Does Unemployed Really Equal Unemployable?

Do you remember the study that came out about six weeks ago that found that unemployed people are less employable than still-employed people?  The study was done by UCLA and SUNY–Stony Brook (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/out-of-work-your-resume-is-no-199510.aspx).

In my first post in this blog I asserted that, “…in today’s awful economy, there is no shame, no stigma, in the fact that it can take a long time to find a job.”  But if you accept the results of this study, unemployment does carry a stigma that makes unemployed job candidates seem less desirable than employed ones. 

I’ve been troubled by these findings and wanted to learn more about the study itself.  So I found UCLA’s original press release (see the link above) and read their description of the study.  Now that I’ve read it, I’m not at all persuaded by this study’s findings – or at least, by its findings as they were presented in the media.  Here’s why.

Who are the people who evaluate job applicants today?  They are in-house human resources staff or recruiters/agencies that assist businesses with screening and selection of job candidates.  These professionals, however, were not the people whose attitudes were assessed in this study.

According to the UCLA press release, the researchers “…recruited a random cross-section of Americans over the Internet and had them appraise fictitious job candidates.”  Why?  No doubt few of these random people were HR professionals.  It’s the HR staffs and recruiters whose attitudes matter when it comes to evaluating job candidates.  Why should we care what random people, who likely aren’t involved in applicant screening and hiring decisions, think?  How is this relevant?

The researchers must have recognized that their subject selection would be criticized.  As noted in the press release, “Moving forward, the UCLA-Stony Brook team…plan(s) to sample human relations professionals to determine whether they share the same prejudices as the general public.”  Why weren’t these the people studied in the first place?  Maybe then the results would actually have been meaningful.

The only conclusion you can legitimately draw from this study is that randomly selected Internet users view unemployed job applicants as inferior to employed job-seekers. 

The results of this study have been widely promulgated and only serve to make unemployed people feel like our situation is hopeless.  Unless I’m missing something, though, this study tells us nothing about how actual hiring professionals view unemployed vs. employed job candidates.  So even though that’s how this study’s been portrayed, it does not mean that. 

In this economy, we have enough challenges to deal with without viewing the very fact of our unemployment as an insurmountable obstacle to employment!