Long-term joblessness has received a lot of attention in the United States lately thanks to the surge in unemployment that followed the global financial crisis. One young researcher called Rand Ghayad was surprised by how so many smart, well-educated and experienced people had been out of work for so long even when job vacancies started to improve. He decided to investigate why those who had been out of work for more than six months seemed to be faring far worse in finding a new job than those who had been unem­ployed for a brief period of time. To find out he sent out almost 5,000 fake resumes in response to hundreds of online job advertisements. The dummy applicants had iden­tical cre­den­tials except for their duration of unem­ploy­ment and industry expe­ri­ence.

Candidates with relevant experience who had been out of work for only a short period got the most callbacks – no surprises there. But Ghayad also discovered that employers were three times more likely to call an applicant with irrelevant but recent employment experience, than someone who had relevant experience but had been out of work for more than six months.

Appli­cants who had been out of work for more than six months were almost never con­tacted for an inter­view.

"It isn't that firms aren't finding the right workers," Ghayad said, "but that employers are screening out the long-​​term unemployed."

The findings suggest that employers are using long-term unemployment as a quick – perhaps even automatic – reason to disqualify candidates when there are many applications.