Best Methods For Fixing Unemployment

(shrug) Stats kool-aid is powerful stuff.

Does Finance count as a useless business major? :P

Well, this isn't good news: ILO warns of youth unemployment 'crisis'

Nothing new under the sun, unfortunately.

Oh hey, I'm not a young person.

Woo.

edited 22nd May '12 2:41:32 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

well shit, I am. :(

I despise when journalists use the word crisis to describe something that took a long time to build up and has a long term solution. A crisis is something sudden. Bah, friggin journalists.

"A crisis (from the Greek κρίσις - krisis;[1] plural: "crises"; adjectival form: "critical") is any event that is, or expected to lead to, an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, community or whole society. "

Bah. BAH I say.

You act like setting up and using a fairly basic database of narrow information about a relatively small subset of people is something hideously expensive and complicated. Hell, I could probably have done that much in my CS 275 class.

edited 22nd May '12 3:47:10 PM by Pykrete

Integrating that system so that hiring managers actually check it is the expensive part-aka, the human end of things.

That's like a weekend job to set up a Drupal-style site on the company's local network. Enter name, pull up identifying information and application history. Leave the rest to employer's call. Done.

Like I said, this is 200-level material here. It wouldn't even qualify as a senior project.

edited 22nd May '12 3:54:20 PM by Pykrete

You have no idea what it's like in a corporate environment do you? :P

I'm well aware that the company would probably spend ten times the expenses required to actually set the damn thing up agonizing over things, forming a committee to agonize over it some more, look for a contractor, find a way to get an executive bonus out of it, etc., all on company time. The point remains that what's actually being asked for is a two-day job at the most.

edited 22nd May '12 9:15:30 PM by Pykrete

To be completely honest, the only thing keeping hiring managers from actually looking at shit is laziness.

HR people are lazy as fuck, and don't do a whole lot in the way of useful things. I can see it being a problem in a huge corporation, but not in businesses comprised of say, hundreds.

Metrics are fucking bullshit. Then again, the corporate life is so foreign to me that it all looks like disingenuous bullshit. I don't know how the current rubrick for what a corporate atmosphere is supposed to be got put into place. It's just so utterly inferior to most anything else. Just a big treadmill of suffering that chugs along like a tank that's been put together with duct tape and elbow grease.

Also, I did an interview with the county paper. They are going to do a story on Guard/Reserve unemployment in the county, and discrimination.

It's worth noting that not only will my old companies name be plastered in the article, the fact that they paid my last and only check(they didn't pay me for my first month) without taking taxes out. And I also hinted to the fact that I'm not the only one who gets paid under the table with a quick check. I sent the IRS a little email.

Boss.

Why do you think that? I mean, just running them through a bullshit metrics filter can remove ninety percent of the work, so why wouldn't they do it? Bah, it just feeds into my preconceived notion that HR departments shouldn't be paid as well as they are. Also, random tazings. *shakes fist*

One of the things that makes HR departments seem lazier than they really are is that in many cases they're forced to wait for a certain number of applicants — at least in more professional positions.

Still, that's another thing that screws entry-level employees. While they're waiting for their quota, new laborers are jobless and still paying rent/food.

edited 22nd May '12 11:26:30 PM by Pykrete

I get the impression that my company's HR department, at least, is massively overworked. The reason jobs can take so long to fill is that they have to sort through literally thousands of applications for each position, especially at the hourly/entry level like customer service.

HR has a very important function: it's their job to grease the wheels of corporate intercourse, so to speak. My mother in law works in HR and she has to manage the benefits of hundreds of workers, including answering every question and inquiry that comes past her desk and teaching people why they should get health insurance and put money in a 401(k), among other things. It's no sinecure.

The fact that some HR departments are staffed with lazy workers makes them no different than any other department of any company. You can always find lazy workers if you look hard enough.

Viewpoint: The time Britain slid into chaos: An item from The BBC from a Historian comparing the situation in Europe to the Fall of The Roman Empire — unsurprisingly, it is rather similar.*

HR aren't lazy, they are just the most hobbled by bureaucracy.

Look at it this way, if you actually get a job, how do you keep that job? Depending on corporate/business culture either it is based more on performance, or it is based more on schmoozing (obviously the worse the climate, the more schmoozing). So what does that mean for HR workers? Their number one concern isn't hiring good people. Their number one concern, in terms of job performance, is not hiring garbage people. So they do everything in their power to not be at fault for hiring a bad candidate that somehow slipped through the interview system. If that means hacking resume stacks, being racist, following stupid metric rules, then that's what they do. Would you want to lose a job hiring someone?

You have to look at it from their point of view. I certainly don't like it, but that's what happens.

It's only once you get to high-end jobs that HR people are given more leeway to do what they need to do to properly source candidates, but those are jobs that pay 80k/year and up, so for the vast majority of Americans, most of whom earn 30k/year or less, that means you're So L.

How would I solve that? I don't know, because government can't force businesses to not be assholes, well at least not in a capitalist market system anyway.

edited 25th May '12 3:11:40 PM by breadloaf

They sorta can force business not to be assholes, but it involves passing legislation that hobbles said assholes' ability to give them obscene amounts of money, so you can guess how well that's gonna go across.

Pretty sure it's not HR that's getting shitloads of money.

Thread Hop: Honestly, it seems like the only real way to fix the American economy would be to limit CEO saleries and increase minimum wage and lower-class salaries, to get more money spent. And that would require enormous initiative among many Americans.

@breadloaf - post 545 - I never thought of it that way. Very insightful.