Finding a job candidate who looks great on paper is a solid first step to filling a position. But tossing aside the resume of an applicant whose last job wasn’t at the level you’d like could cause major players to slip through the cracks.
Finding a job candidate who looks great on paper is a solid first step to filling a position. But tossing aside the resume of an applicant whose last job wasn’t at the level you’d like could cause major players to slip through the cracks.
A study by UCLA labor economics professor Till von Wachter, and economists Henry Farber of Princeton and Dan Silverman of Arizona State University, revealed that the Great Recession is likely to blame for some strong candidates being overlooked today.
Many took a step down
During the economic downturn, unemployed individuals with mid-level experience had to make hard decisions about which jobs to take. Many opted to accept lower-level positions just to get a paycheck, despite having enough experience to do a higher-level job.
In the study, the researchers created 8,000 fake job candidate profiles and used them to apply to open positions.
The candidates were all portrayed as college educated with relevant experience. Some were unemployed, while others said they had recently taken low-level jobs.
Not many callbacks
Results showed that about 10% of the jobless applicants were called back by employers, whereas only 8.5% of those with an interim low-level job were called back.
According to von Wachter, employers may have had reservations about the latter group after seeing the stopgap job.
Even worse, they could have conducted an automated pre-screening of the resumes, which would have weeded out these candidates before HR even saw their full resumes.
