Employing the "employed?"

I was watching something on the news about the difficulties people are having with finding jobs.  One of the issues raised was the practice of employers/HR people wanting to hire only those individuals who are "currently employed."  This is not a new practice and it is one that I have always questioned.  Often, I think it is an issue of laziness.  Now we have an economy in which technical positions are vacant for lack of qualified applicants.  How can that be?  Most of hose positions were filled before the recession by someone and I am sure they did not all retire, given the billions of retirement funds lost in that period.  They are simply currently unemployed.   (Of course the other issue, albeit unspoken, is age discrimination, hidden by all sorts of reasoning.)

When I was in the business world, I usually preferred those who were currently unemployed. People are unemployed for many reasons. They are unhappy in their current jobs and looking for new jobs for fewer reasons, often related to money, promotional opportunities, etc.

One thought that often plagued me was that of a potential mismatch, i.e. selecting the wrong applicant.  Our employment needs were very different from the rest of the market and finding a good match often was a gamble based upon insight into the applicant's technical background and problem solving attributes.  Failure to perform in the positions often meant that employment would be short-lived.  When given a choice of equals, I would ask myself "which of the two applicants would be worse off if I failed to make the correct decision?  The one who was unemployed or the one who left gainful employment only to become unemployed?"

Too often the business of "employment" if still that of finding a round peg for a round hole.  Today, thanks to a constant and quickly changing world, round holes are few and far between.  Unfortunately, the transition from round pegs to malleable pegs based upon quality education has yet to fully materialize, but that's a subject for the future.


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