Is unemployment a barrier to employment?

Last week I wrote about the prevalence of discrimination in the recruitment industry. As part of the research for that I ran a survey asking if recruiters had been asked to discriminate on various grounds. One respondent added the following comment; “I am unemployed and looking for work. The single biggest handicap I have is being unemployed. Forget disability/race/religion – this is the most prevalent cause of discrimination in recruitment.”

My background in recruitment was at a firm where a high percentage of the roles were headhunt assignments and nearly all the candidates on a shortlist would have been in employment. I know that it was a standard belief back then (15 year ago) that in general an unemployment candidate wasn’t going to be as attractive to an employer. I thought it’d be useful to get a bit more information from a jobseeker perspective of perceptions. TipTopJob kindly offered to run a survey on their LinkedIn Group asking: Do you think discrimination on the basis of “unemployment” exists?

With 554 responses I think we had a good sample size and the results showed that 78% felt that “unemployment discrimination” exists and only 22% felt it didn’t.

Some felt that good business sense would prevail and that the person best suited for the post would get the job but if you scroll down the comments on the questionnaire you’ll see how many people personally feel they’ve been affected by their employment situation.

As a recruiter do you actively seek out only employed candidates, are you shrinking your talent pool by doing this? So, what’s the answer to this? Does the fault lie with HR, with line managers, with recruitment agencies or is it justifiable ?