Noticing (Unemployed need not apply)

Just curious why this is still a used model. Albeit not often, it still does exist. What's the logic behind it?

The only thing I can come up with, is that if someone is actually working in the field there is a decent chance they will have sharper skills due to them actually using those, whereas someone out of work for a year could be rusty.

Anyway, pretty sad if you ask me.

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IronmanX

I've never seen this.

blatini

I've never seen this either but it sounds stupid to the point of being funny. Sorry we are only interested in hiring people who don't need a job. ...What?

Fulcrum45

Although it's a pretty crappy I think you're correct in your assumptions, DataBaseHead. That or the misguided belief that if you're out of work then it means you couldn't handle your last job.

blatini

Yeah I think places are always a little sketched out if you are unemployed / have been for more than a few months. This definitely crosses the threshold of being brazenly obnoxious. On the plus side at least you won't waste your time applying somewhere with a crappy culture.

fredrikjj

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Just curious why this is still a used model. Albeit not often, it still does exist. What's the logic behind it?
[...]

The logic is "statistical discrimination". The assumption is that, on average, unemployed people are worse than those that are already employed (if they are good, why are they unemployed?). Therefore, if you only interview people that already have jobs, you get better candidates. It's the same reason why some companies only interview people from certain schools, or people that have worked at certain companies, or people with X years of experience, etc.

These assumptions are probably true, but you obviously miss out on outliers that are better than the average for the group that you place them in. It can also lead to personal tragedies for people that get stuck in one of these less desired groups, and have a very difficult time getting hired.

MontagueVandervort

I think there are assumptions and judgements that a lot of people make about the "unemployed", especially now more than ever it seems. No one has a right to judge anyone until they've walked a mile in their shoes.

This is something I really worry about on an almost constant basis. I wish it could just be as simple as "I want to work. I know my material. I will be the best I can be for your company. Now you hire me."... but instead there are a million useless and judgemental considerations you have to worry about getting passed just so you can survive.

revbox

God forbid someone be a victim of off-shoring, took a time-out for personal/family reasons, etc.

MontagueVandervort

revbox wrote: »

God forbid someone be a victim of off-shoring, took a time-out for personal/family reasons, etc.

Or a violent crime. Or a medical issue. Or anything else that's completely out of someone's control.

DatabaseHead

Interesting Fredrick.

I suppose if you have quantitative data to back it up and you do find a strong pattern/correlation between that and a failed resources you might actually subscribe to that methodology.

fredrikjj

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Interesting Fredrick.

I suppose if you have quantitative data to back it up and you do find a strong pattern/correlation between that and a failed resources you might actually subscribe to that methodology.

I think that most companies already subscribe to that methodology, but they don't advertise it in ads because it's seen as rude. Just like they won't say "if you didn't graduate from schools in this tier, we probably won't interview you", but people form those schools will have drastically higher call back rates.

DatabaseHead

fredrikjj wrote: »

I think that most companies already subscribe to that methodology, but they don't advertise it in ads because it's seen as rude.

Or lazy.........

http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/16/news/economy/unemployed_need_not_apply/

fredrikjj

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Or lazy.........

Yeah, most companies probably want it to seem like they are great at hiring and that their hiring practices are set up to identify talent without relying on superficial signals. At the end of the day though, everyone relies mostly on signals like education, tenure at other companies, and so on because it's too costly to test actual skills (unless you are are down to just a few candidates, but at that point, those other signals have already done the filtering for you).

p@r0tuXus

At a time when Zip-recruiter is making job posting/hiring algorhithmically broken down and people are more worried about "checking boxes" on both sides of the interview table... I'd say it makes sense that the companies would want to streamline the process because time is money, so why go through every resume and give every individual a shot when you know you'll have more luck with raising the bar to filter in the right people. It is, after all, about finding the right people. The less time it takes to do that, the better.

On the other hand, businesses that opt to only hire people from certain schools can go eat a whole bag of D*#%$.... Seriously, what is that elitist B.S. supposed to do other than preserve and perpetuate some douchebag's Alma Mater's culture and ensure longevity for all their future frat or organization buddies that will need a place to go? Again... all about culture and I can't support that because I have *some* principles.

fredrikjj

p@r0tuXus wrote: »

...so why go through every resume and give every individual a shot when you know you'll have more luck with raising the bar to filter in the right people. It is, after all, about finding the right people. The less time it takes to do that, the better.
[...]

In theory, if the company can identify a candidate that's good, but from a bad category (e.g. unemployed), they can hire that person for less money than someone equally good with a stellar resume. But again, that requires investing money into having the capability to identify good people without looking just resumes, and you must be able to do this at scale. It might be too costly relative to what you gain from it.

blatini

p@r0tuXus wrote: »

At a time when Zip-recruiter is making job posting/hiring algorhithmically broken down and people are more worried about "checking boxes" on both sides of the interview table... I'd say it makes sense that the companies would want to streamline the process because time is money, so why go through every resume and give every individual a shot when you know you'll have more luck with raising the bar to filter in the right people. It is, after all, about finding the right people. The less time it takes to do that, the better.

On the other hand, businesses that opt to only hire people from certain schools can go eat a whole bag of D*#%$.... Seriously, what is that elitist B.S. supposed to do other than preserve and perpetuate some douchebag's Alma Mater's culture and ensure longevity for all their future frat or organization buddies that will need a place to go? Again... all about culture and I can't support that because I have *some* principles.

I'm confused how you can defend filtering people by job status and then complain about companies hiring from certain schools...? Companies know that the requirements to enter certain schools are more strict than others so logically people who have attended those schools are smarter and harder working right? "It is, after all about finding the right people. The less time it takes to do that, the better."

For the record I think both are complete bullshit I just don't follow your logic and am curious.

scaredoftests

being unemployed, I resemble that remark. Seriously, how stupid.

dontstop

Lazy HR vetting. This logic is along the same lines as HR staff who believe that a candidate with a Degree is in any way superior. A friend of mine from school wasn't even interested in his Degree, did plenty of somewhat shady assignment/code sharing and got his Degree. There are a lot of assumptions in that A4 piece of paper you get from a Degree. Not to mention that most subjects allow you to nearly pass or actually pass the exam based on coursework before you even take the exam. The model is generally 50% marks from coursework and 50% from exams.

NavyMooseCCNA

I remember reading something several years ago about firms pulling this crap. I believe Indeed made it a policy not to accept ads from firms pulling this.

Whomever made this decision deserves to be laid off so they can experience what it is like as a job seeker.

scaredoftests

NavyMooseCCNA wrote: »

I remember reading something several years ago about firms pulling this crap. I believe Indeed made it a policy not to accept ads from firms pulling this.

Whomever made this decision deserves to be laid off so they can experience what it is like as a job seeker.

Exactly!

MontagueVandervort

When you really break it all down, all that all of this is going to do is add to even more resume falsification so people can get through. It's like the whole system is a trainwreck waiting to happen.

bodokid

Because Christianity is our business we require all employees to sign a statement of faith.

UncleB

NavyMooseCCNA wrote: »

I remember reading something several years ago about firms pulling this crap. I believe Indeed made it a policy not to accept ads from firms pulling this.

I've seen this from both sides of the table - as an employer you can put out an ad for say a 3rd line support role and you get 300+ applicants. If you are involved in the filtering process on top of your day job (made more difficult because someone left and you have to cover their role too) and you have to select a criteria to cut through this pile.

Reading a CV written by your average techie takes around 10 minutes due to the typical sprinkling of jargon and buzzwords that these people think look good - maybe make that 5 mins on average as some CVs will flag up as unsuitable quickly. That is 25 hours on average to filter CVs even before going through a process of grading and inviting for first stage interviews. That is a huge amount of time for a busy manager to spend, so you need to have a secondary process in place to filter.

To do it right all the time is not econmically viable so you have to use another mechanism to reduce the numbers, even though it means you cannot be fair to everyone. I've see the following mechanisms used:

- divide the candidates into several bundles and discard one bundle - these were unlucky candidates because you discarded them and you don't want to hire an unlucky candidate!
- give each one a score based on what they claim as the skills on the CV, but this relies on them being truthful. This however is unfair on those who did not write good CVs
- only chose employed candidates as these require another employer to have vetted the basic work readiness of the candidates in theory
- eliminate on some other criteria that you have a bias against - hard to prove at this stage if you excluded all funny sounding names or people from a certain part of the country. I know this is illegal but it is still all too common and is very hard to prove.

There are plenty of ways to do it right, but short of spending a load on a 3rd party to do the filtering for you, there is just not enough time for most hiring managers. Remember that they now need to spend many more days with phone interviews and multi stage interviews and this requires other managers time to sit in the interviews too, resulting in each position costing thousands of dollars to hire for simply down to the time it takes.

It isn't fair, but then neither is life. Some of us do what we can to influence things for the better, but the sad thing is that the econoics of it don't support the right thing.

For the record I have hired staff from long term unemplyed backgrounds and all races, religeons and genders (even transgender) and do what I can to make the process as fair as I can based on the CV, but I have reads tens of thousands of CVs by this stage in my career and can see the temptation to use the "unlucky candidates not welcome" approach.

If any of you have a suggestion on how employers could efficiently and fairly do the filtering then I would love to hear it.

paul78

UncleB wrote: »

I've seen this from both sides of the table - as an employer you can put out an ad for say a 3rd line support role and you get 300+ applicants. If you are involved in the filtering process on top of your day job (made more difficult because someone left and you have to cover their role too) and you have to select a criteria to cut through this pile.

As an employer and hiring manager, I have to say that I've never had this problem. If anything, I would prefer to get more resumes for open positions. Personally, we have always used a queue - I.e. we review candidates in the order that the resume was received - it's simple, it's fair, and it's effective.

@Databasehead - I'm curious if you or anyone actually saw ads that discriminate against the unemployed or under-employed. The CNN article that you cited was from a NY Times report from 2010 that generated a lot of buzz. And some states had enacted legislation against discrimination against unemployed persons. New Jersey being one - ftp://www.njleg.state.nj.us/20102011/PL11/40_.PDF . I have read that District of Columbia and Oregon may have similar laws but I don't know what happened to the other states that tried to do similar.

TechGromit

DatabaseHead wrote: »

[h=2]Noticing (Unemployed need not apply) [/h]

I'd be very surprised to see that in actual print. it's a blatant discrimination that has class action lawsuit written all over it. While a company may practice it, they would never come right out and say it on a job ad.

TechGromit

UncleB wrote: »

That is a huge amount of time for a busy manager to spend, so you need to have a secondary process in place to filter.

I thought that was the entire point of HR, they do the first round of filtering based on parameters you provide them and only send you qualified applicants for your review.

paul78

TechGromit wrote: »

I thought that was the entire point of HR, they do the first round of filtering based on parameters you provide them and only send you qualified applicants for your review.

Depends on the company. Many smaller companies don't have fulltime HR and administrative HR functions are usually outsourced to a PEO. I personally prefer to do my own vetting so my instructions to in-house recruiters are to give me or my managers all resumes - the criteria for filtering are always very simple. For example - depending on the role - "must have been a manager or team lead before", "must have more than 3 years professional experience", "must have worked for a bank", "must list Java on resume" - stuff like that.

TechGromit wrote: »

I'd be very surprised to see that in actual print. it's a blatant discrimination that has class action lawsuit written all over it. While a company may practice it, they would never come right out and say it on a job ad.

It's only illegal in some states.

IronmanX

TechGromit wrote: »

I thought that was the entire point of HR, they do the first round of filtering based on parameters you provide them and only send you qualified applicants for your review.

Plus I see a lot of places are now using job posting systems where you have to log in, create an account and apply for a job where they ask you a few specific questions about the job you are applying for. Some have a generic skill section when you create an account which I find to be a little bit useless as the usually are too generic.

I have seen job posting asking for only local people to apply or people who are already eligible to work in the country they are in.

I've never seen the problem of getting too many applicants.

DatabaseHead

TechGromit wrote: »

I'd be very surprised to see that in actual print. it's a blatant discrimination that has class action lawsuit written all over it.

You are speaking with emotion not facts. Like Paul mentioned only in certain states.

they would never come right out and say it on a job ad.

This is false others on here have seen it as well.

The original question, why companies choose to do this.

jeremywatts2005

Here is how you remedy that situation. Start a LLC and get a business license. I think the last time I did it I paid like $20 or $30 something like that. Did the LLC stuff online didn't cost much. Now you are a CEO running your own business. I did it when I got laid off in the early 2k's. Then when someone would ask me what I was doing out of work I would say I am not out of work. I am operating my own business doing consulting. Then you are never unemployed and there will never be gaps in the resume

paul78

DatabaseHead wrote: »

The original question, why companies choose to do this.

If you enjoy reading judicial opinions as I do - there was an attempt to challenge the NJ law that I mentioned. The appellate court did uphold the NJ statute. The opinion can be found here - a0417-12.opn.html

The opinion cites some research by a Rutgers professor - in short:

"Some employers, however, perceive that currently jobless persons are less likely to be suitable applicants because they may lack current skills, or because they may have lost their previous jobs due to poor performance. In addition, because of the surplus of supply in the labor market, hiring employers may already be flooded with more than sufficient applications from currently employed candidates. "

This practice was common during the recession back in 2010-2012.

@jeremywatts2005 - that's actually not a bad idea. And it's actually very practical.