Jobless Edged Out by Employed Jobseekers
As if things weren’t bad enough for the unemployed.
Trying to decipher legit and made-up job postings, fighting tooth and nail for their unemployment checks, and politely listening well-intentioned “advice” from friends and family.
We thought it couldn’t get any worse.
Well it can.
According to the Wall Street Journal, employers – even in this economy – are giving preference to job applicants who are already gainfully employed. The reasoning? Those who are still working must be the cream of the crop. A type of corporate Darwinism.
Right. Because incompetent middle managers never cut their hardest working reports to save themselves. Because no one ever gets to stay put simply because they’re better at schmoozing with upper management. And because it’s always better to fly hundreds of miles to court an employed person, than to give a local, perfectly qualified unemployed person a chance.
I think we all know that some extremely talented people have lost their jobs in the past eight months, for reasons that were well beyond their control (coughAIG-Citigroup-FannieMaecough). It seems ridiculous, at least to me, that anyone would be discriminated against for not having a job in the worst recession of our lifetime.
We’ve all heard the old adage: “it’s easier to find a job when you already have one.”
But isn’t it time for hiring managers to put aside their short-sighted, lazy, archaic litmus tests to find and nourish the very best talent?
Corporate culture is evolving. And yet, corporate HR departments have, so far, miraculously managed to dodge extinction. Clearly, Darwin’s theory is not fool proof.
Having worked in and as part of and supported HR departments for a few years now, I really have to object to the last lines here. HR departments often do not make hiring decisions, it’s hiring managers. Often, HR departments don’t even source candidates, recruiters do. And they do so at the request of hiring managers and to their specifications. The issue at hand is really the incompetent middle managers who don’t want to hire talented unemployed people, and decide some arbitrary criteria for judging candidates.
HR departments I’ve worked in are full of people who fight tooth and nail for the people who work at the company, and are often put in positions by senior management and others to do things they don’t want to do.
At the other end of the spectrum, temps now face tough standards.
Even Data Entry TEMP jobs require 3 years experience. Such jobs can be learned in 1 week or less.