The blogosphere is abuzz these days with this latest trend in a lot of employment ads with a new caveat appearing in many job postings: “Unemployed need not apply”.
I personally don’t agree with this… although after reading various opinions, I do see the thoughts (not logic) behind this tactic. The employers argue that it takes longer to train applicants who have been out of work for long, and they also believe that the ones who haven’t been laid off represent the better ones in their fields. Also, many employers think that the unemployed are more inclined to send their resumes for job postings for which they are not even qualified and this takes them longer to sift through the stack of résumés that they receive, and costs them to screen through bogus applicants.
While these points make some sense, I question whether it’s the right tactic to use for screening purposes. Why not introduce additional screening criteria in the application process to help screen in the appropriate candidates for interviewing? Also, isn’t this practice going to encourage additional lying and fluffing on the résumé?
Totally inappropriate. Better question is, do you want to work for an employer who doesn't have the resources or the inclination to do proper due diligence on a prospective candidate. And the whole idea of less/more qualified - the employer may lose out on a better candidate which shows the employer's lack of commitment to finding the best employee and instead a focus on cost savings.
^ I agree totally that the tactic is inappropriate but I attribute it to a myopic perspective on the management's part - as is the case in many... many other so-called cost saving initiatives.
we were forced to do that back in 2002 when the economy was just starting to recover post dotcom bubble burst
we are amongst the first ones to be reverse the trend of retrenching - when we advertised for the positions - we were flooded. The unemployed as well as the people who were looking for a change applied for the posts
Someone raised the idea of screening based on their current employment status - it looked wrong so was immediately shot down
so we went around scanning all the resumes and calling the candidates... we regrouped after a week and found exactly the same observations as stated above - lack of required skills , resume fudging etc amongst the unemployed There would be few who would be worth it but it was like finding a needle in the haystack...the efforts to scan hundreds of resumes to get one was not justified
so it was decided - we will filter out the freshers and the unemployed - harsh but in those circumstances justified
While I was unemployed for a bit last year I joined some people who would get together for the sake of networking, but more so to cry out their sorrows.
One of the things we agreed on (there were people from all diff genres) was that people who were NOT laid off and were still working were not that better off than the others who were out. They were doing the work of 3-4 people while their pay had no chance of going up.
So those same people were bombarded with resumes and applications from tons of people so they would have to come up with shortcuts to get their jobs done and go home so they can forget about what they did the whole day.