

The unemployed will not be considered - known
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/04/disturbing-job-ads-the-un_n_600665.html?view=print

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koeselitz
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.

~~~
azanar
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.

~~~
techiferous
"haven't _thought_ about this at all."

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.

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SandB0x
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._

~~~
pigbucket
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.

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raganwald
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.

~~~
Tamerlin
"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.

~~~
raganwald
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.

~~~
Tamerlin
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.

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patio11
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.)

~~~
azanar
_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.

~~~
cianestro
Sorry, but you're horrifyingly correct.

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stretchwithme
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.

~~~
rue
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.

~~~
stretchwithme
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

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tibbon
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.

~~~
enjo
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.

~~~
pyre
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.

~~~
dedward
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.

~~~
viraptor
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).

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brk
I have created a solution to this problem.

For $500/mo. you can "work" for me.

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.

Employment is only a click away!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'll do it for $5

~~~
bhousel
It only works if the amount you're offering is similar to what a person would
make from their unemployment benefits.

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pwim
_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.

~~~
fburnaby
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.

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dsc
From the article: "There are about 5.5 people looking for work for every job
available, according to the latest data from the Labor Department. "

That's not much. Oh, and OUCH!

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known
Entrepreneur or Unemployed?
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02reich.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02reich.html?pagewanted=print)

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thingie
So, I've sent quite a lot of (pretty much blank, but should I lie?) resumes,
mostly didn't get any answer at all, and… what now? :) It's almost funny.

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fleitz
The irony of the policy is the company will then ask you loyalty questions in
the interview.

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tarkin2
I find the terms self-employed and freelancing much more satisfying than
unemployed.

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SkyMarshal
Interesting choice of photo.

~~~
cmelbye
How so?

~~~
SkyMarshal
I probably wouldn't have used a pic of a befuddled looking black guy as the
sole picture for an article about the unemployed.

~~~
cmelbye
Again, why? Blacks are technically just as likely to be unemployed as whites.

~~~
nostrademons
Technicallly, they're almost twice as likely to be unemployed as whites:

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm>

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.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
> _It's offensive because it's true ..._

Something about that sentence isn't right.

~~~
crpatino
what's wrong with that? true == offensive everybody knows this!

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lionhearted
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.

~~~
crpatino
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.

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houseabsolute
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 . . .").

~~~
plorkyeran
You're surprised that you can ask for someone's work history in an interview
setting?

~~~
houseabsolute
Current employment status, not work history.

~~~
plorkyeran
One's currently employment status is part of one's work history.

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smiler
This should be illegal

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looprecur
It's my firm belief that the hottest rooms in hell will be saved for those who
kick people when they're down.

