An article in the New York Times recently talks about a strange national phenomena that I haven't seen before in my working career.  Some employers seeking qualified candidates are refusing to consider those applicants who are un-employed.

The only quasi rationale that I can think of as to why employers or contracted recruiters would refuse to consider an un-employed candidate would be to limit the size of the response to an advertised open position.  I can imagine that it must be overwhelming for a recruiter to sift through potentially hundreds of resumes, especially for lower skilled jobs. However, we've had high un-employment before, and working in the Human Capital side of the corporate business now for a long time, I have never seen nor heard of filtering out the un-employed from potential applicants before now.

It's extraordinary.

It's also incredibly stupid.

I recall the early days of the AIDS crisis, when no one knew from whence AIDS came, or how it was communicated from one to another.  Contracting the dreaded disease was not only a death sentence, but everybody and anybody ran to the hills to get away from those who had the disease.  Now, it seems like un-employment has become a disease, and the people afflicted are being shunned by a significant segment of the employing population.  As if, somehow, you can 'catch' the un-employment contagion, and wind up stricken with that awful malaise, by coming into contact with those who already have it.

I'll go out on a limb here and make an unsubstantiated but likely accurate claim:  Every single corporation in the United States has it's fair share of corporate dead-wood.  Corporate dead-wood is a worker who is ineffective, or barely effective, who chief skill is manipulating their co-workers to perform their jobs for them.  I like to call these people corporate wallpaper.  They come to the office, camouflage themselves into the wall paper, and emerge at the end of the day ready to go home. 

I think recruiters may be assuming that if you've been laid off from your job, that by default you are dead-wood that has been flushed out.  The bad news is that there is still plenty of gainfully employed dead-wood out there in corporate America, and many of those who are out of work are not dead-wooders. 

Those recruiters, and the Human Resource managers and executives who encourage the practice of excluding un-employed applicants are the ones who should be at the top of the list to be chopped during the next Reduction In Force (RIF) cycle at their respective firms.  They are stupid morons and likely corporate dead-wood in their own right.  The correct recruiting attitude, and the right recruiting practice during hard economic times like these, is to seize an extraordinary opportunity to flush out the useless corporate drones, and grab the best of the best while they are available, and relatively cheap.

If I were in a position to hire, I'd be more interested in the candidate who was unemployed, because if chosen well, that person is far more likely to work their ass off for their new employer than someone who is gainfully employed, and shopping around for an exit.
 
Stupid is as stupid does in an alarmingly Stupid Nation.