Your story got me thinking of another reason some companies might want to avoid looking at applications from the unemployed ...

When I graduated from University it took months for me to get my first job in my career, and I remember sending out resumes to any posting that was even remotely related to my education. At the time the thought was that I could always continue looking for the job I really wanted after I got any related job; and I even turned down a crappy call-center job I was offered because it wasn’t really what I was looking for.

As I got more experience and wanted to leave a job I was unhappy with, I was far more careful in the jobs I was sending out resumes to because my bills were already being paid, getting time off for interviews is a pain, and I wanted to be careful not to take a job that was actually worse than I already had.

If you assume that my approach is (more or less) generalizable to the employed/unemployed mindset for job hunting, you could spend a lot of time and money to find someone to fill a position only to have them turn down the job and/or work for a short period of time and leave for something better. If you’re dealing with a low skill job where you can put a job posting in the newspaper and hire someone tomorrow this isn’t such a big problem, but if it takes weeks or months to find someone only to have them quit after a short period of time that can be a major issue.

Exactly.  They want to be sure of who they are getting.  If I am going through a intensive process, hiring always is, I want to make sure what I get out of it at least exceeds what I put into it.

Unfortunately companies are looking at a person being unemployed as a negative thing.  They really do not have much else to go on.  It is very similar to the "Criminal Record" debate that is now going on.  They need anything to separate candidates and that is another negative for them to exclude. 

It took me about 6 months to find a job out of college and 2 weeks when I knew I was going to get laid off.  If my being employed and not a known criminal helped in that regards, I am all for it.

Not lazy. There is only so much time in a day.

I do the hiring at the pizza place I work at (So Cal) and I dont even bother interviewing people who got laid off of construction cause I know as soon as they can get a construction job ($100 a day usually) they will leave us high and dry. I can't blame them its hard to pass up a $100 a day compared to 40-50 they may make at the pizza shop, even if they dont know how much construction work they will have.

Why should there be a law?

They're saving you the trouble of being ignored and saving you time, they're actually doing you a favor.

I've know quite a few hiring managers and they in general hate their lives.  They have to sift through hundreds of resumes of unqualified and incompetent people.

If you want to get angry at someone, get angry at the people that needlessly embellish their resume, apply to jobs they're in no way qualified for, and people that just out right lie on their resume.  It's completely their fault.

Hell, I've seen a resume where someone tried to make the fact they knew how to shred paper sound like an actual applicable skill.  He was applying to be a level designer.

And that's just one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.  Not only will they be forcing compaines to waste their time ignoring you but now they're wasting my money making that crap into a law.

The thing is, if you can make it the difference between 100 resumes and 1000 resumes, it's worth it to screen the resumes.  Chances are, in those 100 resumes you're going to find someone at the very least as good as the people in the 900 other rusumes.

If a company did actually consider those other 900 that would eat up the time of the HR department, the leads of whatever department they're applying to,various managers, and probably even the team the person is applying to.  It saves the company insane amounts of money if they can immediately cull out 900 resumes.

It's the same thing where they require five years of experience.  A company doesn't actually care if you have three years or five years, they're just trying to cut down on the number of resume submissions.  Every resume that gets sent to a computer gets put through a filter that immediately culls out the people that fit certain criteria. 

It's not them saying you aren't good enough, they're just trying to save time and money.  People often get so caught up in their own business (and rightly so, being unemployed isn't a small deal) that they forget to think about the other side.  It's much easier to just villainize them.

You always make such great and thought out posts. Thank you for that.

I recon it's also a lot to do with human nature.

as mercenary as it seems, the best candidate for a job is normally the one who'se already doing it successfully - even if it's somewhere else. That's why a lot of places have restraint of trade clauses in employment contracts (validity of those varies hugely though) is to try discourage head hunters

I live in one of those countries where it is easy to live off the government benefits. Unemployment benefits and Disability penions are easy to get where I live. The disabled pension pays more then unemployment benefits and you do not even have to worry about looking for work. Dealing with 1000s of rejections increases your depression, anxiety and stress. 

A company receives say 10 job applications apply for the role. 5 of those job applicants are currently employed and 5 are unemployed. The 5 unemployed get automatically rejected and/or black listed. 5 employed get short listed and the best interviewed canidate gets the job.. 

Funny how the system works. Once you are unemployed you have a hard time getting back into the workforce the longer you are unemployed. 

Being unemployed is almost as bad as having a criminal record or a  medical condition. The employers are reluctant to take on an employee who has issues.