batonka

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.

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.