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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

228 points by vellum 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago
The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- but there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build? Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle... Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have generational creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That is generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines. The generational cultural poverty, coupled with actual material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.
- tptacek 14y ago
  The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement. The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.
      - toomuchtodo 14y ago
        I agree very much with your post.
  - ryanklee 14y ago
    It'd be interesting to note whether the rise is accelerating or decelerating, whether it's growing in sufficient proportion to the number of Americans entering the workforce, etc. Just because the share is rising doesn't mean those enterprises aren't becoming less viable or accommodating. I'm not saying they are or aren't, only that that data is pertinent.
  - deleted 14y ago
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- tempaccount9473 14y ago
  > The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed. Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Nor mine, not in the short term. Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed. The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe. Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many). Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades. In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint. So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.
- tbrownaw 14y ago
  The Corporate System is actually collapsing. No, corporations are actually getting more powerful. they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. They're as efficient as they've ever been. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) No, we don't have human-level AI yet. Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.
larrys 14y ago
Not surprising at all. Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a factor but a house on the market to long gets stale). Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker to less attractiveness all else held equal. The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor. Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.
tbrownaw 14y ago
So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?
- bluedino 14y ago
  Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has been unemployed, the less competent they are.
- batonka 14y ago
  Joel Spolsky said it best here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html To quote: "When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. " The article's author is assuming that the people in the under 6 months and over 6 months are identical candidates just based on resumes. They are ignoring all of the "soft skills" that can get picked up in actual interviews.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? "Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.
- theorique 14y ago
  Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.
  - larrys 14y ago
    Probably a variation of "better to be thought a fool than to open up your mouth and remove all doubt". In this case you say something which is better than nothing. In the case of a guy laid off from a factory job better to say you have been spending the time helping a friend doing handyman work then that you are at home watching TV, doing nothing, or just sending out resumes getting rejected. Even better if you imply that you liked the work and were making money. It's all in the story. Even the BS shows at least you are attempting and know the downside of not having anything. You get a few points for that in my book.
  - jarek 14y ago
    And do you think the screeners won't start screening out "personal projects" if enough people start doing that? "Freelancing" for eight months after a career of working for other people, and suspiciously little to show for the freelancing... I wonder what that's about?
    - pc86 14y ago
      It's already happening. Last time I applied for a job was after just shy of two years of contract work full-time. They asked for a portfolio which I sent over. I was confused when they asked for more as I had already picked my best work. After supplying some more samples I asked the hiring manager why they had requested more and was essentially told they were looking at not only quality, but also quantity. They wanted to make sure I had been doing this for two years. Personally, I think this is good. Saying you're freelancing when you're actually unemployed is no less dishonest than saying you have a degree you don't have or you worked at [X] BigCo for six months longer than you actually did. I worked my ass off when I was a consultant and I'd be pretty upset if John Q. off the street has been resume blasting everyone for six months while drawing unemployment and saying he's been "consulting."
tptacek 14y ago
Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, and there's high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing for jobs via resume blasts. Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers that routinely needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.
- larrys 14y ago
  "is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches" Along the same lines I had an office a few years ago in an office park about 1 mile from a Walmart. In all the years I was there nobody ever knocked on our door looking for work or dropping off a resume. At the Walmart though I'm almost certain that they had a steady stream of job seekers showing up and filling out employment forms. I've helped two doctors get better jobs just with the simple suggestion that they proactively contact all the relevant departments within a radius of where they could work and not wait until called by a recruiter or by responding to an ad. They got multiple offers and essentially had no competition (jobs hadn't been posted yet). One time I got a job that I was unqualified for by simply flying out to a tradeshow after doing some research and cold calling various sales managers in person (had setup some interviews in advance as well). Got hired two times (short 3 year period when I didn't work at my own thing). Worked great. No doubt in my mind that if I had responded to an ad with a resume, that since I wasn't really qualified, I wouldn't have been picked or even come close to getting an interview.
  - lreeves 14y ago
    Your anecdote doesn't really seem feasible for most people. Do you think it's reasonable that someone who has been out of work for 6 months would take on the risk and cost of flying to a tradeshow?
bryanlarsen 14y ago
I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months. If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you can take advantage of. But it gives you something you can put in that hole on your resume, and hopefully gives you relevant skills. The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it. The question is whether or not you should put your "forced sabbatical" projects on your resume or not. They'll plug the hole, but I imagine that it will also cause you to be filtered out by HR departments in big corporations if the work isn't "relevant".
- at-fates-hands 14y ago
  I can absolutely vouch for this. After a 6 month contract gig, the employer told me they were going to bring me on full-time. I stopped interviewing thinking I had a full-time spot. They told me two weeks before the end of the contract they didn't have anything else for me and I was cut at the beginning of January after our project ended. I did find a job with a small company, but after three days, realized they were looking for a Javascript developer, not a front-end developer. From then on, I was out of work for almost four months. Luckily, I picked up a freelance project which filled the gap during the time I wasn't technically "working". On my resume, I put it was a private freelance project that lasted the time I was unemployed (four months). Since it was relevant to my work history, nobody asks about it, or just wants me to go over what we did and the technologies we used. The interesting thing is when recruiters see "freelance" projects they instantly equate it with being unemployed. While the actual HR people at the companies I interviewed with never made the same connection. To them, work is work as long as its relevant to your career.
  - evandena 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
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redmattred 14y ago
It's a terrible trend and its absolutely true. With the unemployment rate so high, employers are now getting absolutely flooded with resumes for every and any job posting. There is a high volume of completely unqualified people applying to positions they have no relevant experience for. There is also a much higher volume of qualified people, and HR departments need some way of prioritizing these applicants. Fair or not, filtering out people by whether or not they have been recently employed is a relatively effective way to find the most promising candidates. If you are out of work and looking for a job, your best chance is to try to bypass HR altogether by either reaching out to hiring managers directly or by networking your way in. Most jobs are filled long before they are ever even posted online. It's never too soon to reach out to companies you want to work for - they may not be hiring immediately, but you want to be top of mind when a new position does open up.
auctiontheory 14y ago
If you are unemployed, please read Ask The Headhunter.
bluedino 14y ago
>> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have already selected the best from? >> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed. What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job? Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for another year?
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed." What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct action. Prima facie, this argument seems to be that if employers don't like an attribute in a job applicant's resume, we should either make it illegal for them to discriminate based on that attribute or "fake out" that attribute in some other way. It seems like anything I'm going to say is blindingly obvious, but I'l say it anyway: we cannot provide "recent experience" in X simply by hiring somebody and giving them a nametag that says "I do X!". It doesn't work that way. Employers want experience, not simply words on a resume. You can't create lots of experience for a job position in a market that simply might not have that many job positions of that type available. In addition, sometimes (not always by any means) companies let go the people who are deadweight first. I could go on. There's a plethora of various speculations I can make about why this measured observation is true. More research, most likely by job seekers themselves, is required to fix this. Politics by correlation, just like management by correlation, is a terrible way of running a ship.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things. It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?" In reality, people can be long-term unemployed for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with them being a bad potential employee. Maybe they have really specialized skills or want a really specific kind of job--the nature of such situations is that there is going to be gaps in how long it takes to find the next employer looking for those very specific skills.
  - marknutter 14y ago
    Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a profit, it collects taxes. Therefore it's a very attractive alternative to the cold, hard realities of the market. Of course, there's only so much tax money to go around..
droithomme 14y ago
It's not a terrible metric. There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness. Few long term unemployed are long term unemployed for no reason at all. It's hard to take the claims seriously of those such as the article author who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this. If authors and social workers are concerned with advocating on behalf of the small minority of long term unemployed who are actually employable, it would be more helpful to have articles that address the issue of how to find the small number of long term unemployed who would make good team additions, without having to spend far more time interviewing bad candidates than one does when hiring currently employed and short term unemployed persons. Advocating for the government to hire unemployable people for positions in government is one of the worst suggestions I have ever heard. Things are already bad enough with endemic incompetence and corruption in government bureaus without seeking out even more of the incompetent and dangerous and giving them the power and influence that comes with government positions.
- xentronium 14y ago
  > There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness. There is an actual correlation between being black and drug addiction, criminality &c. Discriminating on skin color is illegal, though.
  - Flimm 14y ago
    If you read two resumes that were identical in every way, except that one had experience listed and the other had none, wouldn't you go for the first one? If not, what's the point of listing experience at all?
- gehar 14y ago
  Government employee doesn't have to be bureaucrat. It could be street-sweeper.
mgkimsal 14y ago
At some point the pendulum may swing the other way, and employers may not hire anyone who even has a current job, using "loyalty" as a filter. "If they're so bold as to take time off work to go interview here with me, why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off and leave me high and dry in the future?" If we want to affect quick change for 'long term unemployed', start offering tax breaks to employers (hasn't this been done/tried already?). Reduce payroll tax by 2% for every year a person has been unemployed (2 years = 4% reduction, etc). That would, I'd think, get employers' attention.
- VLM 14y ago
  "why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off" That's just bizarre. I've been around a couple decades and I've always taken a personal or vacation day for interviews. I guess there are people who call in sick although thats not my style. I've never even heard of an employer so controlling that they get to decide if my day off activities are "worthy enough". Salaried jobs I just took off for an odd lunch hour.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    People will rationalize anything. Who might have predicted years ago that we'd be in a position like this: Employer: "I just can't find any qualified people to work! I'll have to import people from overseas who've never done this work before!" Person: "But... there's load of people right in this city who have these skills who'd like to come work for you." Employer: "WTF? They've not had a job in 9 months!" Person: "That's because your competition closed down and you're one of the few places in town that needs their skills but you didn't want to hire them, even though you need workers to keep up with demand." Employer: "BUT THEY HAVE NOT HAD A JOB IN 9 MONTHS! NEXT MONTH IT WILL BE 10 MONTHS!" Yes, I understand that long-term unemployment can bring about changes in people wrt skills and perhaps socialization (keeping 'normal' hours, etc). That's not what's in play all the time. We had a HUGE increase in job seekers - employers had their pick of whoever they wanted for most positions, and some will continue to make the criteria harder to fill if it means they'll get something out of it (tax breaks for hiring long-term unemployed, relaxed immigration bills for cheaper foreign workers, ability to keep wages down in their region, etc).
ChuckMcM 14y ago
What bothers me most about the long term unemployed is the lack of visibility into what they have been doing during the down time. I recently got to look at two resumes, both people who had been unemployed for > 6 months, one guy has this big blank spot, the other has a narrative about what he's been doing. The active guy got in shape, he rebuilt is basement drainage system, he did odd jobs helping people with "handy" work (he was a highly paid system administrator at a New York bank before he was laid off) and he's been reading. I am much less likely to call back the blank spot guy and much more likely to call back the active guy. What I'd like to know is, there any correlation between callbacks and intra-employment activity?
- pnathan 14y ago
  Whenever I read a resume, I wonder about blank spots over about 2-3 months. I don't really get excited that they exist, but I do want to get a grasp of the rationale and what they did. I suppose I am ok with it if someone just wanted to spend 3 months in his PJs recovering from burnout. But I'd rather hear about him spending 3 months doing gardening. Better yet, I'd rather hear about the technical things he did in that time frame. What I try to distinguish is apathy/laziness vs. relaxation/recovery.
jmsduran 14y ago
The negative stigma that is placed on long-term unemployment is an issue that needs to be addressed; measuring how long someone has been unemployed is not really indicative of anything. The rationalization that "If no one has hired them in X months, there must be a reason not to" is just flat out dumb. And while it may be a red flag when purchasing physical goods or real estate, it's a baseless stat when it comes to measuring how well an individual's expertise & qualities may be suited for a particular position. In my opinion, there are much better stats an employer can take off a job application, and wouldn't mind the federal/state government passing legislation against this type of discrimination if it gets out of control.
- pekk 14y ago
  Hiring is based on flat-out dumb reasoning, as long as it is a stupid reason to exclude someone rather than include them.
grimtrigger 14y ago
Long term unemployment is unfortunately a signal of low productivity. While being long term unemployed doesn't necessarily unproductive, it is highly correlated with low productivity. The same thing happens for race,unfortunately. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
reinhardt 14y ago
As someone with zero debt, minimal financial needs and enough savings to take voluntarily more than a few months off work, this is downright scary. I guess if it comes down to this, I'll just have to fudge the hell out of it in my resume.
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batonka 14y ago
It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this: -Good people are hard to find -If I find a good person, I snap them up right away -Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same -If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews -In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire -Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.
- pekk 14y ago
  Also it's obviously not his fault that the bank collapsed, whereas we will blame someone if they do not have work in a few months
cletus 14y ago
This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than those that don't. How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and easy filter. There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. 10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both. We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  "While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are." Over the last few years it's more like they can't move to where the jobs are, at least not without taking a huge loss on a house or declaring bankruptcy. But yeah, you're right - we've got a rather immobile labor market, for a variety of reasons, and there don't seem to be any quick fixes. telecommuting you'd think would help, but it's not applicable to every single job, and even places that do allow for it don't necessarily orient their culture to take full advantage of it.
  - david_l 14y ago
    Also, could it be that salaries offered are not worth the risk as well? For example, I've had recruiters contact me about the same/similar positions in the DC and NYC suburbs, where I'd only make $7k-10k (if I was lucky) more than my current position (in a middle market city). Why would my fiance (who would have to quit her job as well and find new work) and I leave for peanuts? I'd also lose any time base perks at my current employer as well. If companies/recruiters are expecting people to move for "same job, same pay" then there's your reason for an immobile work force. Add to that what you mention - many would have to take a loss on their home when they wouldn't have too.
AznHisoka 14y ago
I wonder if the same effect applies if you took a couple of years off to do a Masters or PhD full-time?
- crpatino 14y ago
  Short answer, yes. Long answer, I happened to teach at undergraduate level during my days ad grad school (not really a T.A. but a sort of associate professor position that in the US is normally filled by PosDocs). At the time it seemed like a great idea and I was proud to "not having a single day of unemployment in my record". The problem was when I decided to go back to work in industry instead of pursuing an academic career. Most employers would see me not as a fresh graduate from a prestigious graduate program, but as "just a teacher" trying to "switch careers". It took 4 and a half months of eroded expectations, biter exchanges with H.R. folks and learning the ropes of the hiring game to find someone to actually give me a chance to prove myself in a support position that required no advanced degree and minimal technical skills (basically: speaks English, knows ksh and SQL). Then came the appalling realization that after 9 years of post K12 education I was apparently not qualified to answer the phone properly. Of course, your mileage may vary. Much of my experience not necessarily comes from being in grad school, but from lack of soft skills and the ability to manage perception of potential employers.
spikels 14y ago
Then did extending unemployment insurance to 99 weeks actually screw the people it was intended to help? I have not read the details of the original study but this article seems to indicate that a recently employed person in a different industry has an easier time getting a job than a long-term unemployed person with industry experience.
venomsnake 14y ago
Hire half unemployed to dig holes with a shovel all day, and the other half to fill them and pay them 30% below minimum wage. Or do something useful - there is always infrastructure in need of repairs. If won't cost much compared to wars and will do wonders for the self worth of the people.
- Vivtek 14y ago
  You've just invented the Public Works Administration! A huge proportion of America's infrastructure was built in the 30's by the PWA - including the vast majority of infrastructure in federal and state parks. They had to stop because that's socialism - and as we all know, socialism is unAmerican and bad.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Better yet, fire everyone in the DMV and similar places and have those positions filled by unemployed people.
t0mbstone 14y ago
Here's an idea. Think outside of the box: If being employed in the past six months is really such a big deal, just start your own LLC and do contracting work of some sort. Hey, look at that. Now your resume shows that you were employed during that period. Sure, you might not have made all that much money while you were employed at your own business, but at least you were employed.
- yen223 14y ago
  If finding contracting work were easy, the person wouldn't be unemployed for 6 months now, would he?
rdouble 14y ago
This seems to also affect software engineers. I used to split my time between 18-24 month consulting projects and then would take 3-6 months off to travel. I've been lucky to see all of the US and parts of Africa, Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico. This was pretty easy to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, after the last time I traveled, it took quite some time to find another contract. It seems much riskier in the current economic climate.
Apocryphon 14y ago
In tech itself, open source organizations should make a push to hire long-term unemployed developers. Promise to give them recommendations and references if they do a good job during the interim. The downside is the long-term unemployment problem is probably not as significant in software, compared to other industries.
incision 14y ago
About 13 years ago, I was unemployed for about four months. I've had a few people positively grill me about that blank despite the length of time that has passed and evidence that I didn't spend the time idle (Obtained a certification, did freelance work and eventually pivoted my career). In each case, it was an older person who upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness. I ended up getting those jobs, but came to learn a bit about how some people can come to think of life as so straightforward and easy. In each case the people judging me hadn't had to look for work for at least 20 years. In one, the person judging was the son of a prior VP who was widely despised by his peers for having made a nepotistic ascent through the ranks. In another I ended up seated at a desk next to the son of the judging CTO.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  >upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness. What judgmental fucking assholes. It's a shame such people are the ones doing the interviewing instead of the ones rotting in unemployment. We only get to live one time, so if you see me taking off two months as "blatant laziness" then fuck you.
jlarocco 14y ago
At some point wouldn't it be easier to create their own jobs? It seems like a waste of energy to organize a protest with "We want work" signs when they could be starting a business or something.
tsunamifury 14y ago
3 years ago I ended 18 months of unemployment by listing every friend, person I spoke with, or acquaintance as one of my clients for my 'very successful' consulting business. I regularly do help out on side projects or test out ideas with friends so they were more than happy to provide a reference for this period. In the 3 years since i've been able to climb from no income, to medium US income, to top 5% income bracket. Its hard, but not impossible to recover.
bennesvig 14y ago
If you can't land a job in your desired field, get another job that pays a wage you can live on. Then in every single free moment you have, do work in the field you're interested in. Even if you have to do it for free (assuming the free work looks really good on a resume). It lets you keep something current on your resume and develop skills in the field. Doesn't work for every field and situation, but I've found it useful.
sebastiano 14y ago
This article hits home for me. I graduated from a Top 20 university here in the UK in 2009 with a First Class in Computer Science. I have always been the type that never really knew what they wanted to do with their life and made the mistake of not forcing myself to pick a career path. The first year after leaving uni I worked in a job unrelated to my degree. I left and decided to take the grad scheme slog that is so common. I applied to 10-15 big companies' grad schemes in their Tech departments (IBM, MS, investment banks etc) and reached at least the first in-person interview for around half of them. I had a few offers but turned them down since I realised I was not passionate about the role (big mistake). Since then I have spent the following 18 months unemployed. I work voluntarily at my parents' business, again, in a field unrelated to my degree, while doing some freelancing and hacking on some personal projects. I am scared to apply for programming jobs now because of the gaps in my employment and lack of 'formal' experience. I have a massive fear of the rejection, mixed with a good amount of Impostor Syndrome. It's a vicious cycle. I am scared to apply and be rejected, which is in turn adding to my unemployed period and making the situation worse. I have had some savings which meant I could survive unemployed comfortably (probably worked against me in hindsight), but it is quite a depressing realisation and I feel as though I have wasted my degree and am starting from scratch.
stretchwithme 14y ago
The worst thing about the interventions into the labor market is that they prevent people from being hired. It would be far better to hand aid to the working poor directly than to have a minimum wage or impose regulations that make hiring the working poor more expensive. Many people seem to think making the employers pay somehow reduces their profits with no other ill effects. But in reality, it is also likely make prices go up. OR the take home pay of workers go down or rise more slowly. Just because these effects don't happen immediately doesn't mean they don't eventually happen or that they don't accumulate. And just because you don't understand how artificial prices interfere with supply and demand doesn't mean the effects aren't real. If you are one of the least productive laborers, your labor may not be worth the minimum wage to anybody. You're completely shut out. Good luck finding a place to live under the nearest bridge.
el_fuser 14y ago
Not surprising. I know quite a lot of professionals that took a couple of years off to care for babies and can't find work. As a corollary, I've also seen quite a few engineers that were just slightly out of date get passed over.
aurelius83 14y ago
"In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer." This seems intuitive to me. With the large number of people applying to jobs, there has to be a way to quickly filter resumes down. It's unfortunate, but HR probably decided that six months or longer is probably a signal that there is something wrong with the applicant. Because of the vast amount of resumes being sent in, they can afford to miss out on the diamond in the rough that is hidden among the mass of resumes of people out of work for 6 months or longer.
b0rsuk 14y ago
Do you have some tips for someone like me ? Unemployed for 3 years, graduated from IT but worked in another industry (nautical charts). I have little to show. I got an interview quite often, but that's where it ended. 80% companies just have HR department and don't ask any technical questions. Should I focus on building my portfolio ? (recently focused on Django) Is it easier to find a job in some "common" field, like software testing or PHP, or rarer like Django where there are much fewer offers but also less competition ?
fredgrott 14y ago
a question: any engineer would recognize the symptoms of what may be a systematic failure in a system. There was no mention in the article of studies fo studying the hr system from a sysatem perspective. My thinking is that the drastic increase in applicants for any job posted acts as a feed back loop adjusting the system into chaos as hr personnel choose to reduce workload via reducing quality. Is thee any studies somewhere where a team took on the task to study the problems as a system? even my assumptions could be wrong..it would be nice to attack with some actual facts based on some science.

228 points by vellum 14y ago

The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- but there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build? Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle... Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have generational creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That is generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines. The generational cultural poverty, coupled with actual material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.

tptacek 14y ago
The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement. The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.
    - toomuchtodo 14y ago
      I agree very much with your post.
- ryanklee 14y ago
  It'd be interesting to note whether the rise is accelerating or decelerating, whether it's growing in sufficient proportion to the number of Americans entering the workforce, etc. Just because the share is rising doesn't mean those enterprises aren't becoming less viable or accommodating. I'm not saying they are or aren't, only that that data is pertinent.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tempaccount9473 14y ago
> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed. Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Nor mine, not in the short term. Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed. The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe. Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many). Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades. In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint. So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.
tbrownaw 14y ago
The Corporate System is actually collapsing. No, corporations are actually getting more powerful. they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. They're as efficient as they've ever been. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) No, we don't have human-level AI yet. Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.

larrys 14y ago

Not surprising at all. Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a factor but a house on the market to long gets stale). Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker to less attractiveness all else held equal. The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor. Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.

tbrownaw 14y ago

So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?

bluedino 14y ago
Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has been unemployed, the less competent they are.
batonka 14y ago
Joel Spolsky said it best here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html To quote: "When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There's a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. " The article's author is assuming that the people in the under 6 months and over 6 months are identical candidates just based on resumes. They are ignoring all of the "soft skills" that can get picked up in actual interviews.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? "Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.

theorique 14y ago
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.
- larrys 14y ago
  Probably a variation of "better to be thought a fool than to open up your mouth and remove all doubt". In this case you say something which is better than nothing. In the case of a guy laid off from a factory job better to say you have been spending the time helping a friend doing handyman work then that you are at home watching TV, doing nothing, or just sending out resumes getting rejected. Even better if you imply that you liked the work and were making money. It's all in the story. Even the BS shows at least you are attempting and know the downside of not having anything. You get a few points for that in my book.
- jarek 14y ago
  And do you think the screeners won't start screening out "personal projects" if enough people start doing that? "Freelancing" for eight months after a career of working for other people, and suspiciously little to show for the freelancing... I wonder what that's about?
  - pc86 14y ago
    It's already happening. Last time I applied for a job was after just shy of two years of contract work full-time. They asked for a portfolio which I sent over. I was confused when they asked for more as I had already picked my best work. After supplying some more samples I asked the hiring manager why they had requested more and was essentially told they were looking at not only quality, but also quantity. They wanted to make sure I had been doing this for two years. Personally, I think this is good. Saying you're freelancing when you're actually unemployed is no less dishonest than saying you have a degree you don't have or you worked at [X] BigCo for six months longer than you actually did. I worked my ass off when I was a consultant and I'd be pretty upset if John Q. off the street has been resume blasting everyone for six months while drawing unemployment and saying he's been "consulting."

tptacek 14y ago

Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, and there's high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing for jobs via resume blasts. Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers that routinely needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.

larrys 14y ago
"is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches" Along the same lines I had an office a few years ago in an office park about 1 mile from a Walmart. In all the years I was there nobody ever knocked on our door looking for work or dropping off a resume. At the Walmart though I'm almost certain that they had a steady stream of job seekers showing up and filling out employment forms. I've helped two doctors get better jobs just with the simple suggestion that they proactively contact all the relevant departments within a radius of where they could work and not wait until called by a recruiter or by responding to an ad. They got multiple offers and essentially had no competition (jobs hadn't been posted yet). One time I got a job that I was unqualified for by simply flying out to a tradeshow after doing some research and cold calling various sales managers in person (had setup some interviews in advance as well). Got hired two times (short 3 year period when I didn't work at my own thing). Worked great. No doubt in my mind that if I had responded to an ad with a resume, that since I wasn't really qualified, I wouldn't have been picked or even come close to getting an interview.
- lreeves 14y ago
  Your anecdote doesn't really seem feasible for most people. Do you think it's reasonable that someone who has been out of work for 6 months would take on the risk and cost of flying to a tradeshow?

bryanlarsen 14y ago

I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months. If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you can take advantage of. But it gives you something you can put in that hole on your resume, and hopefully gives you relevant skills. The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it. The question is whether or not you should put your "forced sabbatical" projects on your resume or not. They'll plug the hole, but I imagine that it will also cause you to be filtered out by HR departments in big corporations if the work isn't "relevant".

at-fates-hands 14y ago
I can absolutely vouch for this. After a 6 month contract gig, the employer told me they were going to bring me on full-time. I stopped interviewing thinking I had a full-time spot. They told me two weeks before the end of the contract they didn't have anything else for me and I was cut at the beginning of January after our project ended. I did find a job with a small company, but after three days, realized they were looking for a Javascript developer, not a front-end developer. From then on, I was out of work for almost four months. Luckily, I picked up a freelance project which filled the gap during the time I wasn't technically "working". On my resume, I put it was a private freelance project that lasted the time I was unemployed (four months). Since it was relevant to my work history, nobody asks about it, or just wants me to go over what we did and the technologies we used. The interesting thing is when recruiters see "freelance" projects they instantly equate it with being unemployed. While the actual HR people at the companies I interviewed with never made the same connection. To them, work is work as long as its relevant to your career.
- evandena 14y ago

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redmattred 14y ago

It's a terrible trend and its absolutely true. With the unemployment rate so high, employers are now getting absolutely flooded with resumes for every and any job posting. There is a high volume of completely unqualified people applying to positions they have no relevant experience for. There is also a much higher volume of qualified people, and HR departments need some way of prioritizing these applicants. Fair or not, filtering out people by whether or not they have been recently employed is a relatively effective way to find the most promising candidates. If you are out of work and looking for a job, your best chance is to try to bypass HR altogether by either reaching out to hiring managers directly or by networking your way in. Most jobs are filled long before they are ever even posted online. It's never too soon to reach out to companies you want to work for - they may not be hiring immediately, but you want to be top of mind when a new position does open up.

auctiontheory 14y ago

If you are unemployed, please read Ask The Headhunter.

bluedino 14y ago

>> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have already selected the best from? >> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed. What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job? Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for another year?

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed." What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct action. Prima facie, this argument seems to be that if employers don't like an attribute in a job applicant's resume, we should either make it illegal for them to discriminate based on that attribute or "fake out" that attribute in some other way. It seems like anything I'm going to say is blindingly obvious, but I'l say it anyway: we cannot provide "recent experience" in X simply by hiring somebody and giving them a nametag that says "I do X!". It doesn't work that way. Employers want experience, not simply words on a resume. You can't create lots of experience for a job position in a market that simply might not have that many job positions of that type available. In addition, sometimes (not always by any means) companies let go the people who are deadweight first. I could go on. There's a plethora of various speculations I can make about why this measured observation is true. More research, most likely by job seekers themselves, is required to fix this. Politics by correlation, just like management by correlation, is a terrible way of running a ship.

rayiner 14y ago
Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things. It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?" In reality, people can be long-term unemployed for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with them being a bad potential employee. Maybe they have really specialized skills or want a really specific kind of job--the nature of such situations is that there is going to be gaps in how long it takes to find the next employer looking for those very specific skills.
- marknutter 14y ago
  Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a profit, it collects taxes. Therefore it's a very attractive alternative to the cold, hard realities of the market. Of course, there's only so much tax money to go around..

droithomme 14y ago

It's not a terrible metric. There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness. Few long term unemployed are long term unemployed for no reason at all. It's hard to take the claims seriously of those such as the article author who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this. If authors and social workers are concerned with advocating on behalf of the small minority of long term unemployed who are actually employable, it would be more helpful to have articles that address the issue of how to find the small number of long term unemployed who would make good team additions, without having to spend far more time interviewing bad candidates than one does when hiring currently employed and short term unemployed persons. Advocating for the government to hire unemployable people for positions in government is one of the worst suggestions I have ever heard. Things are already bad enough with endemic incompetence and corruption in government bureaus without seeking out even more of the incompetent and dangerous and giving them the power and influence that comes with government positions.

xentronium 14y ago
> There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness. There is an actual correlation between being black and drug addiction, criminality &c. Discriminating on skin color is illegal, though.
- Flimm 14y ago
  If you read two resumes that were identical in every way, except that one had experience listed and the other had none, wouldn't you go for the first one? If not, what's the point of listing experience at all?
gehar 14y ago
Government employee doesn't have to be bureaucrat. It could be street-sweeper.

mgkimsal 14y ago

At some point the pendulum may swing the other way, and employers may not hire anyone who even has a current job, using "loyalty" as a filter. "If they're so bold as to take time off work to go interview here with me, why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off and leave me high and dry in the future?" If we want to affect quick change for 'long term unemployed', start offering tax breaks to employers (hasn't this been done/tried already?). Reduce payroll tax by 2% for every year a person has been unemployed (2 years = 4% reduction, etc). That would, I'd think, get employers' attention.

VLM 14y ago
"why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off" That's just bizarre. I've been around a couple decades and I've always taken a personal or vacation day for interviews. I guess there are people who call in sick although thats not my style. I've never even heard of an employer so controlling that they get to decide if my day off activities are "worthy enough". Salaried jobs I just took off for an odd lunch hour.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  People will rationalize anything. Who might have predicted years ago that we'd be in a position like this: Employer: "I just can't find any qualified people to work! I'll have to import people from overseas who've never done this work before!" Person: "But... there's load of people right in this city who have these skills who'd like to come work for you." Employer: "WTF? They've not had a job in 9 months!" Person: "That's because your competition closed down and you're one of the few places in town that needs their skills but you didn't want to hire them, even though you need workers to keep up with demand." Employer: "BUT THEY HAVE NOT HAD A JOB IN 9 MONTHS! NEXT MONTH IT WILL BE 10 MONTHS!" Yes, I understand that long-term unemployment can bring about changes in people wrt skills and perhaps socialization (keeping 'normal' hours, etc). That's not what's in play all the time. We had a HUGE increase in job seekers - employers had their pick of whoever they wanted for most positions, and some will continue to make the criteria harder to fill if it means they'll get something out of it (tax breaks for hiring long-term unemployed, relaxed immigration bills for cheaper foreign workers, ability to keep wages down in their region, etc).

ChuckMcM 14y ago

What bothers me most about the long term unemployed is the lack of visibility into what they have been doing during the down time. I recently got to look at two resumes, both people who had been unemployed for > 6 months, one guy has this big blank spot, the other has a narrative about what he's been doing. The active guy got in shape, he rebuilt is basement drainage system, he did odd jobs helping people with "handy" work (he was a highly paid system administrator at a New York bank before he was laid off) and he's been reading. I am much less likely to call back the blank spot guy and much more likely to call back the active guy. What I'd like to know is, there any correlation between callbacks and intra-employment activity?

pnathan 14y ago
Whenever I read a resume, I wonder about blank spots over about 2-3 months. I don't really get excited that they exist, but I do want to get a grasp of the rationale and what they did. I suppose I am ok with it if someone just wanted to spend 3 months in his PJs recovering from burnout. But I'd rather hear about him spending 3 months doing gardening. Better yet, I'd rather hear about the technical things he did in that time frame. What I try to distinguish is apathy/laziness vs. relaxation/recovery.

jmsduran 14y ago

The negative stigma that is placed on long-term unemployment is an issue that needs to be addressed; measuring how long someone has been unemployed is not really indicative of anything. The rationalization that "If no one has hired them in X months, there must be a reason not to" is just flat out dumb. And while it may be a red flag when purchasing physical goods or real estate, it's a baseless stat when it comes to measuring how well an individual's expertise & qualities may be suited for a particular position. In my opinion, there are much better stats an employer can take off a job application, and wouldn't mind the federal/state government passing legislation against this type of discrimination if it gets out of control.

pekk 14y ago
Hiring is based on flat-out dumb reasoning, as long as it is a stupid reason to exclude someone rather than include them.

grimtrigger 14y ago

Long term unemployment is unfortunately a signal of low productivity. While being long term unemployed doesn't necessarily unproductive, it is highly correlated with low productivity. The same thing happens for race,unfortunately. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

reinhardt 14y ago

As someone with zero debt, minimal financial needs and enough savings to take voluntarily more than a few months off work, this is downright scary. I guess if it comes down to this, I'll just have to fudge the hell out of it in my resume.

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batonka 14y ago

It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this: -Good people are hard to find -If I find a good person, I snap them up right away -Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same -If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews -In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire -Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.

pekk 14y ago
Also it's obviously not his fault that the bank collapsed, whereas we will blame someone if they do not have work in a few months

cletus 14y ago

This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than those that don't. How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and easy filter. There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. 10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both. We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are.

mgkimsal 14y ago
"While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are." Over the last few years it's more like they can't move to where the jobs are, at least not without taking a huge loss on a house or declaring bankruptcy. But yeah, you're right - we've got a rather immobile labor market, for a variety of reasons, and there don't seem to be any quick fixes. telecommuting you'd think would help, but it's not applicable to every single job, and even places that do allow for it don't necessarily orient their culture to take full advantage of it.
- david_l 14y ago
  Also, could it be that salaries offered are not worth the risk as well? For example, I've had recruiters contact me about the same/similar positions in the DC and NYC suburbs, where I'd only make $7k-10k (if I was lucky) more than my current position (in a middle market city). Why would my fiance (who would have to quit her job as well and find new work) and I leave for peanuts? I'd also lose any time base perks at my current employer as well. If companies/recruiters are expecting people to move for "same job, same pay" then there's your reason for an immobile work force. Add to that what you mention - many would have to take a loss on their home when they wouldn't have too.

AznHisoka 14y ago

I wonder if the same effect applies if you took a couple of years off to do a Masters or PhD full-time?

crpatino 14y ago
Short answer, yes. Long answer, I happened to teach at undergraduate level during my days ad grad school (not really a T.A. but a sort of associate professor position that in the US is normally filled by PosDocs). At the time it seemed like a great idea and I was proud to "not having a single day of unemployment in my record". The problem was when I decided to go back to work in industry instead of pursuing an academic career. Most employers would see me not as a fresh graduate from a prestigious graduate program, but as "just a teacher" trying to "switch careers". It took 4 and a half months of eroded expectations, biter exchanges with H.R. folks and learning the ropes of the hiring game to find someone to actually give me a chance to prove myself in a support position that required no advanced degree and minimal technical skills (basically: speaks English, knows ksh and SQL). Then came the appalling realization that after 9 years of post K12 education I was apparently not qualified to answer the phone properly. Of course, your mileage may vary. Much of my experience not necessarily comes from being in grad school, but from lack of soft skills and the ability to manage perception of potential employers.

spikels 14y ago

Then did extending unemployment insurance to 99 weeks actually screw the people it was intended to help? I have not read the details of the original study but this article seems to indicate that a recently employed person in a different industry has an easier time getting a job than a long-term unemployed person with industry experience.

venomsnake 14y ago

Hire half unemployed to dig holes with a shovel all day, and the other half to fill them and pay them 30% below minimum wage. Or do something useful - there is always infrastructure in need of repairs. If won't cost much compared to wars and will do wonders for the self worth of the people.

Vivtek 14y ago
You've just invented the Public Works Administration! A huge proportion of America's infrastructure was built in the 30's by the PWA - including the vast majority of infrastructure in federal and state parks. They had to stop because that's socialism - and as we all know, socialism is unAmerican and bad.
flyinRyan 14y ago
Better yet, fire everyone in the DMV and similar places and have those positions filled by unemployed people.

t0mbstone 14y ago

Here's an idea. Think outside of the box: If being employed in the past six months is really such a big deal, just start your own LLC and do contracting work of some sort. Hey, look at that. Now your resume shows that you were employed during that period. Sure, you might not have made all that much money while you were employed at your own business, but at least you were employed.

yen223 14y ago
If finding contracting work were easy, the person wouldn't be unemployed for 6 months now, would he?

rdouble 14y ago

This seems to also affect software engineers. I used to split my time between 18-24 month consulting projects and then would take 3-6 months off to travel. I've been lucky to see all of the US and parts of Africa, Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico. This was pretty easy to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, after the last time I traveled, it took quite some time to find another contract. It seems much riskier in the current economic climate.

Apocryphon 14y ago

In tech itself, open source organizations should make a push to hire long-term unemployed developers. Promise to give them recommendations and references if they do a good job during the interim. The downside is the long-term unemployment problem is probably not as significant in software, compared to other industries.

incision 14y ago

About 13 years ago, I was unemployed for about four months. I've had a few people positively grill me about that blank despite the length of time that has passed and evidence that I didn't spend the time idle (Obtained a certification, did freelance work and eventually pivoted my career). In each case, it was an older person who upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness. I ended up getting those jobs, but came to learn a bit about how some people can come to think of life as so straightforward and easy. In each case the people judging me hadn't had to look for work for at least 20 years. In one, the person judging was the son of a prior VP who was widely despised by his peers for having made a nepotistic ascent through the ranks. In another I ended up seated at a desk next to the son of the judging CTO.

flyinRyan 14y ago
>upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness. What judgmental fucking assholes. It's a shame such people are the ones doing the interviewing instead of the ones rotting in unemployment. We only get to live one time, so if you see me taking off two months as "blatant laziness" then fuck you.

jlarocco 14y ago

At some point wouldn't it be easier to create their own jobs? It seems like a waste of energy to organize a protest with "We want work" signs when they could be starting a business or something.

tsunamifury 14y ago

3 years ago I ended 18 months of unemployment by listing every friend, person I spoke with, or acquaintance as one of my clients for my 'very successful' consulting business. I regularly do help out on side projects or test out ideas with friends so they were more than happy to provide a reference for this period. In the 3 years since i've been able to climb from no income, to medium US income, to top 5% income bracket. Its hard, but not impossible to recover.

bennesvig 14y ago

If you can't land a job in your desired field, get another job that pays a wage you can live on. Then in every single free moment you have, do work in the field you're interested in. Even if you have to do it for free (assuming the free work looks really good on a resume). It lets you keep something current on your resume and develop skills in the field. Doesn't work for every field and situation, but I've found it useful.

sebastiano 14y ago

This article hits home for me. I graduated from a Top 20 university here in the UK in 2009 with a First Class in Computer Science. I have always been the type that never really knew what they wanted to do with their life and made the mistake of not forcing myself to pick a career path. The first year after leaving uni I worked in a job unrelated to my degree. I left and decided to take the grad scheme slog that is so common. I applied to 10-15 big companies' grad schemes in their Tech departments (IBM, MS, investment banks etc) and reached at least the first in-person interview for around half of them. I had a few offers but turned them down since I realised I was not passionate about the role (big mistake). Since then I have spent the following 18 months unemployed. I work voluntarily at my parents' business, again, in a field unrelated to my degree, while doing some freelancing and hacking on some personal projects. I am scared to apply for programming jobs now because of the gaps in my employment and lack of 'formal' experience. I have a massive fear of the rejection, mixed with a good amount of Impostor Syndrome. It's a vicious cycle. I am scared to apply and be rejected, which is in turn adding to my unemployed period and making the situation worse. I have had some savings which meant I could survive unemployed comfortably (probably worked against me in hindsight), but it is quite a depressing realisation and I feel as though I have wasted my degree and am starting from scratch.

stretchwithme 14y ago

The worst thing about the interventions into the labor market is that they prevent people from being hired. It would be far better to hand aid to the working poor directly than to have a minimum wage or impose regulations that make hiring the working poor more expensive. Many people seem to think making the employers pay somehow reduces their profits with no other ill effects. But in reality, it is also likely make prices go up. OR the take home pay of workers go down or rise more slowly. Just because these effects don't happen immediately doesn't mean they don't eventually happen or that they don't accumulate. And just because you don't understand how artificial prices interfere with supply and demand doesn't mean the effects aren't real. If you are one of the least productive laborers, your labor may not be worth the minimum wage to anybody. You're completely shut out. Good luck finding a place to live under the nearest bridge.

el_fuser 14y ago

Not surprising. I know quite a lot of professionals that took a couple of years off to care for babies and can't find work. As a corollary, I've also seen quite a few engineers that were just slightly out of date get passed over.

aurelius83 14y ago

"In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer." This seems intuitive to me. With the large number of people applying to jobs, there has to be a way to quickly filter resumes down. It's unfortunate, but HR probably decided that six months or longer is probably a signal that there is something wrong with the applicant. Because of the vast amount of resumes being sent in, they can afford to miss out on the diamond in the rough that is hidden among the mass of resumes of people out of work for 6 months or longer.

b0rsuk 14y ago

Do you have some tips for someone like me ? Unemployed for 3 years, graduated from IT but worked in another industry (nautical charts). I have little to show. I got an interview quite often, but that's where it ended. 80% companies just have HR department and don't ask any technical questions. Should I focus on building my portfolio ? (recently focused on Django) Is it easier to find a job in some "common" field, like software testing or PHP, or rarer like Django where there are much fewer offers but also less competition ?

fredgrott 14y ago

a question: any engineer would recognize the symptoms of what may be a systematic failure in a system. There was no mention in the article of studies fo studying the hr system from a sysatem perspective. My thinking is that the drastic increase in applicants for any job posted acts as a feed back loop adjusting the system into chaos as hr personnel choose to reduce workload via reducing quality. Is thee any studies somewhere where a team took on the task to study the problems as a system? even my assumptions could be wrong..it would be nice to attack with some actual facts based on some science.