The Equity Factor

White House: More Than 300 Companies Will Reform Hiring to Help Long-Term Unemployed

The president, along with more than 300 U.S. companies, announced a new initiative to revamp hiring practices to help the long-term unemployed.

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The government likes to talk about how the country is slowly but surely rebounding from the recession, and it’s true that unemployment has dropped modestly from month to month. But whenever the Department of Labor releases jobs numbers, many politicians are quick to gloss over the long-term unemployed.

Here’s a nasty conundrum: The longer you’re out of work, the harder it is to find it. If you’ve been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, you fall under the “long-term unemployed” moniker. The most recent jobs report found that 3.9 million Americans face long-term unemployment, accounting for 37.7 percent of the 10.4 million unemployed. Roughly 2.6 million Americans have been looking for work for over a year, according to the White House.

Last Friday, President Obama launched an initiative with some of the country’s biggest corporations — Apple, Walmart, Ford and General Motors — to reform their hiring practices, which generally discriminate against the long-term unemployed. More than 300 companies have joined the initiative.

“It’s a cruel Catch-22,” Obama told reporters after a meeting at the White House on Friday. “The longer you’re unemployed, the more unemployable you may seem. This is an illusion, but it’s one that, unfortunately, we know statistically is happening out there.”

Recent research found that the “callback” rate drops as the length of unemployment grows. For applicants with comparable resumes, callbacks were 45 percent lower for those unemployed for eight months than those unemployed for just one, according to the White House.

No projections exist as to exactly how many Americans this initiative will affect, but the willingness of so many companies to work on best practices for hiring, screening and recruiting is huge. Moreover, the average duration of unemployment is 37.1 weeks. Think that’s bad? It’s a slight improvement from the end of 2012, when it stood at 38 weeks, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Of course, there wasn’t a huge, magical net gain in jobs Friday. In the long term, however, the compliance of employers could help those who have been out of work the longest find a job.

The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Bill Bradley is a writer and reporter living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Deadspin, GQ, and Vanity Fair, among others.

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Tags: jobsequity factorbarack obama

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