A shameful hiring policy

I already knew that every time I submitted a resume to a company, it would be competing against numerous other worthy candidates. What I didn't know (although suspected) was that I also was competing against myself.

A new CNN report shows that some companies are immediately discarding resumes from unemployed applicants. If it's true, that is a shameful hiring policy. How dare these companies turn away from willing applicants who have the audacity to seek a job. How dare they force us to trudge through the unemployment line, accepting welfare checks when all we want is a decent-paying job with a side of health care benefits.

"Making that kind of automatic cut is senseless; you could be missing out on the best person of all," said Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project. "There are millions of people who are unemployed through no fault of their own. If an employer feels that the best qualified are the ones already working, they have no appreciation of the crisis we're in right now."

I couldn't agree more. It makes you wonder how many applications were immediately chucked in the trash because the resumes don't include a current job. I seemed to have solved that problem by freelancing for the Tribune-Review and working as a census enumerator. However, I'm beginning to wonder if that U.S. Census Bureau position is a red flag that I'm without a full-time job.

Some think we should boycott the companies that use this practice, but who knows which employers are doing it? Most of us send our resumes into the tubes of internet, never to be heard from again. It's becoming increasingly clear that the cards are stacked against the unemployed. Unfortunately, it's worse than I previously thought.