Unemployed need not apply....

[Ssenkahdavic]

HappySqurriel said:

Ssenkahdavic said:

A little story.

My buddy from college told me this a few days ago actually.  His bosses best friend had been unemployed for the past years.  He has been looking diligently for the past 2 years for a job (he has a ton of experience a masters) and has not found much at all.

My buddies boss decides to give him a temporary position in the company and boom, two months later he scores a big interview with a company (who he had applied to a month earlier through a temp agency and he was told they were not interested in hm).  A week after that, he has a job and a damn good one at that.

When I was unemployed, the first piece of advice I was given by a temp agency was to get a job anywhere I could get hired.  She told me that many of their clients refuse to even look at resumes of people who are not currently employed (regardless of what the current employment is).  She said that this was one of the easiest ways for most of these companys to shift through the thousands of applications they are receiving for jobs.

While I do not agree with the practice in general, when receiving literally thousands of applications for a single job, you have to do something to separate out the resumes, and I guess this method is working for them.

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.