Unemployed?Reasons why companies won't hire you

Have you seen a job posting that declared, along with a need to have a degree and experience doing x, y, and z, that candidates must be employed? Why would companies do that? Here are some of the reasons companies prefer the already employed over the unemployed. 1. The preference for hiring the already employed has gone on for years and years. The difference was, it used to be that very few people were unemployed. Because unemployment was low, there was more of a possibility that if you were unemployed, you were at fault. It’s always been easier to find a job when you have a job. This is why I advise people to stick it out at a job until they have a new one, unless the current job is so awful that staying there is a danger to health (mental or physical) or safety. 2. Hiring is really difficult so companies use “alternatives” to help them. College or graduate degrees are really nothing more than proxies for knowledge, perseverance, and enough social skills to not get kicked out. Employers assume that your school was capable of telling if you were qualified for a degree, so they trust the school’s evaluation of you. Because it’s really hard to tell how you’ll perform on the job, hiring managers look and see that another company values your work enough to continue to employ you. If you don’t have a job, it’s like not having a degree. It doesn’t mean you aren’t capable, it’s just another proxy. 3. Stereotypes are alive and well. We’ve all seen the stories about people being fired for sleeping on the job, stealing or being rude to customers. Somehow our psyches seem to think that those are the only reasons people lose jobs. Even people who have been laid off in the past somehow think that they were the exceptions, not the rule. Unemployed=big problem, so you’re not taken into consideration. It doesn’t matter how high unemployment is, this stereotype persists. 4. Companies are flooded with applicants. The rising unemployment rate means that more and more people are trying to get any job. Companies don’t like to hire people who want any job. They want to hire people who want this job. One way of cutting through the applicants is to eliminate the any job candidates, and these are most likely to be the unemployed. 5. Skills do deteriorate without use. Some jobs are more skill heavy than others. Some have higher learning curves than others. Companies want people who need the smallest amount of training possible. Even though companies do have some logical (and some illogical) reasons for excluding the unemployed, they do run into problems. When specifically asked about what tips the balance between two job candidates with limited job experience, HR professionals preferred candidates who held an unpaid volunteer position or internship directly in the candidate’s career field (70 percent) over experience in a paid job that may not be directly in the candidate’s career field (30 percent). This reinforces the value that employers place on direct experience and relevant skills. Finding a job is never easy, and in an economy with high unemployment, it’s even more difficult. But, don’t assume that because you’re unemployed you’ll never find work again. Many people can benefit from making some changes in how they approach their job hunts. Which of the 5 reasons do you think is holding you back from being employed?