Kicking the Unemployed

People are quick to judge, quick to condemn, quick to write off. I read (and teach) about looking for work in the age of the myth of privacy, warn of the dangers of expressing yourself in social media and how people (read employers) will move on with little provocation. And now I'm hearing that some employers and recruiters won't consider candidates who are unemployed, which is bullshit, believing that they are somehow tainted or use quill pens and churn their own butter.

And yes, I take this a bit personally as a victim (along with 40 others) of a lay-off myself in 2009. I knew the quality of the people who were sacked along with me and there wasn't one that would have been let go if the greed of corporate America hadn't forced it. I decided to start my own business and hopefully have a bit more control (insert laughter here) but I know that many of my friends had difficulty finding new work, several were even forced to leave advertising. And my group was just the beginning. At the end my former employer laid off more than a hundred others. 

Not considering a candidate simply because they fell victim to an almost unprecedented economic crisis is short-sighted and really just idiotic. I must confess to a bit of schadenfreude (look it up) when an HR manager, who once told me she had to "strip the deadwood" from a large workforce because they cost too much, was laid off from a very large corporation last year. I don't wish that on anyone but my hope is that she finds a new job and becomes a lot more empathetic.

The EEOC is looking into the legality of this practice and while I don't know if the policy is illegal I hope the threat of investigation will cause employers to think twice about ignoring the out of work. And then I'm disgusted because threat of a lawsuit will have to do this instead of simply being a little bit human.