An interesting form of discrimination... By: Chad Brooks, BusinessNewsDaily Contributor "As if finding a job isn't hard enough when unemployed, new research shows that simply being out of work â and not lack of skills or expertise â is the reason many aren't getting hired. "The study, which will be presented at next month's annual meeting of the Academy of Management, found strong evidence of bias against the unemployed from those who hire. "While it has long been argued that discrimination against the jobless occurs only after being out of work for a lengthy period of time, the research revealed that the prejudice starts almost immediately. "We found bias against the jobless, among human-resource professionals as well as among the broader public, virtually from the outset of unemployment," said researcher Geoffrey Ho, a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. "The study also found that saying they were laid off doesn't lessen the stigma for the unemployed. "Those two words by themselves don't elicit any more sympathy than 'left voluntarily,'" Ho said. "What does allay people's bias is some explicit indication that losing your job was not your fault â for example, that the company went bankrupt or suffered some specific setbacks that made layoffs inevitable." "The findings were the result of several experimental studies, including one involving human resource professionals. "As part of the experiment, nearly 50 human resource professionals were asked to envision that their companies wanted to hire a marketing manager. Each was provided with résumés exactly the same, except that half indicated the candidate's most recent job to the present, while the others showed the applicant's last day of employment was a month earlier. In addition, a brief profile above the résumé stated the applicant's name and job status â "employed" or "unemployed." "The study found that the human resources experts rated the employed candidate significantly higher on both confidence and hireability. "Here we see candidates with strong résumés being substantially penalized for something that may not reflect at all on their ability to contribute to the company," Ho said. "At a time of high unemployment, as at present, employers would do well to reflect on whether the bias we have identified in this paper may be compromising company efforts to recruit the best people." "Based on their experiment of the general public, Ho said the bias against the unemployed reaches much further than just those charged with filling jobs. "Unemployment stigma may be a robust phenomenon that affects people in their everyday interactions and not only when HR professionals are looking at résumés," Ho said. "The study shows the unemployed must be aware of résumé gaps, according to Ho. "Do whatever you can to fill in the gap since your last job with any relevant activities, whether it's continuing your education or doing pertinent volunteer work or anything else that may enhance your qualifications for the job in question," he said. "The study, âThe Psychological Stigma of Unemployment: When Joblessness leads to Being Jobless," was co-authored by Margaret Shih and Daniel J. Walters of UCLA Anderson and Todd Lowell Pittinsky of Stony Brook University." http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2919-unemployment-bias.html
Employment discrimination is bad. Apartment discrimination is ten times worse. But, your "good" government is only doing what the money people are telling them to do; so they allow these "discrepancies" to occur.
There is a side to this that warrants the discrimination, for example if i was hiring and i looked at 2 resumes for someone to do some book work for me, and both people had similar experience prior to 2008, and one guy lived on unemployment for 4 years, and the other guy worked at McDonalds for 4 years and refused to take a government cheque there is no question id hire the guy who worked at McDonalds.
Ricter, you need to get out of the basement more often (at least once?) because this is an economic topic, not P&R. (There's already a thread or 2 dedicated to this subject.) http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=224199&highlight=discrimination http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=217262&highlight=discrimination
A couple of years ago I saw an article in the local paper written by a headhunter who said that many companies see unemployed people as "damaged goods."
Nothing surprising about this at all. It's the same thing as it's much easier to pick up women if those women know you have a girlfriend already (married is even better). The hiring company wants the challenge that you are being stolen away (hopefully from a competitor to boot )from a suitor. Just like women ARE without a doubt more interested in a man who already is in a relationship. The single man or unemployed is more like picking a dog up from the pound, it's a rescue operation and they are thinking "what's REALLY wrong with this dog /employee)"?
On making the stigma permanent: Hopeless Unemployment by Brad DeLong, Commentary, Project Syndicate: "...At first, the long-term unemployed in the Great Depression searched eagerly and diligently for alternative sources of work. But, after six months or so passed without successful reemployment, they tended to become discouraged and distraught. After 12 months of continuous unemployment, the typical unemployed worker still searched for a job, but in a desultory fashion, without much hope. And, after two years of unemployment, the worker, accurately expecting to be at the end of every hiring queue, had lost hope and, for all practical purposes, left the labor market. " This was the pattern of the long-term unemployed in the Great Depression. It was also the pattern of the long-term unemployed in Western Europe at the end of the 1980s. And, in a year or two, it will be the pattern again for the long-term unemployed in the North Atlantic region. " I have been arguing for four years that our business-cycle problems call for more aggressively expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, and that our biggest problems would quickly melt away were such policies to be adopted. That is still true. But, over the next two years, barring a sudden and unexpected interruption of current trends, it will become less true. " The current balance of probabilities is that two years from now, the North Atlanticâs principal labor-market failures will not be demand-side market failures that could be easily remedied by more aggressive policies to boost economic activity and employment. Rather, they will be structural market failures of participation that are not amenable to any straightforward and easily implemented cure."