As I wrote in an article today, there are many job ads on sites like CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com stating that employers will accept applications only from people who already have jobs or who very recently had jobs.
Dollars to doughnuts.
If you think about it, people who were laid off recently may be, on average, worse candidates than people who were laid off a while ago.
After all, people who have been out of work for two years or longer are people who were laid off during the recession. That means many of them were workers whose jobs were eliminated simply because their businesses were doing badly, not because they were personally incompetent. And their first year or so of unemployment occurred as businesses were still cutting jobs, not adding them, so almost no matter how qualified they were, they were stuck in a holding pattern.
But more recently, layoffs have been near historic lows and there has been (some) job growth. That means the people laid off in the last few months are much more likely to have lost their jobs because they were poor workers rather than victims of the business cycle.
Of course, employers may have concerns that longer durations of unemployment actually cause workers’ skills to atrophy, regardless of what their skills were before they were laid off. But for many lower-skilled jobs, or jobs in industries that are not terribly technologically dynamic, this should not be a huge concern.
None of this is to say that employers should be discriminating against workers for any reason, legal or otherwise. But if they’re going to discriminate against workers because they’re unemployed, and especially unemployed long term, they should at least take the time to figure out whether current job status even correlates with worker quality.
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