I’m not sure what you mean here. My argument was that while they called it ‘expectation of loyalty’, client poaching really isn’t about loyalty at all, and doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the topic of this thread.
I got hired yesterday and I think one of the main reasons was because I was unemployed and wanted the job so bad. I interviewed with the president and he said “hungry employees make the best employees”.
I can’t understand how the hell employers can’t have this thinking? I am so grateful and plan to work very hard to secure this position. I’m sure mostly anyone else in my position would do the same.
Congrats on the successful job hunt!
I think that companies have this idea because a desperately unemployed person will take any shit job that is thrown their way, and then begin immediately looking for something better.
Meanwhile, their performance at the current job suffers because they think that such things are beneath them.
Not that I am saying it applies to your situation, just the general thought. Best of luck in your new opportunity.
Good luck in your new position!
My main worry if this becomes a trend, what happens if there are 10 employers in the area and all 10 refuse to hire anybody who is not currently employed. WHat happens to the unemployed in the area? They have to move out and go elsewhere?
You know how freaking resistant people are to either moving or driving more than a few miles from home for employment?
Now extrapolate. What if literally every employer in the country were to decide to jump on the bandwagon and NO employer in the country would hire an unemployed person? [I know it is not likely that all 100% of businesses would refuse to hire unemployed, but bear with me for sake of argument. If you want to argue that it would never happen, go make your own damned thread.]
Would it not make more sense to only use temp agencies, and make all new hires come from the temp agency? That way if they are not working out, it isn’t difficult to fire them you just tell the temp agency they are not needed the next day.
And another thing this is just downright dumb. It seems most people are against this kind of policy on the basis that it’s illogical and very unsympathetic. The supposed “star” employee ain’t gonna go for it either.
Thank you jtgain and khadaji. And yeah that is a good point there I didn’t think of that. Lol
Everybody is overlooking one possibly crucial aspect of not hiring somebody who’s currently unemployed, and that is: Once you have done that, you have the superstar employee, and your competition doesn’t, and has to go out and hire somebody else.
When I ran a business, I knew about every aspect of the business except one. I had to hire somebody for that position who really knew what they were doing. I wanted Jill, from a company I had once worked for, because I knew she knew that aspect of the job inside and out, but if not Jill, then somebody Jill recommended, from the people she knew who did the job. All of whom were employed. (Now, if Jill recommended someone who had recently become unattached, it would have been different. But I must emphasize recent.) The benefit being that I could take someone with the recent experience and contacts necessary, which would be important for that position, so they could hit the ground running, while at the same time dealing a minor blow to my competitors who might lose some ground, hopefully to ME, while getting someone else up to speed.
It’s nothing more than a way to cut down on the number of resumes they have to wade through–or at least to give them a fast way to cut out a big chunk of people. And it’s stupid, besides being assholish.
Being retained doesn’t necessarily make someone a superstar. They may still be employed because they’re entry-level and make half the amount of the guy who was laid off. Or they may be really good at kissing ass even if they’re not that good at their job.
And someone who’s happy at work and gets another offer is probably going to go to their current boss first and say, “Hey, I got this offer, I’m giving you a chance to match it.”
This sort of policy doesn’t necessarily mean there’s still going to be a job opening up somewhere. Plenty of places end up with open positions that they choose not to fill. So the people who work there get a little more work piled on them, an unemployed person remains unemployed, and a “superstar” who may just be a really good ass-kisser lands a new job. I don’t see it as much of a win.
Fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter how many employers are doing this. What matters is the unemployment rate. If the rate is steady or going up, then employers can play this game indefinitely and it is possible (though unlikely) that unemployed people will never be offered a job. But if unemployment is going down, then this becomes a game of musical chairs and eventually some employer will have a position that can’t be filled by anyone already employed, because they all already gone to new jobs. So it will have to be filled by someone unemployed.
But you wanted to hire Jill for her ability, not refuse to hire anybody without a job. THe fact she was employed was immaterial, what was important was her skillset, not her current state of employment.
Yes it does matter. If everybody is accustomed and has made it company policy to not hire unemployed, then they will all be locked into the business form of never hiring unemployed, and will therefore NOT hire unemployed as nobody will want to be the first one to break their little HR law and hire an unemployed person.
I like how you posit a scenario that involves lots of people acting against their own self-interest and then pre-emptively tell scoffers to fuck off.
I especially like how (sh)he posted that AFTER the arguments against the point had already been made earlier in the thread. Nice touch! 
And current HR practice makes sense?
I have gone for job interviews where the HR person came out and admitted they had absolutely no idea what the job I was interviewing for entailed, r if I could actually do the job or not. They were simply filling a requisition. What I should have been interviewed by is the person who actually NEEDED me and knew what the damned job entailed, and if I was actually able to do the damned job.
Now does it make sense to have someone blindly hire someone randomly because they liked what they were wearing and the school they went to, or to hire someone that can actually do the job?
Now what is the difference between that really absurd form of hiring, and deciding to only hire employed people … they will not change their hiring practice to something that makes sense. So as I aid, if every damned employer in the area refuses to hire unemployed, then how the fuck does someone who is unemployed get hired??
No, actually, it was significant. She had the knowledge of how the job was done right then, in that market, she had the contacts, etc. It was significant. It wasn’t the most significant thing, and I would have considered someone doing the job who had the skills if they were unemployed, but only if they hadn’t been unemployed for long. Someone who had been out of the market for more than six months just wouldn’t have worked–or anyway I, with my lack of knowledge of what the job entailed, couldn’t have been sure they would have known what they were doing. If I stole them from somebody else, then I could have been sure.
I like how you say “so as I said” and then say something completely different than what you said before.
Unfortunately, the second paragraph has too much truth in it. Unless the entire company gets let go - or there is some sort of contractual seniority system - you don’t get rid of your top performers. And if the entire company goes, the top performers in a field usually have connections and aren’t sending out blind resumes. So, if you are looking for a top performer, your chances of finding them in a stack of resumes of people currently unemployed are pretty slim.
And there are employees significantly better or worse than other employees. I do project management. There are people I’m delighted to have on a team - and teams I know from looking at my resource list we might as well set the schedule out six months, hire expensive consultants and double the budget and call the project toast from day one. If I’m the one making layoff decisions - who goes? If I’m the one looking to hire, who do I hire?
The problem is that unless HR asks the applicant, they don’t know why the applicant is unemployed, nor do they know why the applicant is sending out blind resumes. And companies DO dump talented staff when they’re under pressure to cut costs. Don’t discount the shortsightedness of bean counters.
Consider a few situations I’ve been in.
Situation 1: Company opened a satellite office in a remote location and staffed it with new hires recruited from the community. Thanks to sheer bad luck (tech bubble burst) and impatient management, the company decided to close the satellite office. They already had plenty of staff at the main office, so there was no incentive to transfer people from the satellite office to the main office. Everyone was let go without regard to skill set or potential value to the company. In this case, the company as a whole didn’t close and a dozen people were laid off for reasons unrelated to their performance (and my “contacts” didn’t help me).
Situation 2: Small development shop with one big client (“BigCo”) and a few small clients. Staff was driven primarily by BigCo’s project needs. BigCo pulled its development work in-house. The development shop couldn’t bring in new business (thanks, tech bubble!) and laid off anyone who wasn’t working on one of the smaller clients’ projects. Again, the company had nowhere to put the talented people who weren’t already working on those other projects while they scouted out new business.
Situation 3: Big contract employer with lots of clients all over the US. Got themselves a 5-year contract to provide on-site service to a client in the middle of nowhere. Client wanted bodies on-site 7am-5pm Monday-Friday and available to come in evenings and weekends, so they hired locally to fill the positions. Five years later, the contract wasn’t renewed. The company didn’t have any immediate openings for people with my skill set. Yes, it would have been in their best interests to string me along until they needed someone to do what I do, but it simply was their policy to not do that.
Maybe things are different for sale reps, project managers, and other staff who are directly responsible for generating revenue. DBAs, developers, and other support-type staff tend to be seen as much more expendable.
But the point is that if there are more job openings than employed people, which is the case in the scenario where unemployment is decreasing, then one company will have to hire an unemployed person. Mathematically, there’s no other way.
While it is true that companies occasionally use layoffs as an excuse to get rid of deadwood, sometimes they may just cut out entire departments in a tough economy, which has happened in my industry. You could be the best person for your particular job, but if the company needs to make some cuts and feels that it can get by without the job that you do, you’re going to end up on the street.