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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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".
>>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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|13 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] yardie|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
I've also heard people who will simply pick a company that went out of business where references or verification aren't even possible.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vorg|13 years ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
[+] [-] vec|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] afterburner|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] malandrew|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
* 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.)
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|13 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] macspoofing|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Caerus|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] incision|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] redmattred|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sebastiano|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmsduran|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] reinhardt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
The "I've been freelancing for the past year" trick probably does not work as well for med techs or paralegals.
[+] [-] theorique|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] batonka|13 years ago|reply
-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|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0mbstone|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yen223|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batonka|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] b0rsuk|13 years ago|reply
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 ?
[+] [-] rdouble|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|13 years ago|reply
The downside is the long-term unemployment problem is probably not as significant in software, compared to other industries.