"Looking for work? Unemployed need not apply"

http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/16/news/economy/unemployed_need_not_apply/index.htm?section=money_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_topstories+(Top+Stories)

"Employment experts say they believe companies are increasingly interested only in applicants who already have a job."

Actually, there is a sort of insidious yet undeniable logic to this. If you are actually working in hard economic times, it can be argued you must have something going for you, and by hiring someone who already has a job you are more likely to get a better employee.

Even employers realize a very good worker can lose his job through no fault of his own, and sometimes a real loser can still hang on to a job; but statistically, you are more likely to hire a winner if you restrict your search to those already working. all else being equal. Eliminating a few false negatives more than makes up for eliminating a lot of false positives. You can think of it as a sort of applicant prescreening paid for by the applicants (plus, you get a chance to stick it to a competitor!).

That's how profiling works. The practitioner gets a benefit, the victim gets screwed, and it's hard to prove anything happened. It has nothing to do with good or bad people, and I can't think of any way to intervene and correct this injustice. It's just a dynamic built into the system. It's better to be a hammer than a nail; the job market is a buyer's market from the get-go.

But of course, if you've ever been unemployed, or if you're an employer, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.