The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-longterm-unemployment/274957/

by vellum • 13 years ago

228 336 13 years 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-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.

tptacek18• 13 years 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_camel10• 13 years ago

More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement.

The Corporate System is actually collapsing.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years 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.

ryanklee• 13 years 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.

tempaccount9473• 13 years 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.

michaelochurch9• 13 years ago

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.

prostoalex2• 13 years ago

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristie-arslan/five-big-myths-...

"large businesses only employ about 38 percent of the private sector workforce while small businesses employ 53 percent of the workforce. In fact, over 99 percent of employing organizations are small businesses and more than 95 percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees"

Affordable health care is pretty much the last major benefit that puts a large corporate employer at an advantage to a small business or self-employed status. With health exchanges and affordable (?) health care kicking in next year the parent assertion might be correct.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

I disagree with this assertion that corporations are a "terrible way of turning human labor into work product." In industries like software? Sure. In industries like coal mining? Explain to me how a decentralized structure would be a more efficient way of marshaling the capital resources and labor necessary to blow the top off a mountain and extract a bunch of rocks from the carcass.

tbrownaw4• 13 years 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.

larrys8• 13 years 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.

tbrownaw4• 13 years 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?

bluedino3• 13 years 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.

batonka2• 13 years ago

Joel Spolsky said it best here:

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.

jiggy20118• 13 years 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.

theorique2• 13 years 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.

larrys8• 13 years 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.

jarek8• 13 years 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?

tptacek18• 13 years ago

Startuplandia myopia is myopic. Even for software developers, if you apply for a bunch of BigCo jobs, you're going to find that a long stretch without formal employment is an obstacle.

The "I've been freelancing for the past year" trick probably does not work as well for med techs or paralegals.

netfire• 13 years ago

Probably not. Something like "I've been volunteering down at the hospital" would be much better in those professions. Regardless of your profession, surely you can find something productive to do for 6 months, even if its part-time or without pay. Taking that sort of initiative will probably also get you the connections and referrals you need to get a job. Doing nothing but submitting applications for months on end is about the worst thing you can do. If you aren't getting hired, do something to make yourself more hirable.

tptacek18• 13 years 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.

larrys8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

jdminhbg• 13 years ago

> I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.

I assume you are looking to ask the 50% of the population with lower unemployment, shorter median unemployment duration, and lower % long-term unemployed: http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/

tptacek18• 13 years ago

Women are more likely to work in sectors not as hard-hit by the recession. They don't tend to work construction. They do tend to work in the public sector sharply more often than men. You have to take those statistics in context.

thedufer• 13 years ago

As for lower unemployment, you might have noticed that women also have lower employment. As a percentage of people who actually want jobs (employed+unemployed) rather than of the total population, the unemployment rate is basically the same between men and women.

rfugger• 13 years ago

I don't understand either of your points. Care to spell them out?

tptacek18• 13 years ago

1. Resume blasts are infamously ineffective. Not only that, but gap since last job is a screening criteria so basic that even HR can filter from it; if you're bad on that metric you're unlikely even to hit a hiring manager. So it may be less true that 6 months of unemployment is intractable than that 6 months of unemployment forecloses on the tactic of just blasting resumes.

2. Women routinely incur 6-12 month gaps of unemployment because they have kids. When Erin went back to the workforce, the resume gap was by far the biggest obstacle she faced; it was raised specifically in (I think? She'll comment and correct me.) every job interview she had. Point being: if you're disadvantaged as a cohort that early in the process, the impact to your career long term is likely to be far-reaching even after you find employment.

jiggy20118• 13 years ago

It's probably easier to justify a 6 month gap with "I decided to have a kid" than "I was unemployed because nobody wanted me".

tptacek18• 13 years ago

I think you'll find, if you talk to a lot of women who have looked for jobs after taking 6+ months off to deal with having a kid, that this is not true.

zorpner• 13 years ago

Where on the resume would you recommend putting that information?

yasth• 13 years ago

It is easy in the tech world (and HN is mostly tech) to confidently say 6 months is a long time for unemployment. At the moment, I'm fairly certain I could have interviews in a single digit number of hours, but that isn't true for people who have to compete for "general skills" jobs (i.e. those that require a resume, but no particular special skills, such as receptionists, admin and the like). Also there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to have a 6 mo gap (the biggest is maternity leave).

Resume blasts are often the only realistic option some people have for getting their candidacy out there. If they had a friend at a firm that was hiring they'd probably have used that before 6 months of unemployment. Unemployment generally means that hanging out with employed friends has to be cut back (because going out for drinks gets expensive). If you network fails you for a few months you might not have much of a network to lean on after that.

Discrimination against 6 Months+ of unemployment certainly has some objective basis. Discrimination isn't always a bad thing. Still there are undoubtedly people swept up into this bias who should not be.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

If it's true that 6+ month resume gaps have a deleterious effect on job searches, my point would be that this observation is another arrow in the quiver of people (like myself) who believe that women face not just bias but also specific objective structural disadvantages in the workplace, beyond just the career development time they lose directly to child care.

cgmorton• 13 years ago

> 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.

Oh, wait, you mean women? For a most of that rant I thought you meant ex-convicts, because there is definitely an objective stigma against them (and they're certainly out of the job market). Now that I think about it, it's possible that the amount of ex-cons in the 6-month+ unemployment bracket, plus maybe ex-mental-institution or ex-rehab individuals, is significant enough to skew the results. The original paper doesn't address this, at least not that I can see.

bryanlarsen4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

What if you simply got a business name for yourself? A DBA license isn't too hard to get, and would probably look a little more professional (even if unjust) than freelance.

hosh3• 13 years ago

You don't put "freelance" on your resume. Being "freelance" means you're operating your own company, with its own presence, branding, etc. The least you can do is to name your consulting company and declare yourself as the owner. Even with something as simple as <last name> Consulting. Because, at least according to the IRS, you are. Take advantage of it.

enraged_camel10• 13 years ago

>>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.

Ideally, yes. In reality, it's easier said than done.

1. Most unemployed people need a way to pay their bills. This is not possible if you're dicking around with open source projects or volunteer work. Starting a business requires a certain amount of capital. And "making stuff to sell on Etsy" works only for a tiny minority of people who have the creative skills to make cool stuff.

2. When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job. You should get up at 8am and look for jobs, make a list, take a lunch break, then spend the afternoon tailoring your resume for those jobs. Then you can get off at 5pm or whatever and do other things. What most people do however is that they do other things during the day, and then in the evenings they sit in front of their computers with Monster.com open and browse job openings, and maybe send out a few resumes. Which doesn't work of course.

Basically, the only people who can afford to work on something meaningful while unemployed are those who have a significant amount of money saved up. In today's economy, most people who are at risk of unemployment don't.

radley• 13 years ago

A better choice is to try to make something great... especially for HN followers.

akincisor• 13 years ago

If you've been looking for work full time for 6 months and not a single employer has wanted to hire you, being unemployed for 6 months is the least of your problems.

marknutter4• 13 years ago

Well, you not saving money is nobody's fault but your own. And if you can't pay your bills, you can either take advantage of any of the many safety nets provided by the government, or you can use any of the natural safety nets that are available to everybody but the most antisocial people; friends and family. Jobs are not a right, they are a privilege.

pc863• 13 years ago

But doesn't your point #2 conflict with #1?

This is obviously industry-specific but assuming you have the skills, doing contract programming requires only trivial up-front cost (a domain name and server, but most who work with the web would have that already) and it's certainly not a $15/hr job.

As one of my siblings comments says, it's your responsibility to have a safety net of your own (6 months of all your expenses is a pretty standard number). Not doing so is simply irresponsible unless you're struggling to keep food on the table as it is.

VLM2• 13 years ago

"When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job."

This assumes there's enough of a job market "out there" that after more than 6 months you can still burn 40 hours per week on it.

"This is not possible if you're dicking around with ... volunteer work."

This doesn't even make sense. Most volunteer work doesn't require much money. You may be confusing setting up a charity or donating to a charity with volunteer work at a charity. Even something "time consuming" like serving soup at the church soup kitchen can't burn more than a couple hours.

bryanlarsen4• 13 years ago

Finding work should be your primary focus, yes. But employment counsellors will tell you that you cannot and should spend 8 hours a day doing it. That's just a recipe for burn out. After you've applied for a few thousand jobs and been rejected a few thousand times, applying for more jobs is an exercise in futility and a recipe for depression. You're obviously doing something wrong. Figure out what you're doing wrong, fix it, and then try again.

macspoofing7• 13 years ago

>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.

WHY??!?!? Seriously, WHY?!?!

So, I'm thinking that maybe there's some skew in these findings, and then you come in and say "Yea, I wouldn't hire you unless you show me you did more than just look for work".

Looking for work is time consuming. Furthermore, as the spouse who's currently jobless you may be pulling double duty taking care of the kids, or fixing up the house, or helping out the household in some other way (maybe working at McDonald's), things that you don't put on your resume. Little does such a person realize, that there are people like you, who look at his or her resume and dismiss them as lazy.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

Looking for work isn't an idle task, it is sales and marketing. If you do not record that fact for potential employers, questions are going to be raised. No money exchanging hands is not relevant, you were still working in a legitimate profession doing legitimate work. It is a job and should go on your resume. Likewise for home care, if that was your primary profession during that period of time.

icelancer2• 13 years ago

The reality is that you are competing against people who have been increasing their skill at relevant tasks and you have not. It's no more complicated than that. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

bryanlarsen4• 13 years ago

I didn't do the resume filtering, I was doing interviewing. As I said, I didn't really mind what the answer was, just that you had an answer. I would have accepted looking after pre-school kids or major house renovations or working at McDonald's. Basically anything that shows you are the sort of person that makes lemon-aid when life gives you lemons.

walshemj3• 13 years ago

And in the UK you are expected to spend 30 hours a week looking for work in order to claim SS - They have a section of the uk.gov site just for that

Caerus2• 13 years ago

Definitely agree on the "do something in the gap" aspect. In a lot of technical fields, 6 non-practicing months can be very close to "no experience".

My job responsibilities tend to come in waves of 3 different functions, where I'll focus almost exclusively on one aspect for 4 months, then move to another for 8 months, then hop again. Each time I switch it can take a lot of time to "shake off the cobwebs" - either the software changes, there is new functionality, or just rediscovering some best practices.

I can completely understand reluctance to hire someone in that situation.

redmattred• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

If you are unemployed, please read Ask The Headhunter.

bluedino3• 13 years 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?

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years 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.

rayiner5• 13 years 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.

marknutter4• 13 years 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..

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

So you think I'm arguing for a rational market. I am not. Another commenter thinks that I'm ignoring the benefits of getting up and working any kind of job. I am not.

Why would you guys have such diverse opinions on what I'm advocating? Because the problem is not sufficiently stated. That's my entire point. You make one measurement and say "let's work on this directly" and you haven't said much of anything. All you have is correlation. Lots of correlation in the world. It's like the doctor taking your temperature and then applying ice packs because you have a fever. Maybe you have a cold! Maybe you just exercised! Maybe cool water would be better! And so forth. Hell, I don't know what you have, all you've given me is one data point.

If you don't define a problem well, you can't define an experiment to prove that some intervention works or doesn't work. You just have a measurement you want to be different. That may be a huge social problem, but in terms of being useful, it's not a lot of anything. I don't particularly like the fact that high schools graduate so many kids who fail a reading test, but I doubt changing the test is going to alleviate my concern.

Sure, the market is probably irrational to one degree or another. That doesn't mean that we should approach it with an equal degree of irrationality. This very well could be a multi-faceted problem only solved at the level of the individual, like most problems are. Or not. From this article, we don't know one way or another.

icelancer2• 13 years ago

>They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?"

Having been in charge of hiring, this is way, way more true than it is false. It is not irrational at all.

danielweber2• 13 years ago

Honestly, some real skills do disappear with long-term unemployment, like getting up on time every day. Even working a made-up job is probably better.

But real job skills do disappear, too. If one person has been working with machine tools 40 hours a week while the other hasn't used machine tools for six months, hiring the first is the rational thing to do.

Personally, as a software engineer, I've enjoyed my bouts of unemployment, because I've had the chance to deep dive into new things I never had the chance while working full time, and I've come out of them more employable. (Although I'm in the job hunt now while still employed, and recruiters and employers seem to be giant flakes, maybe because I'm not calling them twice a day, or maybe because they just suck.) But this isn't the norm.

arscan• 13 years ago

> If one person has been working with machine tools 40 hours a week while the other hasn't used machine tools for six months, hiring the first is the rational thing to do

yes, but the point is that companies would even prefer hiring people that have been doing work in a different industry recently than someone who is 6 months unemployed but with experience in the same industry.

I think it simply comes down to employers automatically assuming that you have some sort of major flaw if you've been unemployed for so long.

el_fuser2• 13 years ago

* I've enjoyed my bouts of unemployment, because I've had the chance to deep dive into new things I never had the chance while working full time, and I've come out of them more employable.*

It follows that staying in one job for a long period would tend to make you less employable... And indeed I've witnessed this very thing.

michaelochurch9• 13 years ago

Here's a solution that doesn't require the government to hire long-term unemployed: lying on a resume or in an interview to conceal unemployment is now legal. (Well, technically, it was never illegal; just considered unethical.) You may:

* Expand dates of any job by up to two months or 10% on each side, whichever is larger.

* Bump an educational degree forward by up to 5 years if under 40, and 10 years if older.

* Move any employment engagement translationally by up to three years.

* Inflate title as long as it does not involve falsification of a professional credential (e.g. "Senior VP" is OK, "Physician" for a non-doctor is not).

Anyone who is fired for such now-legal falsification must be given six months' severance or there is a wrongful termination claim.

How does that sound to you?

(I don't think it's a good idea, but it is an improvement over the system that exists now.)

mcherm2• 13 years ago

I think it sounds like a terrible idea. As an applicant, I would never take advantage of it. As an employer I would never WANT to hire anyone who took advantage of it. A side effect would be that I would begin to distrust resumes and would therefore hire more by word-of-mouth instead, which would reduce opportunities for minorities and those less well-connected.

sib• 13 years ago

If a candidate would lie about those things, they'd lie about things at work too.

afterburner• 13 years ago

Long term unemployment is intrinsically destructive, both to the individuals losing careers and money and to the economy as a whole. While understanding why it's happening is important, it's also important to compensate for it, for the good of society (and the economy) as a whole. Government is one of the few agencies that at least theoretically has the care of society as one of its goals; private corporations aren't going to give a sh*t, they're not going to "take one for the team" and hire less experienced people, even if the long term effect is increased consumer spending.

It is after all why things like welfare exist. So peoples' lives aren't ruined, and the secondary effects of that happening on a wide scale.

larrys8• 13 years ago

"It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action."

Exactly. You can't defeat the "enemy" (for lack of a better way to put it) unless you understand what they are thinking, motives weaknesses etc.

More typical that people want to put no effort into research or understanding and just have something work out. Laziness.

The good news is that by putting in the effort you can easily take advantage of a typical shortcoming like this.

malandrew• 13 years ago

I absolutely do think that employers should only be able to ask how long you worked somewhere and not how long you worked there. Sites like linked in should give you the ability to only publicize tenure and not approximate dates of employment.

I'm employed but but an issue like this is worrying for other reasons like the decision to take a break from the labor market and travel. What if I want to dip in my savings and travel for a year. I'm unemployed for greater than 6 months in such a situation but voluntarily so.

vec• 13 years ago

The reason here is that the interests of employers are misaligned with society's interests at large.

Individual employers are clearly demonstrating that they have a disincentive, rational or otherwise, from hiring potential employees with large gaps in their resumes. This obviously will tend to feed back on itself, making long gaps longer and unemployable applicants even more unemployable as time passes.

Society, on the other hand, has both economic and humanitarian interests in minimizing the number of unemployable individuals. Since the market has inadvertently began creating a large pool of these unemployable people, and it shows no sign of changing in the short to mid term, then society can and should apply non-market forces to advancing its interests.

Honestly, I'm not sure if direct employment is the best solution; I'd probably prefer some variation on tax incentives for employers. But reaching for the hammer, as you put it, is not always a knee-jerk reaction and seems like a pretty rational instinct in this situation.

snowwrestler4• 13 years ago

During the Great Depression, the government did exactly this, and it worked out extremely well. A lot of parks still use the infrastructure created by CCC employees, and the employees learned valuable work skills, earned a living, and were more productive in the economy and military once the spending boom of WWII began.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

droithomme4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Flimm2• 13 years 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?

gehar2• 13 years ago

Government employee doesn't have to be bureaucrat. It could be street-sweeper.

mgkimsal8• 13 years 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.

VLM2• 13 years 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.

mgkimsal8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

pnathan4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

pekk3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

reinhardt• 13 years 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.

batonka2• 13 years 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.

pekk3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

mgkimsal8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

enraged_camel10• 13 years ago

>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.

Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive.

Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane!

Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the shoulders and shake them violently. It's like the housing market crash did not teach anyone anything!

It comes down to this: a house is a terrible, terrible means of investment. It's a fixed asset that, contrary to popular belief, is not guaranteed to always go up in value. In addition, people don't really take into account the negatives. Primarily, a house ties you down. You have zero mobility as a labor market participant if you own a house, and this significantly reduces your leveraging power when it comes to negotiating salary. Besides that though, houses have a ton of expenses, and as fixed assets they are subject to a lot of uncontrollable risk (fire, floods, earthquakes, the neighborhood depreciating, etc.).

Instead of having that money tied down on a house, people are much better investing in the stock market, which has, over the past 100 years, gone up by 7% annually.

The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids. The stability of the environment has a lot of positive benefits for their growth. It also makes social integration easier.

/rant

eli_gottlieb4• 13 years ago

A house is a very useful durable good. Like automobiles and refrigerators.

rdouble5• 13 years ago

Compounding this problem are the facts that in many, and I would argue, most, US cities, renting is expensive, the there is a social stigma against renters, and the rental properties available are very undesirable.

kens• 13 years ago

One thing that puzzles me is that rising house prices are treated as inherently good, and falling house prices are seen as inherently bad. But for most things, it's the exact opposite - rising prices are bad.

Is this just because newspaper articles are biased towards the perspective of real estate agents and homeowners? Or are high house prices good because houses are investments? Would cheap 3-d printed houses (hypothetically) make the country better off or worse off economically?

bluedino3• 13 years ago

> Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane!

It's really the older generation that promote this. If you're 35 years old, chances are your dad walked out of high school into the same large company that he retired from. Why would they need mobility when they had jobs for life?

The only younger people I know that share that view are close-minded and never see the point of leaving Smalltown, USA.

ry0ohki• 13 years ago

>The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids.

It really depends where you live. Here in Pittsburgh you can buy a decent house for $150k. Meanwhile, rent in that same area is $1000 for something similar. In this case, even if there was zero appreciation, the amount you pay on interest, repairs, etc... is less then the amount you would have spent on rent, but everyone should take the time to make these calculations for themselves. There was no amount of math that made a 1,500 sqft house in Calfornia at $1 mil (during the boom) better then renting.

I should also mention the area I'm thinking of has high demand for rent, so your mobility isn't really limited as you'd be able to rent out at a profit almost immediately.

jdietrich• 13 years ago

It's a very simple mathematical error - people compare the cost of a mortgage payment with the cost of a month's rent, failing to take into account that only a tiny fraction of the mortgage payment actually becomes equity.

If they actually sit down and work it out, most people are astonished at how much flexibility they sacrifice for that small slice of equity.

nilkn6• 13 years ago

> Instead of having that money tied down on a house, people are much better investing in the stock market, which has, over the past 100 years, gone up by 7% annually.

Just to be clear, that 7% is after inflation. The historical performance of the stock market is closer to 10-11% pre-inflation.

> The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids.

Retirement is of course another scenario where it makes sense. Mobility won't be nearly as important (indeed it may be totally irrelevant), and you won't have any rent or mortgage payments if you own your house.

The thing is that I don't plan to retire in San Francisco or NYC. I plan on retiring in the south or midwest. Housing is so "cheap" there compared to salaries in tech hubs that as long as you're saving a reasonable amount of cash (say $1k minimum) every month (on top of retirement accounts and investments in stocks and bonds), you'll easily be able to just go buy a decent house in a cheap area for cash when you're ready to settle down in retirement.

Is it absolutely the most efficient path, financially? I don't know, but it sure does make everything simple, as you'll have maximum mobility during your career. I can't tell you how many people I know who have basically stunted their careers due to buying homes. Money is certainly not the end goal in life, not even close, but lots of people I know could double their earnings if they weren't locked down to one location.

rcirka• 13 years ago

I agree that home ownership is not a good investment. Between mortgage interest, property taxes, home owners insurance, and maintenance, the ROI will be negative. Not to mention most homes barely appreciate beyond inflation. People say that with rent, all your money is going out the window. The same can be said for owning a home.

Caerus2• 13 years ago

The piece that I see ALWAYS neglected is maintenance. I rent and pay nothing additional to maintain the place. Washing machine breaks - landlord fixes it. Carpets wearing out (minus things that are obviously my fault) - landlord replaces it.

Everyone I talk to who owns is constantly upgrading or replacing or fixing something in their house. It seems, on average, home maintenance is about 66-75% of my rent check; and that isn't money they get back. It just prevents their home price from falling.

nostromo• 13 years ago

A few things you're not accounting for:

* Leverage. (The most you can leverage a stock investment is 2x. For homes people can leverage their money up to an insane 20x, for example: by buying a 500k home with 25k down. The proper comparison is not to compare buying a 500k home vs 500k worth of stocks; it's buying 25k or 50k worth of stocks vs a 500k home.)

* Mortgage deduction. (Imagine if you could invest 500k in the stock market with only 25k, and then the government let you deduct your interest payments!)

* Inflation. (I've heard of people living in Manhattan in apartments they bought in the 1980s that pay a mortgage of $500. Inflation has reduced their mortgage debt to negligible levels. Time has in a very real way erased much of their debt.)

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Speaking as a homeowner, we didn't buy the house as an investment asset (though naturally we hope it doesn't depreciate too much). We bought it to live in, and are not paying huge amounts or over very long periods. Of course there are risks. That's why we carry insurance.

medinismo• 13 years ago

I so agree with this argument that I think it should absolute, ie no provisos for "The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids." Long term, stable rental income is the dream of any landlord. Families provide that. So capitalism work just fine here too.

jngreenlee5• 13 years ago

Addition to the other factors to consider put forth by nostromo:

-Mobility. When you need to exit a house and relocate, you can do so without waiting for a lease to expire. If you are in the right market, you can rent the first home out while you migrate, then sell it once the dust has settled.

gcheong• 13 years ago

The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids.

I don't have kids but one benefit I get from owning a house is I can do pretty much what I want to it without having to get permission for it from a landlord and it affords more space for entertaining friends and allowing me to build things so I think that statement is a bit short-sighted.

You are right though about the mindless promotion and the dubious investment potential. Unless you specialize in real estate investment, houses are primarily a place to live and you have to determine the value that you would get out of it from that standpoint.

pmorici• 13 years ago

Every place is different but in some places there are huge advantages to buying that most people don't probably realize.

In the state of Maryland for example It's my understanding that property taxes on the first $300k of assessed value for primary residences are adjusted based on your income[0] for households making less than $60k per year. (for reference 300k will get you a pretty nice place in a trendy part of the city) The end result is you could be living in a $300k house and pay zero or near zero property tax. So you could for example buy a place straight out of college rent out the spare rooms to pay off the mortgage at a very accelerated pace and then if you wanted to you could live in that house basically property tax free once the mortgage is paid off so long as you didn't make too much money. I'm not sure if you've looked at your living cost structure but once you knock out mortgage and property tax you have an extreme amount of flexibility in terms of how much money you need to make to live comfortably and the types of career risks you could take w/o having to worry about ending up on the street. You have to be smart about what you buy and at what price of course which is where most people fail at smart decisions when home buying but if you do it right it really can be a no brainier.

[0] http://www.dat.state.md.us/sdatweb/htc.html

luser001• 13 years ago

Given your last point re: kids, how is it "insane" that people want to buy houses? Most people have/want to have kids.

Btw, I don't agree with your last point. It's pretty much possible to stay in a rented apartment for 5 years at a time quite easily. And kids go through wrenching changes every five years on average (home->kindergarten->middle->high school).

You make good points about the drawbacks of buying a house. However, the ability to lock in your housing expenses for the next 30 years (i.e., no impact of inflation) shouldn't be underestimated. IMHO.

b0rsuk2• 13 years ago

Here in Poland, you can't rent a flat even if you want. There are extremely few offers, partially because there's a culture of owning. Renting is frowned upon.

rsheridan6• 13 years ago

I'm in the process of buying a house. My monthly payment will be ~$300 less than what I'm paying for rent now for a similar house, and I could probably break even (taking into account maintenance) if I had to pay a property management company to rent it out in the even that I needed to move.

And in 10 years, who knows what rent will be? I know what my house payment will be, modulo possible changes in tax and insurance rates.

Not all markets are like that, but in some cases it does make sense to buy a house.

eli_gottlieb4• 13 years ago

There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.

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.

Beyond just the correlation with unemployment, it also results in the FIRE sector wielding far too much power over your economy and politics. When political effort goes into bolstering the stability of real-estate to keep all the homeowners afloat, that's the real-estate brokers, the landlords, the banks, and the insurance companies getting the boost.

larrys8• 13 years ago

"I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check "

I've also heard people who will simply pick a company that went out of business where references or verification aren't even possible.

jonnathanson3• 13 years ago

This is a dangerous game. Some HR managers and hiring managers won't have the time or the know-how to fact check that sort of thing. Others will. The expected value of the dice roll isn't worth the risk.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

The social-proof side not only means you need to have jobs, but they have to be a certain "class" of jobs. Though you can invent them pretty well.

Here's a story from an acquaintance (don't know him that well, so may or may not be apocryphal, but it seems plausible). For a period of 2 years he worked at Home Depot to pay the bills, and did a bit of puttering around on tech side projects on the side. Not really any kind of business, just for fun mostly. So he listed that honestly: Home Depot was in the employment section, and a few side projects that had become releasable were listed under projects.

Later, he changed his resume. He removed Home Depot from the resume entirely, because he had gotten the impression that working a retail job while post-college-age carried a stigma, at least if you were looking for "professional" jobs rather than other retail jobs. To explain what he was doing in those two years, he grouped together those side projects as an "unsuccessful startup". Big improvement in responses.

pekk3• 13 years ago

It really seems that honesty is a gigantic liability in this industry.

jonnathanson3• 13 years ago

A friend of mine worked on a consulting project that tracked how hiring managers looked at resumes for high-volume positions (defined, at that time, as 100+ resumes per opening -- probably a very conservative figure today). In interviews, they claimed they looked at everything. In eye-tracking studies, they basically spent about 30 seconds per resume, and they looked at education, companies, job titles, and dates. Almost nothing else on the page mattered.

I'm almost positive you could have inserted complete gibberish into every other line of the accomplishments/bullet points, and still have passed muster if you'd had enough big names on the page.

Of course, that was 5-6 years ago. These days, we also have computer filters to deal with. To some extent, these filters can be "SEO'ed" with the right combination of keywords, and the right percentage of linguistic overlap between job listing and resume. But on the flip side, they're almost certain to be very harsh and uncaring to employment gaps, unknown companies or brand names, and non-standard job titles.

vorg• 13 years ago

> 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.

There's many managers who'll employ you if they suspect it's a lie so they'll have something against you if they want to get rid of you quickly later on. So the trick is to make up a lie that'll fool the HR filters but not the sociopath managers who'll employ you to be their bitch.

jjtheblunt• 13 years ago

"Twitter" a guarantee?

yardie2• 13 years ago

Then how does the US factor into this correlation with an even higher rate of home ownership and lower rate of unemployment?

No, unemployment and home ownership may be tangentially linked but one does not relate directly to the other.

This is how the unemployment rate matches up for both countries.

https://www.google.fr/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa6_&...

Notice a difference? Spain, and a lot of European countries, have some archaic debt laws. Where even if you could move to where the jobs are, the mortgage on the house you no longer own is still on your back. So you could take another job but half your income is going to service that old debt. This contrasts pretty well with the way the US and UK handle debt; you invested, the investment failed, liquidate everything, and then move on.

youngtaff• 13 years ago

Why do you consider them "archaic debt laws"

Someone takes on a debt using property as security, if they forfeit the security why should they be excused from the difference between the value of the security and the value of the debt?

AznHisoka• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

flyinRyan8• 13 years ago

Better yet, fire everyone in the DMV and similar places and have those positions filled by unemployed people.

t0mbstone• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

rdouble5• 13 years 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.

Apocryphon3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

flyinRyan8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

stretchwithme4• 13 years 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_fuser2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

b0rsuk2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

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