Are you unwittingly overlooking this group of qualified candidates?
How’s this for double jeopardy? You lose your job as a result of the Great Recession. You become desperate to pay the bills and take a stopgap job just to ride out the storm. Then, when the job market loosens a bit, prospective employers don’t want to hire you for a position at your former level — because you took that lower-level job.
A study by UCLA labor economics professor Till von Wachter, and economists Henry Farber of Princeton and Dan Silverman of Arizona State University revealed that the Great Recession is likely to blame for some strong candidates being overlooked today.
You know the deal: During the economic downturn, unemployed individuals with mid-level experience had to make hard decisions about which jobs to take. Many opted to accept lower-level positions just to get a paycheck, despite having the experience and expertise for a better job.
Factors Determining Callbacks to Job Applications by the Unemployed: An Audit Study, the researchers created 8,000 fake job candidate profiles and used them to apply to open positions.
The candidates were all portrayed as college educated with relevant experience. Some were unemployed, while others said they had recently taken lower-level jobs.
The result? About 10% of the jobless applicants were called back by employers. But only 8.5% of those with an interim low-level job got a callback.
Was pre-screening the cause?
“We do seem to find that employers don’t like blemishes,” such as low-level jobs, on resumes, said von Wachter in a recent story in USATODAY.
According to von Wachter, employers may have had reservations about the latter group after seeing the stopgap job.
Even worse, they could have conducted an automated pre-screening of the resumes, which would have weeded out these candidates before HR even saw their full resumes.
The researchers concede that the findings may not apply to many workers at higher levels, whose resumes employers often read more carefully.
Even so, the study brings up an interesting question: Is HR overlooking great potential candidates because they did what they had to do to make a living during a recession?
