by Daniel Akst
It’s an article of faith among jobseekers and commentators that the longer a person is unemployed, the harder it is to find work. But the research into this question is decidedly mixed. Duration of joblessness, after all, might be correlated with some other issue that puts off employers.
To get to the bottom of this, three economists devised an interesting experiment. They sent out 12,000 fictitious resumes for 3,000 real job openings in 100 labor markets. On these resumes, they varied the employment status and, if the bogus worker was unemployed, they varied the term of unemployment from one to 36 months. Then they tracked callbacks against duration of joblessness.
They found that, for jobless applicants, “the average callback rate sharply declines during the first eight months of unemployment and then it stabilizes.” In fact, at eight months of unemployment, callbacks are 45 percent lower than at one month because the callback rate falls from around 7 percent to around 4 percent.
And gradual loss of skill probably isn’t the issue, because the callback rate starts falling early in unemployment. No, apparently employers see length of unemployment as some kind of indicator of a person’s productivity.
Interestingly, the study found that duration of joblessness hurt the callback rate much more when job markets were tight. Sensibly enough, employers are more likely to overlook prolonged joblessness when unemployment is high (“there but for the grace of God…”). Presumably when unemployment is lower, employers figure the problem is not in the applicant’s stars, but in the applicant.