I just finished reading “The
Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment,” which looks at how hiring
managers and recruiters routinely put aside resumes from applicants who’ve been
out of work for more than six months. According to the article, a recent study
shows that the length of unemployment matters more to companies than just about
anything else, including overall credentials. In fact, companies will call back
applicants who are less qualified or who have a history of “job hopping”more
often than applicants who’ve been unemployed for longer than six months.
I urge everyone who
depends on a job for a living to read the article. This trend truly is terrifying,
as the comments after the article will attest.
Author Matthew O’Brien
suggests that it’s time for the government to do something, because companies apparently
aren’t going to change tactics without incentive to do so. O’Brien writes, “We
can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can't afford long-term
thinking in either the short or the long-term.”
O’Brien is not the only bearer
of bad hiring news. Last week, a friend of mine, a college professor who
teaches HR, told me his students are reporting that companies are now wanting
to know in what year an applicant graduated from high school. Huh? Is this a
thoughtless inquiry or a sly way of roughly calculating someone’s age? (You
already know what I think.) And then another friend told me that a mutual
friend, a recruiter, works in an agency where her twenty- and thirty-something coworkers
habitually dismiss anyone over the age of forty as “too old.” So, you can kind
of understand the angry comments after O’Brien’s article. Workers who’ve been
unemployed for more than six months and
are older than forty are feeling particularly vulnerable.
While O’Brien says the
government should step in, I say hiring managers and recruiters should check
their biases and stop harboring this ridiculous notion that if you haven’t
found a job quickly there must be something wrong with you. Maybe there is
something wrong with you, but it’s just as likely that you’re experienced and
competent and therefore aren’t the cheapest candidate available. It’s simply
easier to find a job paying forty thousand a year than one paying eighty
thousand, so if you’re seeking the latter you probably will be in the market
longer. That doesn’t mean you’re a dud.
Compounding the problem,
and I’ve written about this before, is that some employers have gotten
downright crazy with their requirements, wanting two or three years of experience
for skills that can be taught on the job. For example, in one of my Linkedin
groups, a debate arose as to how many years of experience someone should have
for an entry-level HR job, and I’m telling you things got heated, quick. Some
people apparently believe that HR is so highfalutin’ there’s no such thing as an
entry-level position. Others, wanting to break into the profession, were
getting frustrated as all get out, a stance I certainly understand. When I
entered HR, I had nearly ten years of work history, and I do believe those
years were helpful in forming my overall maturity. However, I have trained
people with no experience. It can be done and often you get great employees when
you do.
So it seems to me that
something in the hiring industry is seriously broken, it’s affecting younger
and older workers, and we’re never going to get out of this recession if it
isn’t fixed. That’s bad news for everyone, including employers, who keep complaining that they can’t find
qualified workers.
O’Brien says that ‘The
worst possible outcome for all of us
is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable.” I couldn’t agree more.
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