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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

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Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#71

Post by mynewwork »

tptacek wrote: post #31
rfugger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 o…

Ironically, having a child is likely the best possible response to have for why you have a year gap in employment. For the all-male resumes used in this experiment, hr and hiring managers would be more likely to assume the gap was due to work-related reasons (lazy, unskilled, unintelligent, etc) as opposed to the socially accepted and positive reason of childbirth.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#72

Post by grimtrigger »

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

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#73

Post by jarek »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #62
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market doesn't punish the companies for irrational behavior when everyone engages in the same irrational behavior.

Why don't you engage in rational behavior and get rich?

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#74

Post by tptacek »

prostoalex wrote: post #16
tempaccount9473 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 go…

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…

I think this is likely to be a sleight of hand analysis on the HuffPo columnist's part. Firms with fewer than ten employees, which the column alludes to when talking about small businesses, make up just 5% of employer firms. Census doesn't define "small business", and SBA defines it in the context of specific verticals, so that a small manufacturer might have 500 employees while a small law firm might have far fewer. Whatever the case, firms with 500+ employees represent by far the largest segment of all employer firms, by just about 3x the number of employees of any other bracket.

(Caveat: I may be misreading some of this.)

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#75

Post by rayiner »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #62
rayiner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market doesn't punish the companies for irrational behavior when everyone engages in the same irrational behavior.

Why don't you engage in rational behavior and get rich?

There are people who have done precisely that in places like South Korea where there is very overt discrimination against educated women returning to the work force after their children are a little older. If I were starting my own firm that's exactly what I'd do (and some day, I might).

There are some places in New York that at least have the right idea (I don't know about the implementation): http://www.cravath.com/benefits ("We have an associate re-entry program that is designed to foster a connection between the Firm and those associates who leave the Firm for primarily family-related reasons... we hope that these former associates will consider returning to the Firm if they decide to practice law again.").

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#76

Post by sukuriant »

randomdata wrote: post #66
macspoofing wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 current…

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.

So you're saying this person or anyone should put on their resume, rather than

    [last position] [last company] [long time ago - 8 months ago]
they should put

    Personal Marketing Assistant    Me, Myself and I    8 months ago - Present
     * Analyzed potential job contracts with future employers
     * Bid for relevant contracts using specialized letters of qualifications
     * Proselytized Mr. John Do to applicable markets using word of mouth and print
       techniques

    [last position] [last company] [long time ago - 8 months ago]
?

Employers, how would you see this?

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#77

Post by pc86 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #25
bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

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 c…

>>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 easie…

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.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#78

Post by tptacek »

mynewwork wrote: post #71
tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Ironically, having a child is likely the best possible response to have for why you have a year gap in employment. For the all-male resumes used in this experiment, hr and hiring managers would be more likely to assume the gap was due to work-related reasons (lazy, unskilled, unintelligent, etc) as opposed to the socially accepted and positive reason of childbirth.

Is this an analysis the experiment actually did, or your presumption about how hiring managers view time taken off for child care?

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#79

Post by VLM »

enraged_camel wrote: post #25
bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

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 c…

>>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 easie…

"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.

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