Pools, sun, beaches, and beers. Summertime. Whoever said “the livin’ was easy”…was wrong, dammit! (RIP, Bradley)

Summer is stressful! Birthdays, family outings, and weddings take up almost every weekend, not even mentioning graduations (which I thankfully had none of this year). Maybe I’m just making excuses for my lack of blogging lately (Big Brother review extravaganza, to come!), but summer is both rad and sad. Rad, as we lay in the sun burning and drinking Coronas, and sad because when August comes and goes, we still always seem to have plenty of things on our summer to-do lists. Ahh, maybe next year..

And I started a new job a few weeks ago! Work really seems to get in the way of my summer socializing and already hectic weekending. FUNemployment had me quite spoiled, I do suppose. Which brings me to the point of this very extended rambling:

This article states that some companies are, wait for it, not hiring unemployed candidates! “Will not consider anyone NOT currently employed,” some listings say. Outrageous!

Sergey Novoselov reports:

“We try to minimize the amount of time we spent on selection of candidates and typically go after people who are happy where they are and tell them about new opportunities”, one of the HR representatives said. According to the recent information from the Labor Department, there are about 5 1/2 applicants for every open position.

Recently a large electronics manufacturer also posted an ad for a marketing position stating that “No unemployed candidates will be considered.” Later they called it a mistake and removed the notice. This type of job ads are easy to find online, they may say e.g. “must be currently employed.”

I rocked the unemployment casbah for quite some time. With the difficult economy and lack of hiring taken into consideration, I still had other discriminating factors against me.  The fact that I was finishing up a degree as a part-time Grad student prevented me from getting a few positions because companies were worried that I’d be frazzled and fractured. Even my suburban location prevented me from pinning down one position – the manager even told me so outright. But now this?

Every unemployed citizen has factors like these already working against them – families, school schedules, freelance work, and other various obligations all seem to make it harder to fit into a company’s mold. Finding the right position position is already hard enough.

“The decision of some companies to avoid unemployed candidates and re-use the existing workforce is further contributing to long-term unemployment. It also ignores the effect of the economic downturn on millions of highly-skilled workers who lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Obviously these employers are not only shortsighted, but they are also not good corporate citizens of our communities,” writes Novoselov.

And hear, hear!

On that note – It’s time for me to stop blogging during work hours…at least for now.

Thanks to Vanessa for the link!