The Help-Wanted Sign Comes With a Frustrating Asterisk
Screengrabs for online job listings that are aimed at currently employed workers.
The New York Times
By CATHERINE RAMPELL Published: July 25, 2011
The unemployed need not apply.
That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.
A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.
Unemployed workers have long suspected that the gaping holes on their résumés left them less attractive to employers. But with the country in the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, many had hoped employers would be more forgiving.
“I feel like I am being shunned by our entire society,” said Kelly Wiedemer, 45, an information technology operations analyst who said a recruiter had told her that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.
Legal experts say that the practice probably does not violate discrimination laws because unemployment is not a protected status, like age or race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a hearing [ http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/meetings/2-16-11/index.cfm ], though, on whether discriminating against the jobless might be illegal because it disproportionately hurts older people and blacks.
Given that the average duration of unemployment today is nine months — a record high — limiting a search to the “recently employed,” much less the currently employed, disqualifies millions.
“It is really a buyer’s market for employers right now,” said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute. One consequence is that the long-term unemployed will rack up even more weeks of unemployment, Mr. Holzer said, and will find it harder to make the transition back to work [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/business/economy/03unemployed.html ].
Even if Congress passed a measure forbidding companies from making current employment a requirement for job applicants, companies could still simply decide not to hire people who are out of work. Discrimination would be difficult to prove.
After all, there are legitimate reasons that many long-term unemployed workers may not be desirable job candidates. In some cases they may have been let go early in the recession, not just because business had slowed, but because they were incompetent.
Idle workers’ skills may atrophy, particularly in dynamic industries like technology. They may lose touch with their network of contacts, which is important for people in sales. Beaten down by months of rejection and idleness, they may not interview well or easily return to a 9-to-5 schedule.
“We may be seeing what’s called statistical discrimination,” said Robert Shimer, a labor economist at the University of Chicago. “On average, these workers might be less attractive, and employers don’t bother to look more closely to pick out the good ones.”
Employers receive so many applications for each opening that some may use current employment status as an easy filter. In some cases — as with Ms. Wiedemer, of Westminster, Colo. — recruiters merely assume employers do not want jobless workers.
“Clients don’t always tell us ‘we don’t want to see résumés from unemployed workers,’ but we can sense from what people have interested them in the past that they’re probably looking for somebody who’s gainfully employed, who’s closer to the action,” said Dennis Pradarelli, a talent acquisition manager for Marbl, a recruiting firm in Brookfield, Wis. Many of the job ads [ http://www.marblconsultants.com/index.php?searchword=employed&ordering=newest&searchphrase=all&limit=50&option=com_search ] posted by his firm seek workers who are “currently employed or only recently unemployed.”
Many firms that are not intentionally screening out the unemployed may still disqualify such applicants for having bad credit histories [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/business/07credit.html ] after having fallen behind on the bills — which they of course need a job to pay.
It’s not clear what can be done to pull workers out of this unemployment trap.
Government incentives for companies to hire unemployed workers have met with limited success. One such tax incentive from last year [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/checking-in-on-the-job-creation-tax-credit/ ] was poorly publicized, so most employers did not know about it. Better publicity may not suffice, either. An experiment [ http://www.jstor.org/pss/2523540 ] from the 1980s found that telling companies that the unemployed were eligible for generous wage subsidies actually made employers less likely to hire such workers.
Job counselors often encourage the long-term unemployed to go back to school or volunteer to demonstrate that they are still productive, engaged members of society. But absent the actual acquisition of marketable skills — which many retraining programs do not provide [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/us/06retrain.html ] — it’s not clear such efforts improve the chances of being hired.
“Mentally, it may be good for the candidate, but I think companies are still in a position to say ‘O.K., we’re looking for a candidate with the most up-to-date skills,’ ” Mr. Pradarelli said. “If you’ve been out of pocket for two years, going back to school sounds nice, but it doesn’t make or break the situation.”
The best solution, economists say, would be to encourage job growth more broadly, which may initially involve poaching people from other companies but could eventually draw even the least desirable workers back into jobs. During the boom years of the late ’90s, the labor market was so tight that ex-convicts had relatively little trouble finding work.
In the meantime, people like Ms. Wiedemer — who has been out of work for three years — are exhausting their benefits and piecing together what support they can from food stamps and family members. And they are stuck hoping that economic growth manages to outpace their own descent into permanent economic exile.
“I worry that unemployment may eventually come down, not because older workers who have been unemployed for a year or two find jobs,” Professor Shimer said, “but because older workers finally give up and drop out of the labor force.”
Long-Term Unemployed Discriminated Against in Hiring
By: David Dayen Tuesday July 26, 2011 9:35 am
The long-term unemployed have several disadvantages in this economy. First, with the high unemployment rate, they have substantial competition for finding work. Second, their benefits are always on the verge of running out, as state legislators try to trim them back and federal lawmakers try to stop the extensions. What’s more, at 99 weeks benefits run out for good. Over 2 million Americans have reached that number of jobless weeks.
A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.
Unemployed workers have long suspected that the gaping holes on their résumés left them less attractive to employers. But with the country in the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, many had hoped employers would be more forgiving.
“I feel like I am being shunned by our entire society,” said Kelly Wiedemer, 45, an information technology operations analyst who said a recruiter had told her that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.
Legal experts say that the practice probably does not violate discrimination laws because unemployment is not a protected status, like age or race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a hearing, though, on whether discriminating against the jobless might be illegal because it disproportionately hurts older people and blacks.
Kevin Drum writes that this is traditionally more common [ http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/07/long-term-unemployment-trap ], that having a long gap of no employment on your resume is always a warning sign for employers. But in a world where the average unemployment stint lasts nearly 40 weeks, this is an enormous problem. There are millions of people being discriminated against, many of them perfectly able to work but shut out of the system. And now employers are making their bias against them well-known.
This leaves behind an entire generation of workers, millions of people ground up by the Lesser Depression, unable to gain employment. The only way this stops is through a surge in hiring, so the long-term unemployed cannot be shut out. Surely there will be a massive public works program included in the bill to raise the debt limit. Our policymakers aren’t this heartless.
It is hard to recall a time when it was tougher to find a job. Fully two years after the official end of the recession, unemployment is at 9.2 percent. Job creation has stalled. Making things even more difficult, many employers, staffing agencies and online job-posting firms are expressly screening out applicants who are unemployed, apparently as an expedient to cull résumés, or on the presumption that the unemployed are poor performers.
The last thing America’s job-seekers need are policies that require them to have a job in order to get a job. Rejecting the unemployed is also bad economics because it casts aside qualified workers who could perhaps perform jobs sooner or better than already employed candidates.
A bill introduced this month in the House would fix the problem, but with Congress bent on slashing the budget even as joblessness worsens, it faces an uphill battle.
The Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011 [ http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h2501/text ], sponsored by Democrats Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Henry Johnson Jr. of Georgia, would prohibit employers and employment firms from rejecting applicants solely because they are unemployed. It would also make it illegal to state in job advertisements that jobless workers will not be considered.
The bill is as important for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. It does nothing to dictate an employer’s ultimate decision. Instead, it focuses more narrowly on recruiting and hiring, by ensuring that jobless workers are not arbitrarily kept out of the pool of candidates.
The result is a balance between the needs of workers to pursue jobs and of employers to make hiring choices based on relevant criteria like experience and education.
The bill has 30 Democratic co-sponsors in the House and no Republican supporters — so far. It also does not yet have, and clearly needs, a champion in the Senate. With joblessness being the economy’s No. 1 problem, is it really asking too much for lawmakers to move on a targeted piece of legislation that could do some good while doing no harm?
In New Jersey, employers are no longer allowed to specify in classified ads that only employed candidates will be considered. New York and Michigan have weighed the idea, and similar legislation has been introduced in Congress. But in most of the country, it is still legal to say, in effect, "unemployed need not apply" — and to discard a résumé because the applicant is not currently working. As an article [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/business/help-wanted-ads-exclude-the-long-term-jobless.html (first above)] in The New York Times on Tuesday pointed out, with the unemployment rate persistently high and 14 million Americans looking for work, such policies are likely to affect more people than ever before.
Should employers be allowed to give preference to candidates who are already working? Or should exclusion based on employment status be illegal, as it would be if a company barred candidates based on race, age, sex, etc.?
New study identifies stark racial gaps in funding of biomedical research
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff 08/18/2011 3:18 PM
Black scientists applying for grants from the nation’s premier underwriter of biomedical research are dramatically less likely to receive funds than their white counterparts, according to a new study revealing stark racial disparities at the highest levels of science.
The study, published today in the journal Science [ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1015 ], triggered immediate action to address and understand the root of the problem from top officials at the National Institutes of Health, the funding agency studied. The findings stunned Boston researchers, who said the results have implications that transcend the realms of science and medicine.
“That is incredibly alarming to me,” said Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers, division chief of trauma, burns, and surgical critical care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Black scientists who are competing for grants, he said, have already overcome many hurdles known to contribute to racial disparities in achievement. “Once you’ve broken those barriers, I think most Americans would believe the playing field would be level,” Rogers said. “If this is the elite, and you can find this achievement gap, what is it like for the rest of America?”
The gap between black and white scientists could not be explained by differences in training, the home institution of a researcher, the number of papers a scientist had written, or even their scientific influence, as measured by the number of times their work had been cited by other scientists. The bottom line remained: If 100 white scientists apply for a grant, about 30 would be likely to get one; if 100 black scientists applied, about 20 would be successful, the study found.
No difference was seen between whites and Hispanics in the study, which was led by a University of Kansas economist and the president of Grinnell College in Iowa. Researchers reviewed more than 80,000 grant applications submitted between 2000 and 2006. A small disadvantage in Asians’ success rates seemed to be explained by whether the scientists were US citizens, suggesting language ability might play a role.
“I’m an economist by training, and we believe there should be some rational explanation for why we observe differences in career outcomes -- differences in productivity … differences in educational background,” said Donna Ginther, the University of Kansas economist who led the study. “We kind of struck out.”
While the definitive causes of the funding disparity could not be determined, the study’s authors and other scientists suggested the gap could stem from subtle disadvantages that accrue over a lifetime of scientific training: slight differences in crucial mentoring and training, differences in minorities’ social networks, and unintentional biases. For example, black researchers were less likely to resubmit grants that were initially rejected -- a difference that suggests they might not have the encouragement or support to persist.
No one suggested explicit racism was a factor: The panels that decide who wins federal grants don’t have information about applicants’ race. They do have access to the names and institutions where researchers work, which could allow grant panels to make inferences about race or ethnicity.
“Younger people I’ve mentored have expressed a feeling of being shut out. … These are people who are trying to get started, dig their toes in, and they’re not invited to be on grants or in groups or institutes, or at least not at the same rate,” said Paula Hammond, a chemical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led a committee that produced a report on faculty diversity. “I think when people of color present work, or present papers, that work will often undergo a scrutiny that is not observed with others.”
The director of the NIH, Dr. Francis S. Collins, promised immediate action. He announced a new early career reviewer program, in which promising junior faculty, especially minorities, would be recruited to review grants. To get to the bottom of the difference, Collins proposed an experiment: One group of grant reviewers would be blinded to the name and institution of applicants while another group would receive that information. The results would then be examined to see if bias exists.
“Is it possible that an insidious form of bias is still present in our peer review system, and if so, what can we do about it?” Collins said in a press conference. “This situation is not acceptable.”
A growing body of literature has shown the ways in which unintentional, or implicit biases, may creep into society. One study showed that unconscious bias among doctors can influence treatment recommendations for patients with identical medical problems, depending on their race.
Dr. Joan Reede, dean for diversity and community partnership at Harvard Medical School, said it would be critical to drill down into the results to understand the root of the disparity. Reede is working on a project that looks in detail at factors such as researchers’ social networks – who their mentors are, who they publish papers with, what kind of institutional support researchers get -- to see if differences emerge between researchers of different race or gender.
The repercussions resound beyond biomedical research. Laurence Tabak, chairman of the NIH diversity task force, said he had already briefed other grant-giving government agencies on the findings.
But others said it was more than a problem of inequality; it affects the kinds of research that gets done.
“There’s a strong message for the rest of society in this -- there’s a lot of people who claim we’re color blind now,” said Scott Page, professor of complex systems at University of Michigan, who studies diversity within organizations. “You’d think science is fairly objective in the criteria they use, and things like race and ethnicity shouldn’ t be coming into play when looking at these grants -- and yet somehow that appears to be happening.”
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
