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« Parenthesis and verb pluralization | Main | SuperMegaSpeed Reviews »

Unemployed at the wrong time

There has been a lot of talk lately confirming that the longer you are unemployed, the harder it becomes to find a job. Matthew Yglesias takes a look at that and says that it makes sense from the point of view as the hiring manager.

Suppose you had to hire one of two candidates for a job, and you had to base the decision solely on a resume. No interview allowed. The resumes are identical, but one person lost her job in a mass layoff event last week, while the other lost her job in a mass layoff event a year ago. Who are you going to hire? If you're smart, you hire the woman who lost her job last week. You're being asked to make a decision based on very little information. By discriminating against the long-term unemployed candidate, you can in effect "outsource" your decision-making. Most likely [the woman that's been unemployed longer] has interviewed for several jobs since being laid off. If she's still unemployed, there's probably something wrong with her. What? You don't know. You don't have any evidence. But faced with the need to decide under conditions of severe uncertainty it's a sound heuristic.

The real world is more complicated than that, but not all that complicated. Your time as a manager is finite and valuable. You don't want to call back every resume that comes in over the transom. You set yourself a target quantity of "good" resumes you want to identify to call. Then you start your search by assuming that every single person who's been jobless for over a year doesn't withstand scrutiny upon interviewing, and just search for good resumes among the short-term jobless. If you hit your target, then you call those people. It's only if you don't hit your target that you start looking at the resumes of the long-term unemployed.

That's understandable, but i think it misses the main point. I know that there were some local governments considering weird laws banning the practice of discrimination based on time unemployed, and if Yglesias is pushing back on that, fine. But the reason Felix Salmon, Paul Krugman, and Megan McArdle (Yglesias refers to them) are discussing this issue isn't because of that. It's a debate about whether or not we need more stimulus to get the economy strong enough that even these long-term unemployed will be considered again. The point is that the economy is in a very slow recovery, and because it's so slow, it is leaving a lot of people behind. The debate is entirely academic at this point, unfortunately; i don't expect anyone in power to be proposing a new stimulus.

By fnord12 | April 23, 2013, 12:11 PM | Liberal Outrage