The unemployed will not be considered

People who screen resumes tend to assume that you are unemployed because of one or more other undesirable traits you have, like a tendency to be irresponsible or violent and antisocial. This assumption is a mix of broken societal wisdom and an association fallacy. FWIW, there's another fallacy committed when they themselves become unemployed; everyone else unemployed is a antisocial lunatic, but they are a good person who has simply fallen on rough times -- total cognitive dissonance, but they don't notice, even when it is pointed out to them.

It is not necessarily true that a company that is employing this philosophy is necessarily cutting out the best from it's hiring pool; but the inverse isn't necessarily true either. My suspicion is that the mean quality of the unemployed applicants to a company might be slightly worse than the employed applicants, but not enough so to represent anything significant.

What I can more confidently say is true is that most companies, and for that matter most individuals, haven't thought about this at all. What we do right now is the default, and they haven't yet been fired for relying on it, nor have they been rewarded for not doing so. Until they are, nothing will change.

There are ridiculous inefficiencies, but they exist do to some completely screwed up assumptions people make, or that they just blindly follow out of deference to common wisdom.

In order for someone to make money solving these problems, they'd need to convince the parties involved that their assumptions are incorrect, and that they need to use a new approach to hiring. For instance, a hiring manager who believes that the clerk they are seeking must have a bachelors degree, n+ years of experience, and whatever else. Why; because this person has a large number of assumptions they are working off of, and each of these requirements is a manifestation of some subset of those assumptions. And, in the case of the companies tied to this article, they have to already be employed.

Changing these assumptions is amazingly hard to do, because their existence represents a cultural problem, not a knowledge problem. This would be like a company trying to make money solving racism when most everyone in society is a racist. It is incredibly hard to do; people will go bankrupt rather than give up what they've believed all their lives.

I'm reminded a number of months ago of a post you made in reply to one of mine where you discussed the cultural implications of quitting a permanent salaryman position in Japan; you pointed out that anyone who does this will likely never find themselves as more than a contractor ever again. This is really just a different manifestation of the same basic cultural bias; if you are unemployed, our cultural mores dictate that this should reflect badly upon you. If there is a solution to this problem here, I think it would have to look similar to the solution to Japan's bias toward unemployed salarymen.

But, I could be wrong about this; in fact, I'd like to be wrong. It would provide me additional faith in the resiliency of humanity. I just can't see us being that ruthlessly introspective without something far more horrible than high unemployment to motivate us.

And the applicants come in, just out of university, never had a job, have never even heard of ProductX, and have no experience........ what are you to do? I mean, if they put in a good cover letter explaining that they recognize that they don't seem to match the qualifications, but explaining why they want a shot at an interview, or something like that, fine.... but they don't.

They hit monster.com or whatever, look for "sysadmin" or "IT" anywhere in the text and then spam out resumes with complete disregard for the requirements.

Sending out 300 resumés in a month is the wrong strategy, as it shows you don't care about the posting. If you are willing to invest that little effort, you are basically playing a lottery against all the other people doing the same thing. You are far better off being selective and persistant. If instead of sending out 75 resumes a week, you spend a concerted effort on applying to a couple postings - and doing more than just sending your resume, I'm sure you'll have better results.