some long unemployed individuals that
might consider drastic action.

3- A recession could happen any time (historically 8-10 years). You want to
have something established by the time it hits.

~~~
ebiester
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. :)

------
wushupork
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.

~~~
SandB0x
You definitely get more attention from girls if you're seen with another
attractive girl.

~~~
gaius
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".

~~~
wushupork
I agree. When I see those types of pictures - I'm thinking it's going to be
complicated.

------
BalancedThought
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.

------
brudgers
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>

.

------
idoh
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.

~~~
lutorm
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.

~~~
idoh
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.

------
mcantor
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.

------
brc
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.

------
tzs
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.

------
Zakharov
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.

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tjmaxal
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.

~~~
hapless
Typically, your former employers' HR departments are happy to confirm
hiring/departure dates and "eligibility for re-hire."

As a result, those are two things you can't expect to successfully lie about.

~~~
tomjen3
Unless you have a friend with a cellphone...

~~~
kgo
...who doesn't mind commiting wire fraud.

~~~
tomjen3
Is it really fraud though?

I mean, fraud seems to me to occur only when you sell something to somebody,
but then I am not a lawyer.

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lukifer
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.

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

~~~
georgieporgie
Software Engineer - Vandelay Industries.

------
TheAmazingIdiot
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.

~~~
scdc
call it what is, "Current Work", and no it's not dishonest. You're smart to
keep working, even if not gainfully employed.

