32 ms·

As labor pool shrinks, prison time is less of a hiring hurdle

180 points by el_benhameen 9y ago

GraffitiTim 9y ago
There's a YC app for that: https://www.70millionjobs.com/ https://www.70millionjobs.com/
Selfcommit 9y ago
I'm really confused - when did we suddenly start having a labor shortage?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  There's been a labor shortage in the big cities for about a year, though IME that shortage hasn't extended to smaller cities or more rural areas of the country.
  - kazagistar 9y ago
    So its another symptom of rising real-estate prices then?
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      No, it's a symptom of capital concentration. Big cities are growing economically because that's where the money is, thus that's where the startup and VC money goes. The rest of the country isn't seen by investors as the best place for growth, so remains relatively underdeveloped.
- shagie 9y ago
  There's a labor shortage of people who are going to do the tedious work. The good factory job in part requires a dependable worker. In many places, that dependable worker is hard to find and factories are switching to robots (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines... ) > The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger generation that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more and more, a workforce in declining health: because of alcohol, because of despair and depression, because of a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs. > ... > Companies now could pick between two versions of the American worker — humans and robots. And at Tenere Inc., where 132 jobs were unfilled on the week the robots arrived, the balance was beginning to shift. > ... > After an hour the workers were heading back to their cars, one saying that everything “sounds okay,” another saying the “pay sucks.” Bader guessed that two of the four “wouldn’t last a week,” because often, he said, he knew within minutes who would last. People who said they couldn’t work Saturdays. People who couldn’t work early mornings. This was the mystery for him: So many people showing up, saying they were worried about rent or bills or supporting children, and yet they couldn’t hold down a job that could help them. This extends to farms (who often prefer immigrants because they're ok with working with large animals). For a bit on the labor storage in Wisconsin: http://host.madison.com/wsj/business/wisconsin-businesses-grapple-with-a-growing-worker-shortage/article_3ef1000e-c18b-5f72-bbcd-720ee2456111.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/business/wisconsin-businesses-gr... On the other hand, you've got an ex-convict. Many of them are people who have messed up somewhere in the past and don't want to go back. I am in Wisconsin (and work in the public sector), so this is something I'm a bit more familiar with than other states... and also happens to be the subject of the article... http://buybsi.com/images/PDF/MapofIndustries.pdf http://buybsi.com/images/PDF/MapofIndustries.pdf - note that three of the facilities are teaching farm skills. Tying the two articles together - the work release are people that you're sure are going to show up and are going to be drug free. They're not going to stop at the bar on the way home and come into work the next day with a massive hangover. And when they get out... they are often good workers. https://www.npr.org/2016/04/22/475228335/do-felons-make-good-employees https://www.npr.org/2016/04/22/475228335/do-felons-make-good... ... and there's something for the employer too - a tax credit. https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/jobservice/taxcredit/wotc.htm https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/jobservice/taxcredit/wotc.htm
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Economists consider unemployment around 5% as "full employment". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment Hitting that is one way of measuring whether there is a labor shortage. At the moment it does happen to coincide with wage growth (which should be higher when it is more difficult to hire people).
  - randomdata 9y ago
    But economists define shortage as a situation where an external mechanism (like government intervention) prevents price from rising. The fact that we are seeing wage growth says that there is not a shortage.
- temp-dude-87844 9y ago
  Unemployment numbers, as with most official government numbers, are based on a combination of surveys and self-performed actions, such as filing for unemployment, the latter of which essentially amounts to self-reporting [1]. These results are then aggregated into six metrics, U-1 through U-6 [2], of which U-3 has been designated the official and widely-quoted unemployment rate. The main value of U-3 isn't that it's a particularly insightful reflection on job health, but rather that it's easy to measure, its definition is consistent, and captures a particular subset of the population that has demonstrated overt desire to participate in government programs that ostensibly help them on the path towards employment. This self-selects for workers exceeding a particular desperation ratio, while not counting people who may think that they'd prefer to work, but haven't taken a government-defined sequence of steps towards doing so. Seasonally-adjusted U-3 is low right now, around 4.1%, so in macro terms the pool of people who have taken overt steps towards getting a job while still not having a job is shrinking. This means there's fewer candidates for a particular position, and on average, less of a chance that any particular candidate is qualified for any particular position. You could argue that this means there's a labor shortage. [1] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
- mc32 9y ago
  True. Optimistically, the current "shortage" might result in getting chronically unemployed people back into the job market. People who long ago gave up on finding a job. That said, we should introduce some job training for these folks since their skulls are likely severely out of date.
- iguy 9y ago
  Note that the article doesn't contain the word "shortage". It's just the continuum of supply and demand: if people like the ones you hired last year can't be found this year, you have to pay more, or consider those you'd have overlooked, including felons. If they have a stronger bargaining position, they get a better deal. Note that the article also doesn't contain the word "immigration". It deserves to be noted that the jobs being discussed here have a huge overlap with the jobs often filled by unskilled immigrants. Whatever your views on ex-cons and low-skill foreigners, I think it's important to understand that there is a trade-off between them.
- narrator 9y ago
  For low skilled jobs, the immigration crack down might have had some effect. It's certainly had a big effect in construction. The legit bigger employers might have always been hiring people with their paperwork all in order, but the smaller contractors are now competing with them for the same pool of legit workers. The ex-cons are the ones who can fill the gaps for people looking to get cheaper labor. I knew a guy a few years ago, when things were more lax, who lived in Bisbee, Atizona and he said that since it was right next to the border and their was a big border patrol station there that there weren't ay illegal immigrants around, so if he wanted cheap construction help he had to hire ex-cons.
  - Wingman4l7 9y ago
    The irony; you can't find any illegal immigrants to hire -- which is against the law! -- so you have to resort to hiring people who have already broken the law.
    - iguy 9y ago
      Broke the law, got caught, served their sentence, and are now looking to re-join society. As opposed to those who broke the law and haven't been caught yet. (Different laws, granted.)
- Spooky23 9y ago
  We do a shitty job at educating people, so it’s hard to hire qualified people in many industries. Try finding a master plumber or electrician. Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist. Companies run so lean there’s no pipeline of internal candidates either. Where I work, it’s impossible to hire competent managers with technical skills. The normal places you’d look are full of young/inexperienced and old/stagnant.
  - iamdave 9y ago
    I can't speak to plumbing and electrical work, those aren't my industries but Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist. My knee jerk reaction is to say "I absolutely refuse to believe this is true", but I will concede that the problem (here, I am defining problem not as a shortage of qualified talent, but a shortage of qualified talent that actually progresses to getting hired) exists because of symptoms you correctly highlighted "pipelines" and "competent managers". I will admit-however-to being biased as someone who's worked in IT for decades and later became a technical recruiter with an agency who wanted someone on staff that could have conversations with tech professionals on a meaningful, personal level. Unrealistic or otherwise unsustainable hiring manager expectations and offensive constraints on salary compared with demanded skills seem to have created artificial scarcities of talent in IT hiring (pipeline). Candidates are expected to come in the door having every bullet point in a 120 bullet point job ad satisfied as to core-competencies, and when hired, they're given a workstation and sent off to the grind with just enough training and grooming to know the name of the product and the ability to rattle off a list of libraries and frameworks used. Skill gaps get resumes thrown out, even if it's some middling gap that with time and support from senior techs can be rapidly closed with a dose of on the job training. Something that seems as extinct as the pterodactyl nowadays. Heck, just last week I had a talk with a recruiter who was looking for a DevOps Engineer (not strictly IT in the traditional sense of the phrase, but I bring this up to highlight my point) and we joked about one job spec that was looking for a senior level expert with five years experience in Kubernetes (competent managers). Let that one soak in. The hiring manager demanded a five year expert in Kubernetes, which hasn't been around for a full three. My recruiter friend told me they dropped this client after a few more job specs like this because they couldn't get a single candidate past a pre-screening due to hiring manager expecting the world-and they were preparing to do the same to a few other clients for the same reason. I asked if she were worried about what this would do to their billings "No, because we have other clients who pay us more, but have much more manageable expectations on job candidates." I wish this were the exception versus the norm but if I have to hear one more time that there aren't qualified IT people I will probably rip what's left of my greying hair right out of my head because if this is true, it's not the fault of IT personnel, it's the fault of everyone involved in the hiring process refusing to manage their own darn expectations.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  Have you not seen US unemployment data?
RBBronson123 9y ago
I read this article with interest. 70MillionJobs is a for-profit recruitment platform for people with criminal records. Our goal is to match the huge pool of untapped talent (those with records) with employers that have urgent HR needs. In this capacity, my team and I engage with large, national employers, so I think we have a strong sense of where the corporate zeitgeist lies regarding hiring the formerly incarcerated. While the Times author points to a historically low rate of unemployment and cites business conditions in Dane County, WI, this willingness to hire men and women with records does not generally exist with large, national employers. Nearly all of them have internal criteria relating to who they will or will not hire, based upon the nature of the crime(s) an applicant has committed and when it occurred. Most require at least five or six years to pass before they'd consider hiring someone guilty of a felony. And therein lies the rub: there's nearly an 80% chance that someone released from jail or prison will be re-arrested within five years of their release. The vast majority of them will be unemployed at time of re-arrest. Contrariwise, there's very little chance of someone who has found employment being re-arrested. Employment is truly the silver bullet that short circuits this pernicious cycle of recidivism. Recent studies have shown that those with records often emerge as an employer's best hires. Unlike others, people with records have no sense of entitlement and truly appreciate the opportunity they've been afforded. Typically, they reward employers with great loyalty, which translates to much greater retention (the true bane of HR professionals). While attitudes are changing for the better (I, as a formerly incarcerated person, have noticed this in my own life), there still exists a great negative bias towards those with records, the NY Times notwithstanding. Racism figures mightily in this equation. But we're a country that elected a racist President, whose Atty General is eager to reinstate ineffective drug laws (including marijuana) that destroyed lives, families and communities in the 80's 90's and even today. Anyone with a record can attest to the stigma that doesn't leave after doing one's time. In fact, for most, it's a life sentence, a sentence that even low unemployment can't expunge.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Is there any way to use subcontracting to attack this? Traditionally, subcontracting is used in an abusive way to deny workers proper benefits, pay, and stability. But what if the subcontracting firm operated with essentially no profit motive, hired previous offenders, hacking around internal HR groups at large firms? They’re then not hiring someone with a record; they contacting to a firm who has their own hiring standards (which you’re using to your advantage). Offtopic: thanks for attacking this problem. There are few people willing to attack important problems like this.
mtgx 9y ago
Also labor pool is shrinking because more people are put in prison over nothing (while white rich people continue to get away with almost anything).
- DaniFong 9y ago
  They threw me in jail for defending a child against his axe wielding dad!
  - 13of40 9y ago
    What did they charge you with?
    - DaniFong 9y ago
      Trespassing; we're fighting it in court but you still go to jail while they deliberate and they torture you in it via numerous means
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  The phrasing on the latter half seems likely to cause a big mess of an argument, despite its statistical accuracy. Is there a better way to put it?
  - geofft 9y ago
    I would hope that this forum understands the importance of not censoring truths that are politically incorrect....
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      No topic is really out of bounds, but some require an extra order of thinking that isn't reflected in the simple and inflammatory language people tend to use to discuss them. Being politically incorrect is just another way of being and thinking lazy and wasting other people's time.
guskel 9y ago
I have an engineering friend who went to prison twice a couple of years ago and he's making 200k now.
- swozey 9y ago
  Everyone knows people like that. The problem is the amount of ex-felons who can't even land a median salary job. Not everyone, even in the non-con pool, can pull off a 6 figure tech wiz job.
jlgaddis 9y ago
> Ahu Yildirmaz, an economist who helps lead the research arm of the payroll-processing company ADP, said her firm’s data showed more people switching jobs, and getting bigger bumps in pay for doing so. So... if I work for a company who uses ADP for payroll, ADP is tracking if/when I change jobs and how much my salary is over time? I wonder what else they're doing with my private information.
- RhodesianHunter 9y ago
  The ADP employment report is eagerly watched by economists and traders and goes back decades. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Report https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Repo...
lamarpye 9y ago
My wife's company unknowingly hired someone with a criminal record(he used his brother identity to get the job). He attempted to rape another employee and killed the person who stopped him. The company paid rather large settlement to the victims of these crimes. Incidents like this reinforce the notion that it isn't worth the risk to hire people with a criminal record.
- mc32 9y ago
  There's a difference between someone guilty of murder and other physical violence such as aggravated rape and other felonies like larceny, burgling, fraud, etc., where there is a good chance at rehabilitation, esp., if the crime was fueled by drug addiction.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    On the other hand, drug addicts will do pretty much anything for a fix.
    - mc32 9y ago
      That's true. However, I was more or less implying ex-addicts who had been clean, had completed their sentences and were honestly looking to get on with a life, at one time interrupted by bad choices.
  - Teever 9y ago
    I worked with someone who had 16 assault charges. To be totally honest I'd prefer working with someone convicted of murder than that guy. The thing with 16 charges of anything is that you know there's going to be a 17th, an 18th... and so on. Some people can be rehabilitated, some people can't. Severity of the crime isn't necessarily indicative of that.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      You'd likely be right to do so. Murder actually has an extremely low repeat rate. Murderers does have a higher chance of committing another crime on release than people not convicted of a crime, presumably in part because of higher chance of unemployment and poverty, but most murderers are extremely unlikely to ever kill again as most murders are crimes of passion in extreme circumstances that are extremely unlikely to occur again.
Simulacra 9y ago
I think unless the crime is directly linked to the job, for instance bank robbery and working in a bank, they should not be allowed to ask you about your criminal history.
- city41 9y ago
  I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent felonies.
  - andybak 9y ago
    > I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent felonies. I think that's still a very broad category. There's situations that could lead to violent acts but wouldn't mean that person was a risk in the workplace. We all know people who've been in fights and sheer bad luck can turn a brawl into homocide. (a "lucky" punch, an "unlucky" fall leading to a head injury). Personally I've never been in a fight other than the playground shoving kind - and violence seriously freaks me out. But I know that people I know and trust could have easily crossed that line if chance had have played them a different hand.
Shivetya 9y ago
work needs to be done to allow those with records into jobs that require occupational licenses. these can be local, state, or even federal restrictions. a felon could serve to fight wild fires and find in many jurisdictions they cannot become a fire fighter or hold any public job. Just check it out below! https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/ https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/
- shagie 9y ago
  Glancing at the restrictions on firefighter, it appears that they fall under the same set of regulations as police. One finds things like: > Ineligible for employment with municipal fire department (mandatory for felonies/crimes involving moral turpitude) > Any felony; Crime of moral turpitude; Crimes involving fraud, dishonesty, misrepresentation or money-laundering or: > Ineligible for employment in the police or fire department (second/third/fourth class cities) > Any felony; Any misdemeanor Is that a reasonable restriction? I am of the understanding that these restrictions are in place so that others can't can't compromise the integrity of one working in that office. Having gambling debts is something that allows people to blackmail or otherwise influence a person. Looking through that, are there any that are particularly "why is this even there?" that you can point out that fall in the mandatory/automatic for consequence type?
rootw0rm 9y ago
Convicted felon here....it's still a massive hurdle.
thatoneguy 9y ago
FWIW, when I was at Google I had at least two colleagues with felony records. It made me even more proud to work there as it showed the company was willing to look beyond mistakes made in someone's past.
golemiprague 9y ago
So Trump was right, the illegal immigration was taking jobs from Americans and his actions to stop it help the lower and middle class Americans. I don't understand why everybody were laughing and dismissing him.
fnord77 9y ago
tl;dr: someone who needs something that is becoming scarce will loosen their standards. Film at 11.
kebman 9y ago
No shit, Sherlock.

180 points by el_benhameen 9y ago

GraffitiTim 9y ago

There's a YC app for that: https://www.70millionjobs.com/ https://www.70millionjobs.com/

Selfcommit 9y ago

I'm really confused - when did we suddenly start having a labor shortage?

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
There's been a labor shortage in the big cities for about a year, though IME that shortage hasn't extended to smaller cities or more rural areas of the country.
- kazagistar 9y ago
  So its another symptom of rising real-estate prices then?
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    No, it's a symptom of capital concentration. Big cities are growing economically because that's where the money is, thus that's where the startup and VC money goes. The rest of the country isn't seen by investors as the best place for growth, so remains relatively underdeveloped.
shagie 9y ago
There's a labor shortage of people who are going to do the tedious work. The good factory job in part requires a dependable worker. In many places, that dependable worker is hard to find and factories are switching to robots (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines/2017/08/05/631e20ba-76df-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rise-of-the-machines... ) > The robots were coming in not to replace humans, and not just as a way to modernize, but also because reliable humans had become so hard to find. It was part of a labor shortage spreading across America, one that economists said is stemming from so many things at once. A low unemployment rate. The retirement of baby boomers. A younger generation that doesn’t want factory jobs. And, more and more, a workforce in declining health: because of alcohol, because of despair and depression, because of a spike in the use of opioids and other drugs. > ... > Companies now could pick between two versions of the American worker — humans and robots. And at Tenere Inc., where 132 jobs were unfilled on the week the robots arrived, the balance was beginning to shift. > ... > After an hour the workers were heading back to their cars, one saying that everything “sounds okay,” another saying the “pay sucks.” Bader guessed that two of the four “wouldn’t last a week,” because often, he said, he knew within minutes who would last. People who said they couldn’t work Saturdays. People who couldn’t work early mornings. This was the mystery for him: So many people showing up, saying they were worried about rent or bills or supporting children, and yet they couldn’t hold down a job that could help them. This extends to farms (who often prefer immigrants because they're ok with working with large animals). For a bit on the labor storage in Wisconsin: http://host.madison.com/wsj/business/wisconsin-businesses-grapple-with-a-growing-worker-shortage/article_3ef1000e-c18b-5f72-bbcd-720ee2456111.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/business/wisconsin-businesses-gr... On the other hand, you've got an ex-convict. Many of them are people who have messed up somewhere in the past and don't want to go back. I am in Wisconsin (and work in the public sector), so this is something I'm a bit more familiar with than other states... and also happens to be the subject of the article... http://buybsi.com/images/PDF/MapofIndustries.pdf http://buybsi.com/images/PDF/MapofIndustries.pdf - note that three of the facilities are teaching farm skills. Tying the two articles together - the work release are people that you're sure are going to show up and are going to be drug free. They're not going to stop at the bar on the way home and come into work the next day with a massive hangover. And when they get out... they are often good workers. https://www.npr.org/2016/04/22/475228335/do-felons-make-good-employees https://www.npr.org/2016/04/22/475228335/do-felons-make-good... ... and there's something for the employer too - a tax credit. https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/jobservice/taxcredit/wotc.htm https://dwd.wisconsin.gov/jobservice/taxcredit/wotc.htm
maxerickson 9y ago
Economists consider unemployment around 5% as "full employment". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment Hitting that is one way of measuring whether there is a labor shortage. At the moment it does happen to coincide with wage growth (which should be higher when it is more difficult to hire people).
- randomdata 9y ago
  But economists define shortage as a situation where an external mechanism (like government intervention) prevents price from rising. The fact that we are seeing wage growth says that there is not a shortage.
temp-dude-87844 9y ago
Unemployment numbers, as with most official government numbers, are based on a combination of surveys and self-performed actions, such as filing for unemployment, the latter of which essentially amounts to self-reporting [1]. These results are then aggregated into six metrics, U-1 through U-6 [2], of which U-3 has been designated the official and widely-quoted unemployment rate. The main value of U-3 isn't that it's a particularly insightful reflection on job health, but rather that it's easy to measure, its definition is consistent, and captures a particular subset of the population that has demonstrated overt desire to participate in government programs that ostensibly help them on the path towards employment. This self-selects for workers exceeding a particular desperation ratio, while not counting people who may think that they'd prefer to work, but haven't taken a government-defined sequence of steps towards doing so. Seasonally-adjusted U-3 is low right now, around 4.1%, so in macro terms the pool of people who have taken overt steps towards getting a job while still not having a job is shrinking. This means there's fewer candidates for a particular position, and on average, less of a chance that any particular candidate is qualified for any particular position. You could argue that this means there's a labor shortage. [1] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
mc32 9y ago
True. Optimistically, the current "shortage" might result in getting chronically unemployed people back into the job market. People who long ago gave up on finding a job. That said, we should introduce some job training for these folks since their skulls are likely severely out of date.
iguy 9y ago
Note that the article doesn't contain the word "shortage". It's just the continuum of supply and demand: if people like the ones you hired last year can't be found this year, you have to pay more, or consider those you'd have overlooked, including felons. If they have a stronger bargaining position, they get a better deal. Note that the article also doesn't contain the word "immigration". It deserves to be noted that the jobs being discussed here have a huge overlap with the jobs often filled by unskilled immigrants. Whatever your views on ex-cons and low-skill foreigners, I think it's important to understand that there is a trade-off between them.
narrator 9y ago
For low skilled jobs, the immigration crack down might have had some effect. It's certainly had a big effect in construction. The legit bigger employers might have always been hiring people with their paperwork all in order, but the smaller contractors are now competing with them for the same pool of legit workers. The ex-cons are the ones who can fill the gaps for people looking to get cheaper labor. I knew a guy a few years ago, when things were more lax, who lived in Bisbee, Atizona and he said that since it was right next to the border and their was a big border patrol station there that there weren't ay illegal immigrants around, so if he wanted cheap construction help he had to hire ex-cons.
- Wingman4l7 9y ago
  The irony; you can't find any illegal immigrants to hire -- which is against the law! -- so you have to resort to hiring people who have already broken the law.
  - iguy 9y ago
    Broke the law, got caught, served their sentence, and are now looking to re-join society. As opposed to those who broke the law and haven't been caught yet. (Different laws, granted.)
Spooky23 9y ago
We do a shitty job at educating people, so it’s hard to hire qualified people in many industries. Try finding a master plumber or electrician. Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist. Companies run so lean there’s no pipeline of internal candidates either. Where I work, it’s impossible to hire competent managers with technical skills. The normal places you’d look are full of young/inexperienced and old/stagnant.
- iamdave 9y ago
  I can't speak to plumbing and electrical work, those aren't my industries but Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist. My knee jerk reaction is to say "I absolutely refuse to believe this is true", but I will concede that the problem (here, I am defining problem not as a shortage of qualified talent, but a shortage of qualified talent that actually progresses to getting hired) exists because of symptoms you correctly highlighted "pipelines" and "competent managers". I will admit-however-to being biased as someone who's worked in IT for decades and later became a technical recruiter with an agency who wanted someone on staff that could have conversations with tech professionals on a meaningful, personal level. Unrealistic or otherwise unsustainable hiring manager expectations and offensive constraints on salary compared with demanded skills seem to have created artificial scarcities of talent in IT hiring (pipeline). Candidates are expected to come in the door having every bullet point in a 120 bullet point job ad satisfied as to core-competencies, and when hired, they're given a workstation and sent off to the grind with just enough training and grooming to know the name of the product and the ability to rattle off a list of libraries and frameworks used. Skill gaps get resumes thrown out, even if it's some middling gap that with time and support from senior techs can be rapidly closed with a dose of on the job training. Something that seems as extinct as the pterodactyl nowadays. Heck, just last week I had a talk with a recruiter who was looking for a DevOps Engineer (not strictly IT in the traditional sense of the phrase, but I bring this up to highlight my point) and we joked about one job spec that was looking for a senior level expert with five years experience in Kubernetes (competent managers). Let that one soak in. The hiring manager demanded a five year expert in Kubernetes, which hasn't been around for a full three. My recruiter friend told me they dropped this client after a few more job specs like this because they couldn't get a single candidate past a pre-screening due to hiring manager expecting the world-and they were preparing to do the same to a few other clients for the same reason. I asked if she were worried about what this would do to their billings "No, because we have other clients who pay us more, but have much more manageable expectations on job candidates." I wish this were the exception versus the norm but if I have to hear one more time that there aren't qualified IT people I will probably rip what's left of my greying hair right out of my head because if this is true, it's not the fault of IT personnel, it's the fault of everyone involved in the hiring process refusing to manage their own darn expectations.
Mikeb85 9y ago
Have you not seen US unemployment data?

RBBronson123 9y ago

I read this article with interest. 70MillionJobs is a for-profit recruitment platform for people with criminal records. Our goal is to match the huge pool of untapped talent (those with records) with employers that have urgent HR needs. In this capacity, my team and I engage with large, national employers, so I think we have a strong sense of where the corporate zeitgeist lies regarding hiring the formerly incarcerated. While the Times author points to a historically low rate of unemployment and cites business conditions in Dane County, WI, this willingness to hire men and women with records does not generally exist with large, national employers. Nearly all of them have internal criteria relating to who they will or will not hire, based upon the nature of the crime(s) an applicant has committed and when it occurred. Most require at least five or six years to pass before they'd consider hiring someone guilty of a felony. And therein lies the rub: there's nearly an 80% chance that someone released from jail or prison will be re-arrested within five years of their release. The vast majority of them will be unemployed at time of re-arrest. Contrariwise, there's very little chance of someone who has found employment being re-arrested. Employment is truly the silver bullet that short circuits this pernicious cycle of recidivism. Recent studies have shown that those with records often emerge as an employer's best hires. Unlike others, people with records have no sense of entitlement and truly appreciate the opportunity they've been afforded. Typically, they reward employers with great loyalty, which translates to much greater retention (the true bane of HR professionals). While attitudes are changing for the better (I, as a formerly incarcerated person, have noticed this in my own life), there still exists a great negative bias towards those with records, the NY Times notwithstanding. Racism figures mightily in this equation. But we're a country that elected a racist President, whose Atty General is eager to reinstate ineffective drug laws (including marijuana) that destroyed lives, families and communities in the 80's 90's and even today. Anyone with a record can attest to the stigma that doesn't leave after doing one's time. In fact, for most, it's a life sentence, a sentence that even low unemployment can't expunge.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Is there any way to use subcontracting to attack this? Traditionally, subcontracting is used in an abusive way to deny workers proper benefits, pay, and stability. But what if the subcontracting firm operated with essentially no profit motive, hired previous offenders, hacking around internal HR groups at large firms? They’re then not hiring someone with a record; they contacting to a firm who has their own hiring standards (which you’re using to your advantage). Offtopic: thanks for attacking this problem. There are few people willing to attack important problems like this.

mtgx 9y ago

Also labor pool is shrinking because more people are put in prison over nothing (while white rich people continue to get away with almost anything).

DaniFong 9y ago
They threw me in jail for defending a child against his axe wielding dad!
- 13of40 9y ago
  What did they charge you with?
  - DaniFong 9y ago
    Trespassing; we're fighting it in court but you still go to jail while they deliberate and they torture you in it via numerous means
rainbowmverse 9y ago
The phrasing on the latter half seems likely to cause a big mess of an argument, despite its statistical accuracy. Is there a better way to put it?
- geofft 9y ago
  I would hope that this forum understands the importance of not censoring truths that are politically incorrect....
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    No topic is really out of bounds, but some require an extra order of thinking that isn't reflected in the simple and inflammatory language people tend to use to discuss them. Being politically incorrect is just another way of being and thinking lazy and wasting other people's time.

guskel 9y ago

I have an engineering friend who went to prison twice a couple of years ago and he's making 200k now.

swozey 9y ago
Everyone knows people like that. The problem is the amount of ex-felons who can't even land a median salary job. Not everyone, even in the non-con pool, can pull off a 6 figure tech wiz job.

jlgaddis 9y ago

> Ahu Yildirmaz, an economist who helps lead the research arm of the payroll-processing company ADP, said her firm’s data showed more people switching jobs, and getting bigger bumps in pay for doing so. So... if I work for a company who uses ADP for payroll, ADP is tracking if/when I change jobs and how much my salary is over time? I wonder what else they're doing with my private information.

RhodesianHunter 9y ago
The ADP employment report is eagerly watched by economists and traders and goes back decades. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Report https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADP_National_Employment_Repo...

lamarpye 9y ago

My wife's company unknowingly hired someone with a criminal record(he used his brother identity to get the job). He attempted to rape another employee and killed the person who stopped him. The company paid rather large settlement to the victims of these crimes. Incidents like this reinforce the notion that it isn't worth the risk to hire people with a criminal record.

mc32 9y ago
There's a difference between someone guilty of murder and other physical violence such as aggravated rape and other felonies like larceny, burgling, fraud, etc., where there is a good chance at rehabilitation, esp., if the crime was fueled by drug addiction.
- twblalock 9y ago
  On the other hand, drug addicts will do pretty much anything for a fix.
  - mc32 9y ago
    That's true. However, I was more or less implying ex-addicts who had been clean, had completed their sentences and were honestly looking to get on with a life, at one time interrupted by bad choices.
- Teever 9y ago
  I worked with someone who had 16 assault charges. To be totally honest I'd prefer working with someone convicted of murder than that guy. The thing with 16 charges of anything is that you know there's going to be a 17th, an 18th... and so on. Some people can be rehabilitated, some people can't. Severity of the crime isn't necessarily indicative of that.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    You'd likely be right to do so. Murder actually has an extremely low repeat rate. Murderers does have a higher chance of committing another crime on release than people not convicted of a crime, presumably in part because of higher chance of unemployment and poverty, but most murderers are extremely unlikely to ever kill again as most murders are crimes of passion in extreme circumstances that are extremely unlikely to occur again.

Simulacra 9y ago

I think unless the crime is directly linked to the job, for instance bank robbery and working in a bank, they should not be allowed to ask you about your criminal history.

city41 9y ago
I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent felonies.
- andybak 9y ago
  > I would not be comfortable working with people who have committed violent felonies. I think that's still a very broad category. There's situations that could lead to violent acts but wouldn't mean that person was a risk in the workplace. We all know people who've been in fights and sheer bad luck can turn a brawl into homocide. (a "lucky" punch, an "unlucky" fall leading to a head injury). Personally I've never been in a fight other than the playground shoving kind - and violence seriously freaks me out. But I know that people I know and trust could have easily crossed that line if chance had have played them a different hand.

Shivetya 9y ago

work needs to be done to allow those with records into jobs that require occupational licenses. these can be local, state, or even federal restrictions. a felon could serve to fight wild fires and find in many jurisdictions they cannot become a fire fighter or hold any public job. Just check it out below! https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/ https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/map/

shagie 9y ago
Glancing at the restrictions on firefighter, it appears that they fall under the same set of regulations as police. One finds things like: > Ineligible for employment with municipal fire department (mandatory for felonies/crimes involving moral turpitude) > Any felony; Crime of moral turpitude; Crimes involving fraud, dishonesty, misrepresentation or money-laundering or: > Ineligible for employment in the police or fire department (second/third/fourth class cities) > Any felony; Any misdemeanor Is that a reasonable restriction? I am of the understanding that these restrictions are in place so that others can't can't compromise the integrity of one working in that office. Having gambling debts is something that allows people to blackmail or otherwise influence a person. Looking through that, are there any that are particularly "why is this even there?" that you can point out that fall in the mandatory/automatic for consequence type?

rootw0rm 9y ago

Convicted felon here....it's still a massive hurdle.

thatoneguy 9y ago

FWIW, when I was at Google I had at least two colleagues with felony records. It made me even more proud to work there as it showed the company was willing to look beyond mistakes made in someone's past.

golemiprague 9y ago

So Trump was right, the illegal immigration was taking jobs from Americans and his actions to stop it help the lower and middle class Americans. I don't understand why everybody were laughing and dismissing him.

fnord77 9y ago

tl;dr: someone who needs something that is becoming scarce will loosen their standards. Film at 11.

kebman 9y ago

No shit, Sherlock.