You can change the context, but you can’t change human nature

Today’s New York Times has an interesting story about employer bias about long-term unemployed. It’s a cruel Catch-22: not having a job in itself becomes a top barrier to getting one.

Economists have long thought that the strain of unemployment, plus the erosion of skills and loss of contacts that naturally occur, helps explain the “structural” unemployed in a nation’s work force. But new evidence shows that bias plays a much larger role than previously thought. Some of the long-term unemployed might never find work because businesses simply refuse to hire them.

In a recent study, Rand Ghayad a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, sent out 4,800 dummy résumés to job postings. Those résumés that were supposedly from recently unemployed applicants with no relevant experience were more likely to elicit a call for an interview than those supposedly from experienced workers out of a job for more than six months. Indeed, the callback rate for the long-term jobless ranged from just 1 to 3 percent, versus 9 to 16 percent for newly unemployed workers.

Unemployment becomes a “sorting criterion,” in the words of a separate study with similar findings. It found that being out of a job for more than nine months decreased interview requests by 20 percent among people applying to low- or medium-skilled jobs.

While the story presents this trend as a new phenomenon, I always assumed this to be the case; it’s easier to find a new job when you don’t need it.

Apparently, the conventional wisdom goes back further than I thought. Just yesterday I came across an uncannily relevant passage in E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel “Howard’s End.”

Again the Olympian laugh, and the lowered voice. “Naturally the man who’s in a situation when he applies stands a better chance, is in a stronger position, that the man who isn’t. It looks as if he’s worth something. I know by myself—(this is letting you into the State secrets)—it affects an employer greatly. Human nature, I'm afraid.”

Or as David Byrne might put it, same as it ever was.