Image by Getty Images via @daylife
This shouldn’t be news to anyone who has found themselves job hunting over the past 3 years, but the New York Times recently posted an article highlighting the issue of what I like to call “employment discrimination”. Yes, companies will ignore or set aside unemployed applicants in favor of employed applicants. It was troubling during my own job hunt in 2009 and 2010, particularly as I was following the very sage advice of not jumping on just any opportunity that presented itself. But instead of remaining unemployed, I chose a proactive route of self employment through consulting. True, this placed me in the sorely overlooked “underemployed” bucket, but it showed that I was proactive about work, and did pay off well in the end.
Question to readers: Had you found yourselves in a similar situation, finding job postings and employers screening for employed candidates only? what, if anything, did you do to try getting around this qualification, and did it work?
Related articles
- Employers Still Ruling Out Jobless Applicants: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
- Discriminating Against the Unemployed (economix.blogs.nytimes.com)
- You: The Help-Wanted Sign Comes With a Frustrating Asterisk (nytimes.com)
