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“The job situation has NOT improved here in the U.S. We're just hiding some really desperate and scared people in part- time jobs (sometimes more than one) or in low-wage temp work which often goes by the more dignifying, less pejorative aliases of "contract" or "consulting" work. And then there are the jobs that pay no salary at all. No, I'm not talking about internships, which are also on the rise, but commission-only positions like the thousands created by [COMPANY REDACTED], where sales reps make 5% commission and work 60 hours a week just to put food on the table. Don't even get me started on adjunct instructor positions in universities (the new sweat shops).” “ … I have worked my way through a random sample of 514 industry recruiters. This represents a small portion of my 6,500 LinkedIn connections, which is a percentage of the total number of recruiters whose connection I sought. Two hundred and eighty-seven of the 514 recruiters (56%) accepted my LinkedIn invitation. Of the 287 with whom I connected, 53 (18%) replied to a message seeking assistance and outlining my value to an organization. Of the 53 who replied to my message, 22 requested a résumé (42%). (By now this 22 represents 4% of the recruiters to whom I reached out). Of the 22 who requested a résumé, 8 had a specific position in mind based on my message or LinkedIn profile. Future updates to this data will be posted.” Response to Deloitte Report on Long-Term Unemployed: A Return to Substance Deloitte Consulting in collaboration with The Rockefeller Foundation presents to the business community the case for hiring the long-term unemployed (i.e., persons out of work at least 27 weeks) in its Employer Guide to Recruit and Hire Long-Term Unemployed. This is a noble and necessary purpose, and one in which I have a great personal stake. You see, I am a senior member of the LTU -- 2 1/2 years and counting. Throughout my unemployment, I applied to hundreds of jobs nationwide, followed up with HR professionals, and messaged over 4,000 healthcare industry recruiters who accepted invitations on LinkedIn (as well as professionals who would be my managers if I were employed in their organizations). I also read every feature article about, pertaining to, or concerning the unemployed. Some written by columnists and contributors. Some by economic policy experts. The one thing most of them have in common: they just don't get it. The architects of Deloitte's recommendations to the business community and The White House, while having a handle on some of the outrageous challenges facing the LTU, are really no exception.

Response to Deloitte Report on Long Term Unemployed

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“The job situation has NOT improved here in the U.S. We're just hiding some really desperate and scared people in part-time jobs (sometimes more than one) or in low-wage temp work which often goes by the more dignifying, less pejorative aliases of

"contract" or "consulting" work. And then there are the jobs that pay no salary at all. No, I'm not talking about internships, which are also on the rise, but commission-only

positions like the thousands created by [COMPANY REDACTED], where sales reps make 5% commission and work 60 hours a week just to put food on the table. Don't even get me started on adjunct instructor positions in universities (the new sweat

shops).”

“ … I have worked my way through a random sample of 514 industry recruiters. This represents a small portion of my 6,500 LinkedIn connections, which is a percentage of the total number of recruiters whose connection I sought. Two hundred and eighty-seven of the 514 recruiters (56%) accepted my LinkedIn invitation. Of the 287 with whom I connected, 53 (18%) replied to a message seeking assistance and outlining my value to an organization. Of the 53 who replied to my message, 22 requested a résumé (42%). (By now this 22 represents 4% of the recruiters to whom I reached

out). Of the 22 who requested a résumé, 8 had a specific position in mind based on my message or LinkedIn profile. Future updates to this data will be posted.”

Response to Deloitte Report on Long-Term Unemployed: A Return to Substance

Deloitte Consulting in collaboration with The Rockefeller Foundation presents to the business community the case for hiring the long-term unemployed (i.e., persons out of work at least 27 weeks) in its Employer Guide to Recruit and Hire Long-Term Unemployed. This is a noble and necessary purpose, and one in which I have a great personal stake. You see, I am a senior member of the LTU -- 2 1/2 years and counting. Throughout my unemployment, I applied to hundreds of jobs nationwide, followed up with HR professionals, and messaged over 4,000 healthcare industry recruiters who accepted invitations on LinkedIn (as well as professionals who would be my managers if I were employed in their organizations). I also read every feature article about, pertaining to, or concerning the unemployed. Some written by columnists and contributors. Some by economic policy experts. The one thing most of them have in common: they just don't get it. The architects of Deloitte's recommendations to the business community and The White House, while having a handle on some of the outrageous challenges facing the LTU, are really no exception.

ContentsABOUT THE AUTHOR...................................................................................................................................3

WHO REMOVED THIS REPORT FROM THE FEDERAL SOUP FORUM?.......................................................3

A QUESTION OF COMMITMENT..............................................................................................................4

NO OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING HISTORY AND ETIOLOGY OF LTU...................4

CULTURE CHANGES: CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION.....................................................................................5

LABOR MARKET DIFFERENTIATION..........................................................................................................5

JOB PORTALS AND ONLINE JOB APPLICATIONS.......................................................................................6

HOW THE LTU IS ADVERSELY AFFECTED BY LINKEDIN.............................................................................8

THE LEGEND OF THE UNDERGROUND JOB MARKET...............................................................................8

VOLUME..................................................................................................................................................8

THE DISQUALIFICATION MODEL (AKA “KNOCKOUT SCREENING”)..........................................................9

SCREENING SOFTWARE AND APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEMS..............................................................10

RISE OF THE THIRD PARTY RECRUITER...................................................................................................11

EMPLOYER BIAS.........................................................................................................................................11

TITLE CONGRUENCY..............................................................................................................................12

BRANDING.............................................................................................................................................13

PAINT BY NUMBERS...............................................................................................................................13

THOU SHALL HAVE MANAGED A LARGE TEAM......................................................................................13

CREDENTIALISM: REMEMBER TO KEEP HOLY THE SEAL OF APPROVAL................................................14

ADVERSE EVENTS...................................................................................................................................16

I AM THE CERTIFICATE THY SEAL OF APPROVAL. THOU SHALL NOT HAVE FALSE IDOLS BEFORE ME....17

TALES OF THE RECESSION..........................................................................................................................18

Absurd Job Interview 1..........................................................................................................................18

Absurd Job Interview 2..........................................................................................................................19

Absurd Job Interview 3..........................................................................................................................19

Absurd Job Interview 4..........................................................................................................................19

Absurd Job Interview 5..........................................................................................................................20

BJC HEALTHCARE: A CASE STUDY IN FITTING IN....................................................................................21

A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE FOR LABOR ANALYTICS & RESEARCH: WHAT WE NEED TO BE A LITTLE LESS ADHD.........................................................................................................................................................24

INTRODUCING A NEW UNIVERSITY TO BRIDGE THE CHASM BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND HIGHER EDUCATION...............................................................................................................................................26

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Some friends and associates have questioned the wisdom of engaging in a solo evaluation of a Guide compiled by a reputable team of professional consultants for the POTUS. Those close to me are concerned charges of arrogance will saddle my public persona and prolong my plight. Let it be known I'm a fairly humble man. If 2 1/2 years of unemployment don't humble you, nothing will. I've simply reached a point where it became necessary to take more control of my destiny, which in this case means assuming, or attempting to assume, a leadership role in how unemployment is perceived and perpetuated. And for our purposes here today that means calling attention to where the Guide's architects stray from the source material -- the so-called "reality on the ground" -- and why the analysis presented by Deloitte Consulting and embraced by The White House National Economic Council would likely fall short of its goals.

So bear in mind that the following is the compilation of a single out-of-work professional no employer wants. Hardly seems like a fair fight. But in my defense, I'm not just an educated member of the LTU, I also happen to be a social scientist. Or has Deloitte forgotten already (between contracting with the White House and writing the Guide) that a social science PhD can be unemployed for over 2 years? For those of you who do not know what a PhD in Social Psychology means -- and that's nearly the entire business community -- I'm trained in organizational behavior and development, institutional culture, small group dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and personality theory. Even more to the point, I am trained in research design and analysis, which includes the design, evaluation, administration, interpretation, and statistical analysis of surveys and questionnaires. I have held a range of related but distinguishable job titles, including management analyst, operations analyst, business analyst, research analyst, and data integration specialist. I have served the cause, mission, and business of health care from nearly every conceivable angle: as the founder and co-owner of a leading psychotherapy practice; as the inventor of a data integration, analysis, and reporting tool for cancer centers; and as a consultant to the Federal government's Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasure Enterprise. I created an original methodology that led to one of the most successful investigations into both an age-old mystery (i.e., why we dream) as well as the relationship between psychological and disease processes. I even worked as a senior researcher for the U.S. Department of Labor (specializing in the biotechnology and health care industries), so I am no stranger to workforce development. I’ve worked with physicians, government leaders, and captains of industry.

So why not talk to someone like me? What can a Ph.D. social scientist unemployed for 3 years tell us that no payrolled reporter or Federal worker can? What truths can he reveal from his own extensive job search? From 61 resumes and 6,100 LinkedIn connections? From 2,300 failed job applications? Praise is lavished on the LTU all throughout the Guide, but this praise rings hollow once it becomes apparent theirs are the only perspectives Guide authors do not pursue. And it's a glaring omission. If the LTU is as educated as the Guide depicts, then they should have some interesting things to say regarding the reasons they’ve been given for being passed up. I would think analysts would want to know if there are any trends or tendencies in how HR professionals and hiring managers are characterizing their shortfalls. But despite all my education and achievements (and research into my own job search), I *AM* unemployed, and Guide authors treat me no differently than the employers they seek to correct.

WHO REMOVED THIS REPORT FROM THE FEDERAL SOUP FORUM?

I originally did not intend to release this report on LinkedIn, where I was advised that it might complicate my job search. So I published it to the U.S. Department of Labor forum on the Federal Soup web site under the title “Response to Deloitte Report on Long-Term Unemployment: Where’s the Substance?” There is no question the content of the Report is appropriate to the venue and violates no terms of service, and it held a place on the board for 3 weeks before vanishing under suspicious circumstances:

“It was unusual how I learned the Report had been removed. I attempted to visit the site one day to look for new responses to the Report, but I found I was unable to access the web page. And not just the page to which the Report was published, but the entire Federal Soup web site.

I thought it odd since the rest of the Internet remained available to me. So I attempted to access the Forum from the other computer in my home, but the connection problem persisted. After assuming the site itself might have developed maintenance issues over the weekend, I decided to try again. This time from my iPhone, which had never been used to access the site previously. Now that I had access, I navigated to the DOL page, where I discovered the Report had been removed. The question now is, ‘who removed it?’ And who took the additional step of blocking my ISP so that it would be more difficult for me to discover it had been removed (and even more difficult to restore). I doubt this is the work of the Forum moderator. I don’t think he did this of own accord or it would not have been up for 3 weeks. Someone must have lobbied for its removal. Who? Deloitte? The Rockefeller Foundation? Or someone connected to the Federal government?”

A QUESTION OF COMMITMENT

I know my stake in long-term unemployment. I also know what skills I bring to bear to an analysis of this issue. What I want to know before reading a document like The Guide is, what's Deloitte's interest, as a business, in this phenomenon? In the course of searching the Guide for some answers, I was struck by the following on the penultimate page.

"... Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication."

This is an odd statement for a document making a strong sales pitch and issuing strategies that affect everything in an organization from the basement to the rafters, but not so odd when you consider the Report is not only written on a 6th grade level but shows arrested development in strategic thinking and analysis as well.

NO OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING HISTORY AND ETIOLOGY OF LTU

Among the most valuable information acquired during my job search concerns a pervasive and enduring pattern of employer biases that favor some job seekers and diminish others. The most pervasive and enduring among these biases serve to build a growing class of long-term unemployed by discriminating against the presence or absence of certain characteristics, and Deloitte is doing the nation a disservice in neglecting them.

Establishing that long term unemployment exists is no major discovery any more than establishing that it is a negative outcome is a major act of philanthropy. A Report worth its weight in Rockefeller Foundation dollars ought to address the cause-effect relationships beneath the surface. Dig a little deeper. Roll up some sleeves. Get involved. The most glaring omission / oversight by Report architects is that it does not get close enough to the reality of long term unemployment.

Now to be fair, Deloitte did speak to some employers. Deloitte’s “Maturity Model” of LTU recruitment is in the authors’ own words "the result of conversations and feedback from hundreds of employers who are leading the field in accessing this talent pool." But the Report makes no mention of engaging the LTU unemployed themselves. This is ironic; because while the Report talks up the virtues and skills of the LTU, it refuses to include their observations and experiences in the making of the Report. Because people who are unemployed cannot possibly be credible witnesses let alone subject matter experts, right? They can’t even be trusted to serve as authorities on what is happening in their own job searches.

As a member of the LTU, I was disheartened to learn that the picture of unemployment The White House seeks will be constructed wholly from (a) CEOs with no clear grasp of what it really takes to perform many of the jobs in their companies, (b) hiring managers who never look at more than 20% of the applications that cross their desks (and very few for more than 6 seconds), and (c) HR professionals / recruiters who out of fear of losing their own jobs follow the specifications handed down from the hiring managers.

The Guide points out that the LTU are not only educated but that the longer you're unemployed the more educated you're likely to be. PhDs like me remain unemployed because employers do not know what many advanced degrees mean (and do not care to ask) and because they believe business and technical micro-certifications offer more clear and precise measures of domain-specific intelligences. And like software, business certifications are proliferating at break-neck speed. HR professionals looking to hire a project manager tell applicants who once launched and managed leading businesses that this experience is no substitute for a PMP, and they tell statisticians with BAs in Business that their PhDs are "just another achievement" and no substitute for a 6-month Six Sigma certificate from Villanova.

Today you can be a Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) or enroll in a four-course program at Penn State that would make you a certified Data Warehousing Professional. Union Graduate College is offering an MS in Healthcare Data Analytics. If you want a job working in the I.T. department of a hospital, chances are you'll have to "EPIC certified" -- whatever that means.

And this gets to the core problem of unemployment and where The Guide really whiffs. In the post-Software Revolution Era, waves of new job titles have the labor market looking like a lava lamp. If anyone in Labor attempted to classify and assign taxonomic codes to positions like medical professionals do for services (CPT) or illnesses (ICD-10), they would be overwhelmed by the complexity and dynamism. But as fluid as the titles are, their boundaries have become thicker between changes and their qualifications more specific and more rigid. Career pathways today are more highly regulated and more tracked, making it more difficult for people to qualify or move between them. This increased rationalism may be attributable in part to technical requirements and in part to the approximation of human thought to the Boolean logic of its creation. Educated professionals who were once capable of holding Old Economy job titles that broadly encompassed a range of functions may find themselves unqualified for every one of the more highly specialized New Economy positions created when his / her old job was carved up.

This flux contributes to a profound misalignment in expectations between employers and applicants. Job seekers have become so desensitized to hearing they are not a good fit or lack the qualifications, that they dismiss these assessments as routine and as lacking empirical grounds, particularly when rendered by professionals other than the hiring managers themselves.

Once upon a time, when hiring managers searched for their candidates, I did very well. I suspect these managers set some a priori specs but then applied them with flexibility, often setting some aside when they found a person with compensatory virtues. Unfortunately, recruiters are far less given to this because they view adherence to the specs as the sine qua none of their jobs.

I’ll introduce some of these etiological factors in my Report, which I divide into two types: culture changes and employer bias.

CULTURE CHANGES: CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION

LABOR MARKET DIFFERENTIATION

People today are confused. The information revolution and its infiltration of every industry have resulted in a re-

organization and differentiation of the labor market. There are far more position titles today, which on the surface would appear to mean more options when in fact the counter-trend toward certification and specialization has resulted in careers becoming more fragmented and single-tracked. Data suggests that there is remarkably less mobility in the job market today than decades past, and I suspect this is the primary reason: hard boundaries between positions precluding horizontal as well as vertical movement. I applied for a variety of jobs in a hospital, thinking I could flourish in each one of them: Manager of Health Information; Director of Quality Improvement; Organizational Development & Innovation; Strategic Planner; Business Intelligence Coordinator; and Informatics Specialist. In the end, for reasons just as varied, the hospital deemed me unqualified for every one of the positions. Because my work history is broad and touched on a number of these positions, I was not as especially suited to any one job as most of the other applicants. I was not a square peg for any one of the square holes. And in a labor market as differentiated as this one, positions become more narrowly defined with a rigid set of qualifications. And I was not only not as well suited as other sharpshooters, I was deemed unqualified because I lacked credentials (e.g., RHIA/RHIT for the Manager of Health Information; CPHQ and lean Six Sigma for the Director of Quality Improvement; EPIC certification for Business Intelligence and Informatics positions).

Fifteen years ago someone with my education and experience would have been a solid candidate for broadly defined positions that housed under one tent tasks involving performance evaluation, project management, business intelligence, data warehousing, and enterprise systems management. Today, there are specific jobs for each of these functions and each requires an appropriate certification. When all the dust settled, some highly accomplished, skilled, intelligent, creative, and educated people were left without a niche and without a place in the modern economy.

JOB PORTALS AND ONLINE JOB APPLICATIONS

The Internet not being around all that long – it’s safe to say that job portals and online job applications are fairly new wrinkles in the job search.

When most people think of online job portals like Monster or CareerBuilder or Indeed, they are thinking these are technological innovations that can only make positive contributions to job seekers. They do not think about all the ways they set a job seeker back and maintain his unemployment status. How so? -- by making it that much easier for people who already have jobs to compete for vacancies. Back when job hunting took leg-work, pavement-pounding, and elbow grease, people who already had jobs were stuck in their offices having to fulfill the requirements of their 9 to 5 jobs before they can engage anything extracurricular. But now all they have to do is upload resumes to job portals and create profiles on social networks – and the recruiters will come to them. With employers biased in favor of people who already have jobs, they can find their next job with little or no active searching at all. The people who really need the work, the unemployed job seekers, do not always realize that their major competition does not come from the millions of chronically unemployed but from the even greater legions of chronically dissatisfied workers who did not apply for the job, who already have jobs, and who may not even reside in the country (i.e., H1-B visa).

And this is the truly outrageous part of all this. As Forbes contributor Liz Ryan pointed out in her online column “The Horrible Truth About Online Job Applications” (11/21/2014), while hundreds of job seekers spend 45 minutes reproducing across dozens of HTML fields in an online form key elements of the Word-based resume they were already asked to upload – not to mention completing additional assessments and listing the address of all residences going back 7 years – oblivious to the fact they are 1 of anywhere between 118 and 1,000 applicants – the employer is instructing the internal recruiters (or third party professional staffing firms) to scrub social networks like LinkedIn and job portals like Indeed for the purple unicorn.

Some researchers have taken an even more pessimistic view of online applications. On November 21, Forbes columnist Liz Ryan (“The Horrible Truth about Online Job Applications”) cites the case of a job seeker who submitted a late evening job application through a company’s careers page only to receive an automated rejection

email upon waking up the following morning. The applicant tracked down the recruiter who posted the position and recounted what he learned from their correspondence: “The thing is that Andrea doesn’t have time to screen resumes that come through the company website. She finds her own candidates using LinkedIn, instead. So when she input the Technical Project Manager job into her company’s jobs portal, she set it up so that every candidate gets a No Thanks message, the same message I got ... She has her own system for filling jobs. The applications that come through the company website go straight into the virtual trash.”

This will serve to undermine public trust in corporate hiring and screening practices – and well it should. Yours truly has submitted at least 5,000 online job applications across four different job searches since the turn of the century – a century which has witnessed the NASDAQ crash of 2000, 9/11, the War in Iraq, a Great Recession, and a 5-year budget impasse on Capitol Hill – on top of personal sources of instability such as relocations for a spouse’s new job – and from all these applications I have received precisely zero interviews. You heard right. Zero. In fact, I’d say that I received updates on the status of my applications in less than 20% of the cases. If after all this history you’re still submitting online applications, you’ve just refuted every basic principle of operant conditioning and may be too stupid to live.

These practices are perfectly legal but they are particularly cruel to older job seekers, journeyman job seekers, and job seekers who have worked a lot of fixed-term contracts – for these applicants the time spent completing the online application is multiplied by the number of past experiences. Such a job seeker could spend as much as 3 hours completing a single online application and then have the additional disadvantage of having lapses in employment which in many cases, unbeknownst to the applicant, will result in him being pre-declined before all that keyed-in information ever meets human eyes.

The single piece of information I want above all else is how much time a person on average wastes compiling online job applications and collectively what all this idle productivity amounts to as a % of GDP.

GUIDE NEGLECTS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY AND ITS ROLE AS MAINTAINING FACTOR IN LTU

The Guide boldly touts the work ethic, loyalty, and diversity of the LTU community and even ventures one bolder step when it bucks conventional wisdom to headline LTU superior skills:

"A study of nearly 20,000 sales and service workers found that there was virtually no difference between the performance of those who had not held a job within the past five years and those who had. In fact, the study found that workers who had been unemployed for five years actually performed slightly."

But a statement like this plays into the hands of most employers, who either work in the I.T. industry or in industries that run on products of the I.T. industry (i.e., software). Guide readers and cynics will likely point to the convenient selection of sales and service workers for a highly circumscribed statement of LTU strength.

The Guide may in fact allude to this when it makes a contradictory statement further into the document:

"Because it can result in skills deterioration of the labor force and a reduction in overall productivity, leading economists agree that the long-term recovery of the economy remains in danger if long-term unemployment persists at this high level."

So which is it? Are the LTU skilled or are they not? The Guide seems to resolve this inconsistency when it advocates an evaluation of applicant skills.

"Focusing on an applicant’s skill set as opposed to their previous employment history will enable you to hire the candidates with the most relevant abilities."

"Instead of traditional interview methods that ask about your previous work experience or positions, use behavioral-based interviewing techniques to evaluate the candidate’s skills and abilities as well as their work ethic and motivations. Behaviorally-based selection techniques will provide you with more accurate and timely information to assess the candidate’s "can do" and "will do" for the position and for the organization."

HOW THE LTU IS ADVERSELY AFFECTED BY LINKEDIN

The problem with most long term unemployed professionals is that they never seem to fit the profile. This is entirely a matter of lacking education or skills. In many cases, it’s a matter of having additional experiences that are not relevant to the job: “Employers are looking for sharpshooters. A sharpshooter is someone who not only performed the same tasks that make up the advertised position, but that these tasks were performed as part of the most recent job, that the title of the most recent job matches that of the advertised position, and that there are no irrelevant jobs in the applicant’s recent work history.” Irrelevant experiences are not the only thing that could trip up an applicant. Employers often balk at irrelevant education. “Job seekers with PhDs report all too often being advised to hide their education by removing the advanced degree from their resume.”

In order to ensure he or she fits the profile, the job seeker will revise the resume so that it includes only those experiences, skills, and degrees that are relevant to the position. This is called a targeted resume. The problem for many job seekers is that they pursue a range of opportunities, each requiring a different resume. “I knew one fellow with a broad background who ended up with 61 different resumes, each drawing from different skill sets, different experiences, and different knowledge bases.”

The real problem however is LinkedIn.

“It seems inevitable that the hiring manager will look for the job seeker on LinkedIn. If he’s a white collar professional and doesn’t have a LinkedIn presence, he will be bypassed. If he does have a LinkedIn profile, this is where he runs the risk of exposure. The hiring manager will see everything he did not include in that resume and will likely conclude this is not a perfect fit. Unfortunately, there’s no way around this conundrum.”

THE LEGEND OF THE UNDERGROUND JOB MARKET

I can’t tell you how often I’ve been contacted by representatives of career management / talent search (CM / TS) firms that claim to hold exclusive relationships to large swaths of industry-leading (in some cases Fortune 500) companies. Ostensibly, the relationship works as follows. The company withholds its professional and senior level positions from the job boards. These jobs are placed in a database to which only the CM / TS firm has access. The firm then combs profiles on social networks and job portals in search of unemployed job seekers with promising skill sets willing to pay the firm an exorbitant fee -- somewhere in the $4K – 10K range -- for access to the opportunity. The unemployed job seeker is then subjected to a comprehensive skills assessment protocol and a resume makeover, at which point the firm matches and markets the seeker to the most relevant opening. The firm arranges the introduction, vouches for the job seeker, and coaches the job seeker through the interview process. This is known as the “hidden job market” and its status and reach remains uncharted. For some, the hidden job market is an urban legend. For others just one of many rackets unscrupulous hucksters perpetrate upon those who could least afford to be hustled. And yet for others, it’s a little known labor practice to which most politicians and journalists, who already have jobs, remain oblivious. But for many people like me, it has face validity because it jibes with what we see – or fail to see – everyday: a lack of interesting and upwardly mobile knowledge jobs on the job boards. Even the jobs with the word “analyst” in the title appear to be nothing more computer age clerical jobs.

VOLUME

The number of un-employed is staggering enough. When you add in the under-employed (i.e., job seekers who’ve settled for part-time jobs in lieu of full-time employment) and those who are looking for a way out of their current full-time job, the volume of applications for any opening is eye-popping. This last group is interesting, because when the employment community goes as long as it has hiring at such a weak pace, employees do not feel free to leave their jobs. This does not stop them from looking for something new and better, as they may have been working 3 jobs and have not seen a wage increase in some time. Americans are brought up to climb the ladder, and so it doesn’t take long for many people to feel restless at their current title and salary.

Volume is the principle driver behind the disqualification model. And it’s the major reason job seekers waste their time filling out online applications for jobs. It’s also a major impetus behind our next two culture changes: applicant tracking systems and the third party professionals who love them.

THE DISQUALIFICATION MODEL (AKA “KNOCKOUT SCREENING”)

From the list of employer biases (we’ll take these up later), it’s clear there are a lot of things that can sink an applicant. Some gauntlets cannot be run. Applicants report feeling they are never fully looked at -- never fully considered. And it's more than just being drowned out in a wider and deeper applicant pool. The volume of applications has forced employers to take a different approach to reviewing any ONE of the many applications. The industry calls it "knockout screening." I call it the disqualification model. This is an approach in which the employer puts an applicant through a checklist of red flags and outrageous minimum standards, tossing an applicant aside the moment as many as one of these red flags is raised or the moment the applicants falls a quantum short of the minimum cut-off. Applicants today could be forgiven for feeling that getting hired is tantamount to stealing the museum's prize diamond. It conjures memories of every heist film in which some thief in a form-fitting black body suit contorts to navigate the matrix of invisible red laser beams. Or memories of every Vietnam War film where infantry are dropped in a foreign jungle and asked to avoid tripwires in the night underbrush. Gone are the days when the tripwires were located in your own resume or cover letter. Those were the good old days, right? At least you knew your work was being read. In today's cutting edge screening practices, an employer can eliminate hundreds of applicants without reading a single resume.

I suspect that if employers were to take the time and review the materials for each applicant with the question: “what can this person do for me?” they would end up with a list of finalists far different than the list they end up with when they approach applications with the question: “What's WRONG with THIS one?” The latter approach, which I call the disqualification model, is more expedient, but fails to affirm the potential value of the applicant, his or her capabilities and achievements. In seeking to ensure the floor, it fails to recruit the candidate with the highest ceiling. I have never seen the gauntlet completely spelled out, but this statement on the online application of Dignity Health comes closest:

"To ensure that Dignity Health employs the best-qualified individuals, as a condition of employment, submission of past performance evaluations, a drug test, physical, work-related references and a background check (which may include criminal history, civil history, sex offender search, social security number verification, professional license validation, education verification, driving history, vehicle insurance verification, and credit check) may be required as part of our pre-employment process."

I guess Congress was on to something when it passed The Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act in 1988, virtually outlawing the use of lie detectors in connection with job searches.

As daunting as that whole "Gotcha" mentality is, I'd be fine knowing my résumé was read in the proper spirit -- my potential value affirmed -- BEFORE I was subjected to the threat matrix.

Dignity Health, incidentally, is one of the 300 employers celebrated for taking the President’s pledge to give the long term unemployed a fair shake. I applied for 7 positions at Dignity Health a number of months ago and reached out to a few of their recruiters on LinkedIn. Am I impressed?

I did in fact reach out to a handful of the 300 organizations who signed Obama's Pledge -- those I could find within the health care industry. Oddly enough there is no comprehensive list on the Web -- at least that I could find. You'd think that making the list available would be step 1 in helping the LTU find employment -- not combing the guest registry at the Workforce Investment Board. The absence of such publicity raises suspicions and brings into question whether those pledging to give LTU applications a fair review are not attempting to limit how many appear on their doorstep. I applied for jobs with a few of these organizations and I contacted their internal recruiters to let them know I was a member of the long term unemployed class who was drawn to their organization in part because in signing that high profile pledge they agreed to give the LTU a fair shake.

Thus far, nothing has come of these applications. Not even an interview for a PhD with a great deal of health care experience.

A NOTE ON REFERENCES

As if the long term unemployed don’t have enough problems, now special services offered by LinkedIn and Spokeo to premium subscribers allow employers to by-pass the official list of references provided by the applicant to access and engage a list of former colleagues and supervisors – all without the authorization -- and awareness -- of the applicant. So when I write that an applicant needs to have a history free and clear of adverse events, that includes the occasional less-than-stellar first impression. I’ve worked with hundreds of people with varying levels of affiliation, especially in my tenure with two Federal bureaucracies. So if a prospective employer with premium LinkedIn membership submits my name to the controversial Reference Search, it’s likely to return a long list of individuals, and I can’t imagine how many of these people remember me or what they would say if they do. This is the kind of service that discourages innovation by punishing professionals disposed to more unconventional approaches. If the professional world were to suspect that such a service has attained normative status among employee search and screening – and it will be next-to-impossible to tell if and when it does given its inherent cloak-and-dagger-ness – it will be a major homogenizing force in our society, forcing professionals to self-monitor and skew actions and decisions toward those expected to win consensus approval.

A NOTE ON THE SKILLS GAP

Employers claim to have a hard time finding skilled applicants. But it’s very difficult to take this position seriously in light of the absurd list of skills employers claim the candidate needs to function effectively in the position. All the new certificates created by institutes. All the years of experience working with a vast array of software – some brand new on the market – some redundant (e.g., SAS, SPSS, and R for a data analyst position; Photoshop, Paint Shop, Illustrator, and Paint for graphics design position).

SCREENING SOFTWARE AND APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEMS

Employers resort to some rather strange labor-saving algorithms and devices for screening applications. The Guide does astutely acknowledge the adverse impact of technology on LTU when it broaches the subject of applicant tracking systems.

"Remove inappropriate filters and screening procedures, such as asking the dates of last or current employment, that automatically eliminate unemployed and long-term unemployed applications. Confirm that Applicant Tracking Systems do not screen out resumes based on age or employment status."

The problem is that the Guide treats all this as incidental – as some kind of accident. This is what employers use ATS for -- to clear the path to the golden unicorn because the golden unicorn is by definition someone who never had the misfortune of losing a job. There are employers out there who go much further than question the length of someone's unemployment. I started getting questions at about the 6 month mark. "What have you been doing with yourself?" Actually, many employers screen out applicants who've been unemployed for as long as 1 day.

Why do you think employers ask applicants to complete online applications even after the applicant uploaded a Word resume? Because there is some dizzying disparity among the world's resumes? No. For yuks? No. So they can more expediently isolate the rule-out parameters. And age and employment status are the big ones. If you did not check one of the boxes marked "current employer," your resume may never see human eyes. So the 45 minutes you’re spending reproducing all the elements of that Word resume – the one you already uploaded into their system – across dozens of HTML fields in an online form, is time spent empowering the bean counter on the other end make a split second decision to disqualify you without a thorough review of what you’ve achieved.

RISE OF THE THIRD PARTY RECRUITER

Any list of employer biases should be prefaced by a discussion of what prompted them. The real source of all this strife is the volume of applications. One absurd reality gives rise to another. Employers are responding to unmanageable stacks of applications. They receive so many that they cannot possibly read them all. For example, the Smithsonian Institution reports on the government jobs portal USAjobs.gov that it closes the search once it reaches its cap of 100 applications. This means the ad may run for no more than 1 day. In the days before the Software Revolution, one CEO informed he did not have time to go through his stacks of applications and so he “just picked a few off the top until he found someone he liked.” And those were the good old days, when hiring managers took more of a hands-on approach. In this day and age, employers increasingly rely on emerging classes of brokers or “middle men” known as talent acquisition professionals. These professionals may live in Human Resources as company employees or the organization may choose to outsource recruitment to third parties known as professional staffing firms.

The problem with this system is that it funnels attention to a restricted range of job seekers. When hiring managers were doing the recruiting, they may have started out with a vision of the qualified candidate, but they allowed applicants to surprise them from time to time with an alternate vision. “He may not be a Six Sigma black belt with 5 years of experience in the title of performance improvement specialist, but he received a rigorous training in organizational analysis and research as part of his PhD in Social Psychology and he’s designed both a data integration, analysis, and reporting tool for cancer centers and a 4-pronged strategy for improving patient satisfaction. I’ll talk to him.” The intervention of a third party recruiter results in a rigid adherence to the singular vision described by the specification list. Recruiters are not concerned about outcomes for the company they serve per se, but with following the instructions that are presumed to facilitate the desired outcomes, because that’s how they protect themselves against negative outcomes. “Sorry he didn’t work out for you. He met all the specifications.” In the vast majority of cases, the spec-driven process will produce serviceable hires – and the hiring manager will never know what heights could have been scaled with an unconventional alternative.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Human Resources, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” -William Shakespeare

Increased emphasis on networking and standardization have combined to augment pressures to uniformity and place additional stress on the job seeker, including but not limited to the operationalization of job qualifications. Applicants are increasingly asked to “say it in numbers” (e.g., years of experience). Informational interviews are now more protocol-driven – more scripted – with recruiters asking applicants to walk them through the resume to identify the previous positions for which each software in a list of software was used. On the other end of the phone the recruiter is tallying years and months toward some outrageous pre-set minimum. Alternatively, the recruiter may require a credential, usually in the form of a certificate.

EMPLOYER BIAS

NO ACCOUNTING FOR EMPLOYER BIASES AT ROOT OF LONG TERM UNEMPLOYMENT

A major shortcoming of the Guide is that its authors seem to think the only bias causing long term unemployment is bias against the long term unemployed. The long term unemployed have been unemployed that long for a reason. And while sheer volume of applications is certainly a very big reason (the authors correctly cite that for every opening there is an average of 118 to 1,000 applicants), it's not the only reason. Employer bias is the even bigger reason. And age and length of unemployment are not the only ones. Any Report, to be truly effective, must address these biases. They present quite a gauntlet. Perturbing only one of these "tripwires" is enough to sink your application.

By the way, this is not a broad knock on the community of employers. One could certainly understand the plight of the modern employer inundated with hundreds of applications per vacancy from both the legion of chronically unemployed at the red wood forest to those chronically dissatisfied with their jobs on the gulf stream waters. No one's happy. But in order to help the long term unemployed salvage a scintilla of dignity, I call attention to the fact too many employers rely on some rather unreasonable labor-saving heuristics and algorithms to pare down that stack of applications. And one of these employer biases is ... long term unemployment.

Now to a list of employer biases.

TITLE CONGRUENCY

The title of the job you're applying for should match the title of your last job and that job should have logical predecessors. Just as bad as gaps in employment history are fixed-term contract jobs (i.e., “don’t send me no more pinballers”) and jobs that are outside the industry in which one is currently seeking employment. Recruiters are seeking sharpshooters, which is to say your resume tells a simple easy-to-read story. (Like a Hollywood film with high production values made for the moviegoer of BASIC intelligence. No epics. No indie films).

This places at a disadvantage those professionals who have performed a variety of functions before the cultural shift toward specificity. Between 1998 and 2005, I was recruited into positions for which I did not think I was all that suited given my education and training. I had a research PhD in psychology. I can imagine a number of roles for which I would have been ideal. But I was never considered for these jobs. Meanwhile, recruiters called offering me technical writing jobs with finance and technology firms. They didn’t offer terrific salaries. They offered no upward mobility or opportunity for permanent placement. And they diverted me from what I wanted in the way of a career pathway. But they put food on the table. After 2009, the offers not only stopped coming but the same finance and technology firms for whom I ably produced just a few years earlier refused to take me seriously as an applicant. They needed a sharpshooter. The finance firms bristled at the technology and the technology firms took issue with the finance. And both companies saw me as an academic because I had a PhD (something they didn’t do years ago). I really felt betrayed. I helped them out in a pinch when they needed me and now these same firms acted as if they had no memory of my time there. This is due in part to the rate of staff turnover in the modern age. The old managers were no longer with the company. And apparently I was one of an army of contractors to work for them, although I did help Fannie Mae when another contractor flaked out and I was brought in late in the game to write an SOP manual the length of my dissertation in less than a month. Still, I get the sense that contractors were treated as interchangeable (and therefore expendable and forgettable) and that they had no problems letting a good writer walk because when a new project called for a writer, they’d just have the third party professional staffing firm just send them another one. (Fannie Mae policy prohibits managers from providing references for contract employees).

I didn’t realize when I accepted these offers for fixed term contract positions that 10 years down the road I would look back and think, “Wow, did I make a mess of my résumé.” I really hurt my brand. But then I just remind myself that I never really had choices. Of all my job searches since my PhD in 1997 -- through hundreds of online job applications -- I never received a single interview – not even for the research or data analysis jobs for which I was so rigorously trained. I must have applied to a few dozen positions with Westat over the years, a Maryland-based research corporation consulting in statistical design, data collection and management, and research analysis

work. I kicked myself in the ass after I finally phoned the Director Human Resources. If I had been even vaguely familiar with this person’s mentality and worldview, I never would have wasted my time on a single application.

BRANDING

Some job seekers, usually before they ever become unemployed, enjoy a remarkable advantage simply because they once worked for a reputable organization (e.g., Boeing; Northrop Grumman; PwC) or one with "cool company" status (e.g., Google). There are a lot of mediocre professionals who bask in the reflected glory of a former employer with panache. There's no prize for being a great talent swimming against the current in a Federal bureaucracy or for launching and managing a leading medical practice. You have to have a brand.

PAINT BY NUMBERS

Recruiters are not much different from insurance underwriters. They’re assessing risk posed by applicants and finding reassurance in quantity. Over the years it seems employers are requiring more experience in a similar job or more experience with an even greater range of relevant software. It’s less a matter of knowing the software or having used the software – and more a matter of how well you know the software as measured in years and months of prior use. After complimenting my history of unique accomplishments, a recruiter for Truvent Analytics informed me she couldn’t even submit me for any of the positions for which I applied because I fell 6 months short of the 5 year minimum requirement in SAP Business Object. I don’t think I have to explain to anyone the fallacies in the assumptions signified by this approach.

GUIDE FEELS EMPLOYER BIAS (AND CRISIS) WITH EMPHASIS ON SKILLS ASSESSMENT

I think The Guide misses an opportunity here. What the Guide should advocate for is the assessment of potential and capabilities based in part on one's record of achievement. By advocating employers to ignore employment history and by advocating for the measurement of skills, the Guide is feeding the crisis by playing into the hands of employers who demand x number of years of experience with a, b, c, d, e, and f software at g level. This is how the Guide will be interpreted by most employers (i.e., "yeah, we do that") who do not understand that the Guide is advising them merely to ascertain whether applicants have the skills, which is a far cry from industry efforts to measure experience as some sausage-d combination of "how long?" and "how recently?" -- both of which put the LTU at a disadvantage. Software requirements alone put the LTU at a disadvantage. Most analysts, the architects of The Guide included, do not seem to appreciate the contribution of the Software Revolution -- and the Internet -- to a growing LTU class. Employers are sold unnecessary software all the time. Some employers even list redundant software programs in the qualifications just to keep the applicant pool manageable by discouraging some people from applying -- SPSS, SAS, and R for data analysts -- Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark for graphic designers -- when in most cases, the person hired for the job will only have to use one. And new software is being invented all the time. One could hardly keep up with it. Employees are trained and retrained on the latest and greatest all the time -- and yet employers would never hire an educated, creative, accomplished person who has not already mastered a list of software. I look at the software required for some positions and I can't help but think, "What the hell is all this? I never heard of half of these things? I didn't need all this software to be a technical writer 3 years ago?"

THOU SHALL HAVE MANAGED A LARGE TEAM

Many management jobs today require not only that applicants were responsible and accountable for a project, but that they managed a team of people. And not just a team. A large team. How many multiple choice questions have I had to answer in which I was asked to select the size of the team I managed: 1-3? 4-6? 8-10? >10? Seriously? After following up with hiring managers, the sense is that if you as an applicant answered 8-10 but enough

applicants marked the >10 range, your full application may never see human eyes – even if the actual job for which you’re applying only involves managing 1-3 people.

Additional options in the multiple choice item might even require you to affirm or deny that you’ve trained, selected, and appraised the performance of team members. There's no prize for designing and managing a groundbreaking project from end to end if you did so independently – even if you engaged clients, end users, and subject matter experts in the design of the project – unless these people were accountable to you.

CREDENTIALISM: REMEMBER TO KEEP HOLY THE SEAL OF APPROVAL

"WANTED: Six Sigma Black Belt. Business graduates with PhDs in Statistics need not apply."

"Out, out, brief candle! The Six Sigma black belt is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

It’s not uncommon to see names on LinkedIn who have a half dozen acronyms in tow. And I’m not talking about PhD, MBA, or FACHE. There’s big money in the certification racquet. New certifications are being created every day. I’ve applied for jobs where I’ve known I would not be a preferred or even a qualified candidate because I lacked one or more of the following:

“The CPHQ is the only certification in the profession of healthcare quality. The program is fully accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies of the National Organization for Competency Assurance in Washington, D.C.”

“Future-proof your BI expertise by earning the MCSE: Business Intelligence certification and get the skills needed to deliver more data to more people … ”

“TDWI's CBIP (Certified Business Intelligence Professional) program helps you define, establish, and distinguish yourself professionally with a meaningful … ”

“The MISonline Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics Certificate helps you define, establish, and distinguish yourself professionally as you gain the skills and … ”

"Members of the ACMPE may obtain recognition for their knowledge and experience by becoming Certified Medical Practice Executives (CMPE)."

“PMI's Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential is the most important industry-recognized certification for project managers.”

“The Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst (CERA) credential is the most rigorous and comprehensive demonstration of enterprise risk management expertise ...”

“ERMCP is given to professionals who are well experienced in the field of enterprise risk management and can demonstrate their knowledge, experiences and ... ”

“The three levels (Data Mining, Predictive analytics or Marketing Data Science) of the SAS and OSU certificate programs build on each other and are designed to … ”

People who are already employed can rather easily acquire these certifications, which in many cases are recommended and subsidized by their employers. But if you’re unemployed, you may not have the money for what amounts to a speculative investment in a job you do not yet have.

For years I’ve wondered why I was unable to land a single interview for a research position when I am a PhD trained researcher. It’s not necessarily that schools are offering degree programs that are more rigorous, but they are more career-preparatory as well as more branded and marketed to students-as-job-seekers. Today master’s degrees in Data Mining and Health Analytics are available from select schools.

Unfortunately, there’s no grandfather clause for seasoned professionals in the middle of their careers. As an applicant for some Project Manager positions, I’ve been told by some bean counters in HR who know next-to-nothing about working in the world my launching and running a leading business is no substitute for a PMP.

And everywhere I turn, there’s evidence that the answer to innovation and productivity is NOT more credentials. NOT more training. As I will discuss later, I was contacted by corporate recruiter representing a hospital seeking a performance improvement consultant to address its problem raising patient satisfaction scores. My first instinct was to wonder whether I was the first performance improvement specialist to grace their doorstep. I figured, ‘Someone told these guys they need this kind of professional in their organization.’ But as it turns out, they have hundreds! Hundreds! In fact, in addition to the PI specialists who work in the facilities themselves, the health & hospital system has its own Center for Clinical Excellence – six floors in a freestanding building across town. Here are some of the titles under which this glut of talent is laboring:

Performance Improvement Manager / Director Quality Management / Executive Director, TFC / Solution Engineer / Performance Improvement Consultant / Supervisor, Quality Surveillance & Reporting Systems / Transformation Support Manager / Manager Imaging Informatics / Process Improvement Leader-MBB / Manager, Patient Safety, Quality & Regulatory / Executive Director, Transformation Support / Senior Consultant, HR Analytics / VP Clinical Improvement / Quality & Outcomes Consultant / Senior Transformation Consultant / Quality Analytics Manager / Operations & Performance Improvement / Compliance & Quality Metrics / Manager of Transformation Support / Senior Informatics Specialist / Process Improvement Specialist / PS-QI Coordinator / Transformation Support Associate / Clinical Informatics Services Manager / Performance Improvement Engineer / Patient Safety-Quality Improvement Specialist / Associate Transformation Support / Director, Clinical Advisory Services / Director of Strategy and Operations / Quality Patient Care Consultant-Outcomes / Group Manager, Transformation - Communication & Org Development / Informatics Specialist / Manager of Operations / Clinical Process Leader / Transformation Support Group Manager / Certified Pharmacy Informatics Technician / Director, Performance Improvement / VP Clinical Improvement / Transformation Consultant / Director, Supply Chain Analytics / Sr. Project Manager, Clinical Workflow Improvement / Survey Research Manager / Business Process Consultant (“promoting healthcare delivery transformation”) / Engagement Manager - Supply Chain Analytics / Performance Research Analyst / Clinical Epidemiologist / Director, Transformation Training Division / Director, Utilization Management / Supply Chain Analyst, Performance Measurement / Supervisor, Clinical Epidemiologist / Sourcing Manager, Supply Chain Transformation / Supply Chain Analytics-Coordinator / Sr. Analyst, SCM ERP Operations / Lead Clinical Epidemiologist / Senior Associate - Strategic & Capital Planning / Market Research and Evaluation Analytics Associate / Epidemiologist, Analyst / Manager, Planning, Analysis, and Evaluation / Nurse Manager/Project Improvement / Manager Oncology Data Services / Value Analysis Manager / Group Manager, Clinical Outcomes / Strategic Planning Associate / Statistical Data Analyst / Clinical Asset Management / Corporate Planning Analyst-Research Manager / Director of Performance-Based Design / Director Clinical Informatics / Director of Activation Planning Director / Clinical Documentation Improvement / VP Clinical Asset Management / Quality Patient Care Senior Consultant / Quality Coordinator / Physician, Quality and Outcomes / Patient Centered Outcomes Intern / Quality Patient Care Consultant / Director of Patient Experience / Senior Analyst - Accountable Care Organization

The statistics on the long term unemployed population show that they are older and educated. Pundits and analysts are shredding their scalp trying to figure that one out, but age discrimination is not the sole cause – at least not directly or overtly. The proliferation of industry-specific micro-certifications is a key obstacle for seasoned professionals who believe to have completed all their training and education requirements years ago and for whom advances in professional development have come in the form of added experience and achievements. Forty-four year old MBAs who minored in Statistics or PhDs in Statistics with business experience never imagined having to go back to school for that $2,000 Six Sigma black belt. In fact, even advanced degrees are viewed

skeptically or with morbid suspicion by employers who understand them less and who are looking for more clear and more precise measures of domain-specific intelligence. For this reason, the very notion of subject matter expertise – what it is – how to measure it – is transitioning from advanced education to targeted certification. Universities are responding by tailoring MA programs to business interests so as to create a more consumer-friendly product. The young professional can now pick up an MA in Health Analytics along with certifications in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. Frustrated job seekers can be forgiven for feeling that employers are putting the cart before the horse or confusing the predictor with the criterion.

The infiltration of information technology into virtually every industry has resulted in bloated lists of software requirements. To qualify for a job today, one often has to know a lot of software one didn’t need to know just 3 years ago to do the same job. Not all employers need the software proficiency listed in the job ad; some programs are listed because the employer assumes (a) the specific software, or the quantity of software listed, will guarantee better candidates or (b) all the right job seekers will be discouraged from applying, resulting in a more manageable vetting task.

ADVERSE EVENTS

A criminal background test and drug screen is no longer enough assurance for employers, who probe your past with a finer tooth comb in search of a wider variety of adverse events. Employers want to know if you’ve ever been terminated, and some will go so far as to ask whether you have ever resigned to avoid termination. There are job seekers who would rather take their chances than admit to a termination, knowing full well that a termination carries about as much taint as a misdemeanor conviction.

For hiring managers seeking quick and dirty ways of eliminating applicants, employment gaps present a flag with a nice shade of red. You really can't be out of work for any length of time. At the 6-month mark, I was starting to field questions like "You've been out of work since June? Err. What have you been doing with yourself?" And a recruiter attempting to sell me to one of her clients was told the following: "He has some marvelous accomplishments, but we're looking for evidence of more recent leadership experience." (You can only imagine what these same individuals would think now that I have been unemployed two-and-a-half years). Research has estimated the tipping point at 6 months, but there’s no shortage of anecdotes involving employers who use screening software / applicant tracking systems to weed out applicants who did not check the box marked "Current Employer." This means you can’t be unemployed for even a day. Think of employment like health insurance. Don't let it lapse. Just ask the Stanford Medical Center:

"Account for all gaps in employment of 1 month or greater for the past 10 years."

If you’ve maintained a job through this medieval period in our country’s Labor history, you simply don’t have any insight into what it’s like to look for work. None. And with the media towing the President’s line, you’d be mesmerized by headlines touting the longest consecutive stretch of job creation and the steep decline in the unemployment rate. When in fact traces and shadows of the truth can be found in other statistics, like the 151 million Americans receiving government assistance, the decline in wages, the decline in the net worth of middle class families (now at 1968 levels), and the decline in the labor participation rate (1978 levels). The truth is the job situation has NOT improved here in the U.S. We're just hiding some really desperate and scared people in part-time jobs (sometimes more than one) or in low-wage temp work which often goes by the more dignifying, less pejorative aliases of "contract" or "consulting" work. And then there are the jobs that pay no salary at all. No, I'm not talking about internships, which are also on the rise, but commission-only positions like the thousands created by [COMPANY REDACTED], where sales reps make 5% commission and work 60 hours a week just to put food on the table. Don't even get me started on adjunct teaching positions in universities (where unemployed PhDs unable to find tenure-track assistant professorships labor under the title of “instructor” for $2,500 a course, making universities the biggest sweat shops in America).

And then there is the Credit Report. Just about every online application I’ve encountered for a health & hospital system presents me with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and requires me to authorize a check on my credit. Employers seem incapable of understanding that one’s employment status is the cause of and solution to poor credit. Being unemployed can wreak havoc on your credit score, but don't expect logic or sympathy from an employer looking for a quick-and-dirty and superficially reasonable reason to dismiss an applicant. And this is where the Deloitte Guide really falls short. Deloitte is complacent / complicit in its treatment of credit reports. While the Guide advocates for best practices in use of credit reports --

"Organization performs standard due diligence that includes credit checks for relevant roles only. Credit checks are performed for final round candidates only and abide by FCRA obligations and other applicable legal requirements. For long-term unemployed candidates for the final round and only for relevant roles, organization investigates history behind a poor credit score to determine if the applicant has undertaken a good faith effort to meet his or her financial obligations."**

-- the only best practice – the only fair, compassionate, and non-discriminatory practice – is NOT TO USE THEM.

** And that's the recommendation for the business that wants to be a "leading LTU organization." (You don't want to read the recommendations for "basic" and "progressive").

Good faith is not going to put money in the bank account. Employment will. The irony is that the financial industry giants are among the organizations that screen applicants for credit. These are the same organizations whose lending practices tanked the world economy, sparking the loss of millions of jobs and for those who lost jobs, loss of credit standing.

Employers also want to sleuth you out in Google in search of words or deeds anywhere in your past that might raise suspicion. I for one published a novel. Even if I decided to keep that from my LinkedIn profile, an employer will find it on the Web. This is not to say novels are evil, but it’s the kind of hobby that makes employers nervous. It’s time-consuming. Mentally distracting. And it suggests the applicant is a thinker. What if he/she is a purveyor of unconventional wisdom? How will the plot of this or any future novel reflect on the organization? What kind of views does this “author” maintain? Is he/she going to be resolving work-related issues on the weekends, or is he/she going to be busy dreaming up the next story? We’re living in the age of the 24/7/365 kind of worker.

A friend of mine who works for a financial industry behemoth handed my resume to a number of department heads. One of these department heads, who performed an Internet search on my name, found the images and related articles that feature me standing in my best suit and tie in an unusual ploy to call attention to my job standing and raise awareness of labor issues. (I was attempting to exploit the government shutdown as a catalyst).

"Have you googled your friend?" sayeth he who manages operational risk for a living. "I would never hire him." He also had a problem with me issuing an occasional blog post to LinkedIn. (“Did you see all that stuff on unemployment?”). I would have thought I was offering valuable high-level, issue-driven tips and perspectives, but so much is violently construed.

I AM THE CERTIFICATE THY SEAL OF APPROVAL. THOU SHALL NOT HAVE FALSE IDOLS BEFORE ME

This is the common thread among biases. There are many reasons for long-term unemployment. But what it boils down to is that millions of job seekers will never "be a square peg for a square hole." They never fit the profile, the a priori vision of the ideal candidate, which contains a great deal of pork and pork fat and which also overlooks knowledge bases, experiences, capabilities, and virtues that would also contribute to the position. Be a square peg for a square hole. This is the Fundamentalist interpretation of a "Perfect Fit." That means tetrahedrons are as

much at a disadvantage as triangles. Sorry, but the following explains why some of you heathens and infidels (me included) may never work again in the new world order.

This bias also claims the candidacies of many job seekers with superfluous degrees. Your PhD may be a source of pride, and a living knowledge base, but it's "just another achievement" in the words of a couple bean counters I talked to -- and bringing it up will only cause consternation and possibly even draw charges of vanity. Many PhDs will tell you they've been advised to remove the degree from their resume because employers don't know how to make sense of it and because in this day and age, certifications are far more precise measures of domain-specific intelligence. The new certifications are de facto creations that prepare someone specifically for a job (like teachers using a sample SAT to teach their students how to take the SAT). While one could debate the viability of these targeted credentialing programs (i.e., or is this ADHD?), the more salient issue is that there are millions of older job seekers whose education predates this era of credentialism. When they find themselves out of a job, they’re also finding it increasingly difficult to get back in. Most people casually chalk this up to age discrimination, because age is a correlate; when in actuality, age may be concealing that hidden variable I’m calling credential madness.

The LTU consists of a large group of individuals with advanced degrees. In fact, the Guide points out that the long term unemployed tend to be slightly more educated than those who are unemployed less than 27 weeks. One of the maintaining factors in LTU is an anti-intellectual bias within the business community. In a half-dozen interviews I’ve been told something to the effect of (or in a couple cases, these exact words) "you're an intellectual." And I must say, never is it meant as a compliment. “I think, therefore, I am unemployed.” I expect this sort of thing from Pol Pot -- not from the American business community. On second thought, America does have that rich history of conceptual pragmatism. "All that damned book learnin'."

LTU UNDERMINED BY CALL TO IGNORE THE PAST

The Guide also makes a number of statements that appear to position a skills-based assessment as a foil to "history.""Focusing on an applicant’s skill set as opposed to their previous employment history will enable you to hire the candidates with the most relevant abilities."

Good God! They're long term unemployed. They're not ex-convicts. History is important. I for one would like employers to focus on what I've achieved in the face of challenges. I have taken on challenges most professionals will never face. And in the face of these challenges, I have notched some rather unique and remarkable products, insights, and discoveries. The problem isn't too much focus on history. It's a focus on gaps in employment at the expense of one's record of achievements. Achievements, which by definition means prior achievements, as in what one's achieved (in the past), remains the best indication of one's capabilities. The problem is a focus on measuring skills (or an obsession with certificates that serve as measures of skills) at the expense of more important qualities contained in achievements and in one's education. If you can find a person who has demonstrated a knack for coming up with all the right ideas, that's more important than software. That person will pick up the software.

TALES OF THE RECESSION

When you’ve been looking for work as long as I have, you encounter a number of employers who engage in questionable self-serving practices that on the surface appear to exploit the number of and desperation of unemployed job seekers. Review the following and judge for yourself. I hope you enjoy it.

Absurd Job Interview 1

I remember how excited I was to be granted an interview. I studied the history and business of the company all week. When I arrived at the interview site, there were dozens of job candidates in suits entering and exiting through a revolving door. I signed my name to a registry that included hundreds of names going back a week. As I carefully observed how the job seekers were summoned into back rooms one at a time like patients in a large medical practice, it became clear to me the company assigned a staggering number of applicants to 20-minute time slots with one of six interviewing employees.

While my interviewer worked her way through a list of questions from a sheet of paper, asking me how I'd solve a variety of problems, a co-worker seated beside her – a woman to whom I was never introduced and who never looked up from her pad and pen – took copious notes. I came prepared with samples of marketing materials, including some which helped create a leading medical practice. The interviewer asked me if she could keep the materials. Just before the conclusion of the interview, I asked the interviewer if she had a "horse in the race" which is to say an internal candidate. The interviewer then waxed romantic about some woman named "Trudy" who worked down the hall in a clerical position for the past 12 years. Under my breath I muttered, "oh %$#!" and from intel I was later able to gather, I suspect the company intended all along to hire Trudy and used a number of leading job candidates as a source of ideas so she could function viably if not successfully in a position for which she was marginally qualified.

Absurd Job Interview 2

I remember how excited I was to be granted an interview. The job description detailed a well-paying managerial position with a local “company confidential.” When I arrived at the interview site, I was directed into a suite where I joined an audience of 50 people seated in folding metal chairs. We were soon joined by a woman who introduced herself as the Director of Human Resources. She wheeled a television and VCR into the room on a movable stand and hit the play button. At that time I realized this was a fire safety equipment company, as the video contained a list of episodes in which a commercial portable fire extinguisher snuffed out different kinds of fires.

The HR director then began describing an unpaid 3 week training period. The training consisted of hours of supervised cold-calling during which each of us would attempt to “move” as many “units” as possible. Ideally more than anyone else we see in this room. Because the person who sold the most fire extinguishers would be given preferential consideration for the job.

Absurd Job Interview 3

I remember how excited I was to meet Vickrum and his wife in Baby's R Us. This was a well-dressed couple indeed -- he in the 3-piece suit and she in a power suit herself. After the friendly chat expanded to touch on my employment status, he handed me a business card and invited me to an interview at the Marriott Hotel in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. When I arrived at the hotel, I was directed to a conference room where I joined an audience of 100 people seated in chairs. I scanned the room and found Vickrum and wife observing me from seats in the back.

Then the diamond-level Amway salesman entered to address the room.

I bolted. Vickrum and a male cohort chased me down the hall and all the way to the lot, where I found a third confederate staking out my car. I nearly ran him down on the way out of my space.

Absurd Job Interview 4

I remember how excited I was to receive an invitation to interview for a business development position with the Gallup Organization. Its Education Division created a 180-item online questionnaire called StrengthsFinder that categorizes people based on some 32 skill domains. The web site promoting StrengthsFinder talked endlessly

about the importance of StrengthsFinder in customizing employee recruitment and curriculum development solutions for the individual client. I was excited by the discussion of individuality and customization, which appeared to indicate a high value on personal strengths. I spent the entire week refining my pitch, which included my philosophy of science and technology and how it meshed with Gallup's own philosophy and the requirements of the position. I was also prepared to discuss how I was trained -- as a rare PhD in social-personality psychology – to construct, administer, score, interpret -- and evaluate the psychometric properties of – assessments of personality and cognitive functioning.

Then I received a call from the interviewer, who identified herself by a 6-digit number. With all the customary pleasantries of a DMW driving test coordinator, she launched into a discussion of something she called “ground rules.” I was quite surprised to learn I would not be permitted to speak freely and would be disqualified if I provided anything more than yes /no responses to the pre-determined series of questions. The interviewer explained that the point of the structured interview protocol was to eliminate salesmanship (i.e., self-promotion) during the interview. "But this is a SALES position," I protested, shortly after which I was disqualified.

Absurd Job Interview 5

I received a call from the administrator of the oncology business unit for a prominent medical center in Richmond, Virginia. From her tone it would appear she was making a genuine effort to recruit me into a rather unique position in which I would spend half my time writing reports for the analytics team in the university across the street and half my time engaged in strategic business planning for her office. She told me it was my rare PhD in social psychology that attracted her to me. She understands the value of that degree, as the employee I would be replacing – a wunderkind she romanticized often during the conversation – had this same PhD. And what made me an even more rare find to her was that I used this social science doctorate in an oncology setting, having designed a data integration tool for a cancer center and also having founded and co-owned a leading healthcare practice. In short, I understood both the business and science of medicine. She also lured me with the prospect of replacing her when she retired in 5 years. “We’re right down the street,” she said in reference to the 2-hour drive to meet the team in person.

One week later I showed for the interview. First I met with an informatics professional and the social psychologist himself, who surprised me by referring to his future with the organization as “uncertain.” I remember thinking that the administrator spoke as if the social psychologist was leaving and that I was expected to replace him and now he’s speaking as if he doesn’t know whether he’s even leaving. When this interview concluded I met with the administrator herself, who presented with noticeably less enthusiasm than in her a phone call a week earlier. She wanted me to verbally commit not only to take the job should it be offered but that I would remain in the job for at least 5 years, and then she entered into a maudlin retelling of how she lost an employee who’d been on the job only 6 months – just long enough to change the way they did business – before accepting a $40,000 raise to rejoin her former employer at the HCA in Nashville (healthcare industry hub). But I appear to have surprised her when I told her I’d accept the position right now. At that point she backpedalled, telling me “well let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I suppose anyone would say anything to get the job.” Then she felt obliged to tell me they received hundreds of applications for the position and that there was in fact one other person she planned to interview. Naturally this came as a surprise to me. Before I left the building, I asked the administrator’s assistant if she were at liberty to disclose whether the other candidate was an external or internal candidate. Her reply was interesting: “ah, both. This was someone who used to work here and who wanted to come back.” Now I’m more confused than ever.

One month passes and there’s no further word from anyone about the job. Three days after sending the administrator an email I received a letter by snail mail informing me that despite a difficult decision, she’d decided to pursue another candidate. I emailed her and her assistant a few times over the next few weeks seeking some insight into the basis for their decision. You know, so I could learn as much as I could from the experience. Eventually I was able to coax an email out of the assistant, who informed me that they had interviewed a great many people. Yet a third version of the truth emerges.

It would appear I happened into a drama of sorts. Was I really intended to replace the social psychologist? Did he change his mind about moving on to greener pastures? His LinkedIn page still identifies him as an employee although he apparently has also started his own small consulting firm. Was the other candidate, described as someone who left but wanted to return, the woman who had already returned to one former employer (i.e., the wunderkind from HCA)? Or is the truth something entirely different? In the words of the late Robert Stack, that’s what makes this … an unsolved mystery.

BJC HEALTHCARE: A CASE STUDY IN FITTING IN

So now you’re a well-branded and well-connected fit – a “perfect fit” in fact -- a square peg for a square hole with no superfluous education or out-of-place consulting gigs, experienced and amply credentialed – outfitted with the most modern certifications -- and free of adverse events. You survived the computer screen, the 6-second eye scan, the brief phone screen, and the informational interview, and you’ve now been invited to meet “the team” in person.

You can take comfort in knowing you’re halfway home.

But they still have to like you. The focus has now shifted to personality.

No sweat, right. You’re still young – or so you think – you’re 44, but you still have most of your hair, very little grey, and you’re thin and youthful looking. What you don’t know is that of the 12 people who are going to interview you over 5 sessions, 9 are under 35. You haven’t worked in 2½ years and the last time you were introduced to this many potential colleagues, you were fairly new to the 40s.

And you feel like you’re more than halfway home. I mean, the executive recruiter who has an exclusive contract with the hiring company – in this case a hospital – told the hiring manager “this – this is your guy.” The hiring manager liked you so much on paper – one of the first not to have a scathing criticism of your resume style -- that he wooed you by saying that he has every intention of making the 6 month contract a permanent job but just hasn’t had the time to gather all the signatures and complete all the documentation necessary to create the position. In the meantime, he vowed to extend the contract another 6 months. You returned the favor, justifying his love by providing him with a brief but cogent synopsis of the entire patient satisfaction literature and tantalizing him with some insights into why, despite dozens of six sigma black belts and specialists in the fields of clinical informatics and epidemiology, his Center of Clinical Excellence has been unable to provide the hospital with the guidance needed to re-tool operations, improve outcomes, and raise patient satisfaction scores. You demonstrated you not only listened to what he had to say, but that you understood him – possibly better than he understood himself – when you reframed his statement of the problem:

“Let me see if I understand you. You’ve seen enough logistic regressions and you’re looking for the cure for the common “expert.” While you’re hiring me in part because I am uniquely qualified among your staff to assess reliability and validity, you also sense that the gaps extend beyond the mechanics of the survey instruments and you’re open to new directions that would broaden your current approach. Toward this end I have a 4-pronged strategy for moving things forward.”

And you knew you had a solid opportunity when he interceded:

“I’m going to cut you off right there. I’ve heard all I need to hear. I will reach out to [NAME OF CORPORATE RECRUITER] and he will get back to you with the arrangements for next steps. We want to fly you out to meet the team.”

A week later you land in St. Louis where you spend a night in the Hyatt’s junior suite working on the mechanics of delivering your strategy. The next day kicks off with an introductory meeting with the hiring manager. The meeting

feels more like a working meeting than an interview. He presents you with PowerPoint print-outs probing deeper into the problem space, and you respond with the finer details of your strategy. The hiring manager than orients you to a day of interviews:“You should know that many of the people who will be speaking with you today do not understand why they’ve been asked to meet with you. I have not yet informed anyone as to why you’re here. This is out of respect for one member of the staff who has not worked out for us and does not yet know that.”

And it showed. The interviewers were not prepared to ask me questions. I tried to ease their burden by doing most of the talking. So when they led with a question as non-specific as “So tell me about yourself,” I ran with it. There’s a lot in my history that has a bearing on the challenges facing this organization. I made the best possible case for why this organization should put its faith in me – and I did this by discussing the uncommon challenges I faced, the decision making in the face of these challenges, and the outcomes. And I transitioned seamlessly into a discussion of the challenges facing their organization and how my past was instructive in providing me with some useful ideas – ideas I’ve applied before. And I smiled. I smiled a lot. And I made reference to the deep talent pool within their organization and where I felt I fit in and filled a small but vital gap. What happened next I could not have planned for.

Three days after returning home, I received a call from the corporate recruiter. Without customary pleasantries, icebreakers, or ado, he delivered the news.

“They don’t want to work with you in a consulting or any other capacity.”

He then proceeded to tell me that they thought I was qualified for the job, which is an understatement considering they will instruct the person they do hire to implement my ideas.

“They have a problem with your personality. They found you arrogant, pompous, and dismissive.”

At this point I’m beside myself. Perhaps I reacted too passionately to a very rare opportunity in the making. I came in with a relevant history and an intimate understanding of the challenges they faced, as well as some unique skills to fill a very small but vital hole in their Center. I reacted by trying to make the best possible case for why should hire me. I realize I was light years ahead of where most candidates should be at the interview stage. Some of the folks on staff had been informed just minutes before my arrival that the Center intended to hire an outside consultant and that that they should ask me some questions. And so the room was NOT very balanced. On one side of the table there were ill-prepared professionals -- responsible for a status quo they may not have known needed fixing – with half-baked questions for a candidate who stayed up all night polishing his delivery of a 4-pronged operational research strategy for resolving a challenge that remained in spite of hundreds of employees with backgrounds in research, informatics, transformation, and epidemiology.

I understood my contribution to my plight, but then I miscalculated when I assumed the staff would welcome with open arms anyone who could help them. I never realized that I had to make an entirely separate case for fitting in. I thought that just by virtue of dedicating myself to their challenge – making their challenge my challenge – I was fitting in. I was wrong. They had far more social – far more “Party of Five” ideas of what it took to fit in, and as long as this eluded me I did not stand a chance; for the staff consisted primarily of younger, female professionals from the Midwest.

Still, after spending the past couple years banging my head against the wall, this was no way for a candidacy to die. I was miffed. From what information I could cobble together, it sounds like the first thing this group did was to subject my business case to some violent inferences about my sense of self-worth. The discussions were very preoccupied with my ego rather than their operations. This was a cult-like group who felt close enough with one another socially to engage in that kind of character assessment and assassination. They were more concerned with how they envision me around the water cooler than the white board and frankly their conversation was more suited to an Internet chat room than a board room. None of them seemed concerned about the implications of

such a line of inquiry for the perceptions of their own professionalism or maturity. And perhaps in that lies the answer to my question -– and I imagine it’s your question as well -- about how a hospital system could fall so short so long in its goals despite such a broadly and deeply skilled talent pool. You cannot address patient satisfaction without addressing patient psychology, and despite all the training in statistical analysis, information systems, and process improvement systems, how this group handled my candidacy points to a blind spot when it comes to the human element.

Naturally, I followed up with the hiring manager via email, who responded as follows:

“I appreciate the heartfelt note and it personally touches me as both a father and as someone who grew up in a similar situation. I certainly didn't feel dismissed by you and enjoyed our exchange of ideas. I lead by consensus and the room was very mixed - too much to move forward. I hope good work comes for you soon in an environment that will be able to take advantage of your unique skills.”

The bottom line is I did not get the job. More egregiously, the humble hipster they do hire will not only get a $120,000 salary but the ideas to do the job effectively.

DELOITTE FAILS TO MAKE A STRONG CASE AS TO WHY BUSINESSES & COMMUNITIES SHOULD CARE ABOUT LTU

The Guide's strength lies in its statistically-driven statement of the problem. Three million long term unemployed is a problem -- for the three million long term unemployed. The Guide runs out of gas when it argues how the problems of the long term unemployed ripple outward to impact businesses and communities. And long term unemployment IS a problem. I confer with many unemployed people. I know what it could do to marriages, families, and to businesses most directly connected to the job loss. If you've never had to pull a child out of daycare, default on a lease, accept money from an ailing parent who retired on less than a high school diploma, share small living quarters with in-laws who jealousy guard their space, hock sentimental family heirlooms, liquidate a 401k, dispute every overdraft fee with your bank, file Chapter 7, and lose a spouse because you could no longer cope as a unit, you may not understand. The long term unemployed get less sympathy than they deserve. The reason for this is that most people who have jobs do not find their jobs very difficult. They did not have trouble finding their job at the time they found it. And they know they're in no real danger of losing it because employers are not laying people off. Our Commander-in-Chief enjoys talking about the number of consecutive months of positive job growth. But then what else would you expect? Employers probably over-reacted in 2009 and cut more jobs than they needed to, and so they've been hiring in drips and drabs ever since -- if you could call all these part-time, low wage, fixed term project-based work "jobs." (I've received hundreds of spam emails from self-proclaimed recruiters -- for some reason with Indian or Pakistani names* -- looking for someone to fill a 3-6 month position in a city some 1,000 - 2,500 miles away). So when the unemployed talk about how bad things are, they're often greeted with derisive chortling and morbid suspicion. I’m sorry, but you can’t address the crisis in unemployment without addressing psychology. Deloitte sidesteps psychology entirely and this is the reason it comes across as lacking both a heart and a brain.

GUIDE ASPIRES TO NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

The other problem with The Guide, besides lacking an overarching diagnosis of the root causes of LTU, is that it reads like the prospectus for a charity fundraiser. Employers who hire LTU are helping out a fellow human being. They're making a contribution to the community. They're promoting diversity. With section headings like "Focus on Inclusion" and "Strengthen Local Communities," Deloitte sounds like it's going door to door selling peanut brittle for ALS.

"65% of global spending power is controlled by women and the LGBT community’s buying power topped $830 million last year."

And the guide also makes the mistake of using race and ethnicity as a proxy for diversity. There is just as much if not more variation within these social categories than between them. I for one have been penalized for

unconventional interests and approaches to problems (see my groundbreaking work with dreams). And I was a white heterosexual male aged 18-49. Still am. True diversity of thinking and experience is not a product of one's skin color and any formula that equates the two labors under a misapprehension of diversity that's black-and-white and skin deep. Believe me, I know. I was privy to a few faculty searches during my tenure as a PhD student in 4 different university systems. Academics carry the banner for diversity and multiculturalism but their selection practices only serve to surround themselves with a racially and ethnically diverse group of like-minded partisans.

The Guide also recommends that employers use Workforce Investment Boards and local Community Job Centers for lists of the LTU. Most of the LTU have never even heard of these entities and they would feel dismayed to learn somewhere down the line that the only organizations willing to hire someone out of work for 8 months plucked people off a list they didn't know existed. Not to mention the fact that Community Job Center conjures images of low-skilled workers in tattered olive green chinos. That's not going to inspire businesses to seek out the LTU.

A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE FOR LABOR ANALYTICS & RESEARCH: WHAT WE NEED TO BE A LITTLE LESS ADHD

Deloitte Consultants should have pointed to data gaps in traditional labor analytics. Americans are more savvy today than they were 6 years ago about the limitations of the unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They’re aware that this rate does not include persons seeking full-time work who settled for part-time jobs (i.e., underemployed) or workers who dropped out of the workforce (e.g., discouraged). Now contrary to conventional wisdom, household surveys performed by the BLS do access this data and represents them under separate metrics that are not headlined by the media (e.g., U-6). However, the survey methodology does not gather the data needed to understand the complex cause-effect relationships at the root of employment numbers, resulting in a situation where people have to resort to drawing inferences from trends that can be spun to suit any political taste.

IF YOU NEED STATISTICS TO PROVE YOU HAVE AN EFFECT ...

“If you need statistics to prove you have an effect, you don’t have an effect.”

When I was a graduate student in psychology, we had a saying. Only we didn’t. It was more of a dirty little secret said amongst friends or colleagues you trust. And you never wanted your name attached to the saying. Because research training in psychology programs is statistically rigorous. We loved statistics. The more sophisticated the statistics – the more authoritative we appeared. Multiple regressions. Factor analysis. MANOVAs and ANCOVAs. We basked in the reflected authority of the stats we used. And they're easy. Once your data is in the appropriate spreadsheet, you select the analysis from the drop-down menu. Point and click. Let the computer do the rest. And if your sample was large enough, a miniscule difference between groups could be made to appear "statistically significant" and no one would be the wiser. In the behavioral sciences, many of us didn't understand statistics very well (not nearly as well as statisticians), and the consumers of our research understood even less. And the general public understood virtually nothing.

But I didn't worship blindly at this altar. I understood the limits of big data analysis. If you look at the illustrative case of BJC Healthcare (see preceding post), you'd see how far hundreds of informatics specialists, epidemiologists, and process improvement professionals with six sigma black belts actually got BJC. Not very far. After years of logistic regressions and survey analysis, they went looking for an outside consultant and "cure for the common expert."

I want more for myself than the appearance of science and authority. In my grad school days, I remember how our research publications were treated as coming-out parties and we were all expected to don the tuxedo, which is all well and good as long as you spent some time in work boots and gloves. Most of my colleagues (who ended up becoming tenured professors) didn’t. They loved statistics but did not like data analysis.

My point is that sometimes this authority comes at the expense of authenticity. In the hands of people of average intelligence and below-average imagination, statistics were nothing more than the sound and fury of Shakespeare.

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

Instead of treating survey respondents and job seekers like livestock and herding them through a statistical sausage grinder that partitions variance, why not treat each as their own separate experiment. (Split the atom of research so to speak by partitioning variance WITHIN the unit of analysis). Instead of lying out a sign-in sheet in the psych department lounge and waiting for it to fill up with the names of 30 Psych 101 students seeking to fulfill a course requirement (as is customary in university research) … instead of showing up with a stack of questionnaires to a classroom filled with these 30 students, disseminating them, and asking them to drop them off on their way out the door ... why not get to know them? Why not treat them like a series of 30 n = 1 experiments? Draw conclusions within individuals before abstracting across them.

What does this mean for Labor? This means that for any given job seeker, we should be examining the jobs applied to, the methods of application, characteristics represented in the résumé of the job seeker, and the outcomes to include such follow-up data as reason given by employer for non-hire, criteria and characteristics sought by employer, and how the applicant fell short.

Next month I hope to release data on my own 2½-year job search. The results will look something like this:

Between the dates of June 1 and November 22, 2014, a job search log was created detailing hours allocated to following activities: (a) LinkedIn, (b) resume-writing / editing at suggestion of third party, and (c) online job review and application.

A. Between the dates of June 1 and November 22, 2014, LinkedIn was used to alert two types of health care industry professionals to my employment needs and qualifications: (a) recruiters (also known as talent acquisition professionals, hiring consultants, and sourcers) and (b) hospital employees with managerial authority over the quality of healthcare services (e.g., Service Excellence, Quality, Operations, Performance Improvement, Informatics, Transformation / Innovation). Initial contact was established through the following introduction:

[INTRODUCTION REDACTED]

Of the 6,100 professionals who received invitations to connect on LinkedIn, [PENDING] accepted. Of these people, all of whom received an introductory message, [PENDING] replied. Replies were classified and tallied as follows: (a) [PENDING] informed to tell me they were not aware of any opportunities at this time / (b) [PENDING] informed me they were not suitable contacts for the type of job sought / (c) [PENDING] made vague, non-specific references to another company or source of job information / (d) [PENDING] directed me in non-specific way to review job listings on web site of their own company or one belonging to client / (e) [PENDING] requested a resume with or without a request for clarification on job sought and desired salary and location / (f) [PENDING] referred me to a third party contact / presumed source of assistance / (g) [PENDING] directed me to a specific opportunity for which I would need to submit an online application / (h) [PENDING] directed me to a specific opportunity and facilitated connection with hiring manager / (i) [PENDING] requested an informational interview by phone for the purposes of getting to know job seeker or entering job seeker information in system / (j) [PENDING] requested an informational interview by phone for the purposes of exploring a specific opportunity.

Of the responses classified above, [PENDING] resulted in interviews with a hiring manager. Of the [PENDING] interviews, the following are descriptions of the encounters in which I was informed I was not hired.

UPDATE: I have worked my way through a random sample of 514 industry recruiters. This represents a small portion of my 6,500 LinkedIn connections, which is a percentage of the total number of recruiters whose

connection I sought. Two hundred and eighty-seven of the 514 recruiters (56%) accepted my LinkedIn invitation. Of the 287 with whom I connected, 53 (18%) replied to a message seeking assistance and outlining my value to an organization. Of the 53 who replied to my message, 22 requested a résumé (42%). (By now this 22 represents 4% of the recruiters to whom I reached out). Of the 22 who requested a résumé, 8 had a specific position in mind based on my message or LinkedIn profile.

Future updates to this data will be posted.

B. Over the course of the job search, I received x number of unsolicited comments regarding my resume suggesting changes (B1). The following is a classification scheme for the changes suggested. Additionally, x number of people were selected at random to review to my resume for content and structure, and I received the following feedback (B2).

C. Over the course of the job search, I submitted applications for x number of positions. Y% required submissions of soft copy resumes and cover letters, and Z% involved an online job application. The following is a list of information requested as part of the online job application:

A LIST OF ADDRESSES FOR ALL RESIDENCES FOR THE PAST 7 YEARS (%)EXPLANATIONS FOR GAPS IN EMPLOYMENT (%)AUTHORIZATION FOR A CREDIT REPORT (%)AFFIRM, DENY, AND QUALIFY A CRIMINAL CONVICTION TO INCLUDE MISDEMEANORSAFFIRM OR DENY HAVING BEEN TERMINATED, OR HAVING RESIGNED TO AVOID TERMINATIONONLINE ASSESSMENT OF SKILLS OR EXPERIENCES

D. Over the course of the search, contacts were asked to complete a brief questionnaire concerning their assessment of labor market activity.

INTRODUCING A NEW UNIVERSITY TO BRIDGE THE CHASM BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Matthew Giarmo holds a PhD in Social Psychology and performed contract work across a variety of industries, including the U.S. Department of Labor. Dr. Giarmo also attended multiple universities at the graduate and undergraduate levels subscribing to different models (e.g., science-practitioner), including a for-profit professional school. Dr. Giarmo has collected data on four of his own job searches since 1997.

Epilogue: Civilization in Transition

There is nothing wrong with higher education in an of itself. The problem is that it suddenly appears far too self-contained for the tastes of modern technological employers. I personally am nostalgic for the days before the Internet. Before software. Before email. I miss the mystique of a Big World and the romanticism of the "night." Today's world is a 24/7/365 world. A world of instant communication. A world of ADHD credentialism where PhDs are diminished as over-educated in favor of Six Sigma black belts and holders of other certificates. A world where intellectuals are judged by the quality of their PowerPoint slides. A world where the quantity of our contacts has impinged on the quality of our relationships, and where the strength of the network has diminished the quality of the individual, who is less a source of vital thinking and more the sum of the roles he performs within the communities he represents.

The world was ill-prepared to deal with the consequences of the Internet and Software Revolution, and I doubt you will find people willing to acknowledge the hidden Medieval underbelly to this Golden Age / Age of Aquarius. One of the casualties of the Software Revolution is the college and university. There is a conceptual pragmatism and parsimony that runs through America's bloodstream. Always has. It's the kind of extraverted, materialistic mentality that we see in such notions as "all that damned book learnin'," "too much studying / reading pollutes the soul," and "there is no world beyond what can be perceived with our five senses." But employers, who've always been a practical, bottom-lining group have had to rely on educational variables in screening and selecting candidates. Advanced degrees, thesis titles, GPAs, and even where one went to school were hiring considerations.

And then came the Software Revolution.

Now we have a disconnect between the labor market and higher education that no one wants to acknowledge. While graduates -- many with MAs and PhDs -- are unable to find work or the earning potential needed to repay student loans, employers are giving priority consideration to applicants with long lists of industry micro-certifications and software in which they are proficient. For many employers, measuring your capabilities and even intelligence is a small matter of asking you how many years you have spent working with programs a, b, c, x, and y at z level. And if you can produce an email or scanned document demonstrating that you have been certified proficient by an institute or software manufacturer following a training, all the better. Job descriptions for positions in hospitals are written to accept applicants with nothing more advanced than a baccalaureate degree while excluding applicants who do not have Six Sigma, PMP, EPIC, RHIT, or CPHQ certificates. These represent highly targeted, domain-specific measures of intelligence for employers who struggle to wrap their minds around the meaning of some PhDs (and who struggle to ask). For employers, these certifications are also a sign of some kind of pre-existing acculturation to their community -- that you have in fact been socialized into their culture. I will not deny these benefits, though I must protest by pointing out that the true problem solvers, detectives, innovators, and creative thinkers will come from the ranks of higher education. Certificate programs develop and reward one type of intelligence cognitive psychologists call "convergent intelligence" -- the ability to adapt and conform to an environment -- whereas doctoral programs reward and develop divergent intelligence -- the ability to find solutions to novel problems and questions for which there is more than one meaningful answer.

As the lingering effects of the Great Recession and a five year budget impasse on Capitol Hill continue to make themselves felt, mounting student loan debt and employer contempt for the career preparatory function of universities have Americans questioning for the first time in its history the value of an investment in traditional degree programs. Some are abandoning expensive 4-year schools in favor of community and technical colleges, as wage data for the first time reveals that community college grads earn more than their counterparts from 4-year liberal arts colleges. Others are turning their back on higher education altogether to teach themselves coding and software skills with the aid of the Internet. The closing of Sweet Briar College (my wife's alma mater) is a shot across the bow, though it should be noted that as catastrophic implosions go, this is a relatively distant Super Nova considering the school had all the symptoms: it was single gender; it was rural; and it was expensive ($47,000 for annual tuition, room, and board). Still with only 56% of university Presidents willing to forecast a 10-year outlook for solvency (down from 69% a year earlier), it's time for Americans to begin saying its long goodbyes to higher education as they know it. Graduates of community colleges earn more on average than graduates of 4-year liberal arts colleges.

"As They Know It"

As recently as ten years ago when employers were handing out their annual grade of "D" to the university system, universities responded by saying "up yours." After all, university administrators and professors alike did not see themselves as being in the job training business. Their role was one of teaching basic citizenship skills, including critical thinking. This was a place for America's youth to learn how to live with others and how to apply their intelligence in more expansive ways. But now that it is becoming increasingly clear that jobs are hard to get but can be had if one picked up the kind of experience colleges do not provide (i.e., software), a dark cloud of American pragmatism is settling over campuses nationwide. "All that damned book learnin'." No employer is

going to take the time to engage that mind of yours that you developed in college unless you fill your resume with lists of software and certificates.

I suspect colleges and universities will adapt. Money has that kind of influence. You are beginning to see adjustments in drips and drabs with such consumer-driven course offerings as Six Sigma from Villanova and degree programs like Healthcare Analytics from The George Washington University. A few years from now I'm going to pity people like myself whose traditional degrees will lack the trendy face validity and relevance of some of these new titles.

The Great Articulation: Designing the First Truly American College and College for the 21st Century

If I had the $250 million dollars Sweet Briar alum are attempting to raise to save their school, I could break ground on a university every employer would want to hire from and every 18-year-old in the country would want to attend. I could also save a few orphanages and start a number of companies, but then no one listens to me anyway. My university of the future is based on a true partnership between scholarship and industry. I haven't quite decided what I'd call it yet but it's academic program structure would be aligned with high growth industries. Energy. Aviation & Aerospace. Healthcare & Biotechnology. Finance. Advanced Manufacturing. Infrastructure & Home Systems. Security & Incident Management. (These are tentative pending the results of additional research). The curriculum within each academic program would contain all the components needed to enhance a directed and specialized kind of intelligence relevant to that industry. So instead of cramming everyone into a dull and quite frankly stupid survey course like Psychology 101, there would be a psychology class within each industry. A history class. A course in research methodology and associated maths / statistics. A course in supply chain management. And a course (or two) in information systems where students are exposed to the software or programming languages. Many of the courses will also deliver the information needed to obtain a certificate so that passing the final exam will add an acronym to your name. Among the many certificates one would earn in the healthcare program, there's CPHQ and a Six Sigma black belt for the Quality Improvement course, RHIT for Information Management, and EPIC within a survey course on EMR systems, CPHIT for Population Health, HCISSP and others for a course in Compliance and Regulatory Systems, and FACHE and CBIP for Hospital Management and Business Intelligence. (The curriculum would also include courses in Enterprise Systems Management and Health Informatics).

Like traditional universities, there would be a capstone research project that the student would defend before a committee much like one would defend a PhD. This would foster divergent thinking skills and provide the individual with his or her own identity beyond coordinates in the "credential space." The students would also enroll in other capstone (or "finishing") courses in which they receive guidance in building a resume and LinkedIn profile (e.g., Resume Writing, Interviewing, Social Networking).

Are there any courses that would apply equally to all majors so that you can herd 700 people into an auditorium regardless of major? Not many, but yes. And it wouldn't be Introduction to Western Civilization. It would be SQL.

By now you should be realizing just how large the chasm is between colleges and employers. I mean, contrast the above with the traditional curriculum for a popular major like Business. A review of a graduate's transcripts would reveal courses like Anthropology, Introduction to the Theater, Descriptive Astronomy, Sociology of Religion, and maybe even a seminar on Tupac Shaqur (see UCLA). I actually endorse the Arts & Humanities and perhaps a college like mine can include a semester in which the student develops and demonstrates his adaptability across 5 such existential / civilization-themed courses. The shortfall of universities is not in these courses but in the failing of the curriculum within one's core major to address the fundamental realities of the modern business and technological environment.

My model is inspired in part by my work monitoring multi-million dollar grants for the U.S. Department of Labor and in part by an ill-fated attempt to earn a second PhD at a for-profit professional school (i.e., Argosy University formerly The American School of Professional Psychology and The Art Institute), where a highly pragmatic

credential-happy practitioner-model was imposed on students seeking degrees in perhaps the only fields for which this model is grossly out of place: (a) psychology* and (b) art.

(*The industry-conscious curriculum may have facilitated the school's accreditation by the American Psychological Association but does little to impact a graduate's employability. Those who graduate with a PsyD -- the practitioner's doctorate in psychology -- can always opt for solo practice. As for employers, well a group practice or mental health delivery service will not care whether the student passed "Federal competency exams" for administration, scoring, and interpretation of projective (i.e., Rorschach) and cognitive assessment tests (e.g., WISC / WAIS).

Beyond a relevant and rigorous curriculum, my hypothetical college would also include an outplacement office that maintains and updates career pathway data for positions in each industry, including career ladders & lattices, core competencies, and statistics on job requirements submitted by participating employers in exchange for access to students and input into future revisions of the curriculum.

The first college President to steal my idea will probably have artists lining up to reproduce his effigy in oil on canvas. It would be the first university endorsed and accredited by a committee of Fortune 500 CEOs. Students will leave Harvard to go there. And university costs will be addressed not by endowments but by advertising dollars. It will be the first university to completely shed its European roots. The first truly American college.