Searching for a Job in in the Recession

Here's a little something that I came across on Crooks and Liars. The post from Susie Madrak describes how the recession is affecting the job search market. The emphasis of the post is that, when we fall into a recession, employers become increasing selective about the candidates that they look to hire. Not only does the hiring market become a 'buyer's market', providing employers with substantially more leverage over a prospective hire, but it also shifts the employer's behavior. Here's a quote about what employers say that they are looking for:

they would prefer to fill positions with “passive candidates” who are working elsewhere and not actively seeking a job.

While we're all familiar with that old axiom about it being easier to find a job when you have a job, think about what this means, extracted into some sort of theoretical expression of marketing, economics, and buyer behavior. Using the "Blue Ocean" metaphor, as the market gets more tense, this group of decision makers would rather increase their fishing in a place that yields fewer results (assuming that the quality of the result will be higher) than using a broader net and then perform an actual analysis of quality.