As always, this is a long one :)
I have a friend who idolizes corporations. He gets starry eyed when he hears how many eggs McDonald's serves in a day, his heart flutters when he thinks about how much hard drive space Google has, and he thinks GE is the reason we don't live in caves. I take a more jaded view. Big corporate does good things, questionable things, and clearly bad things. Nothing is all good or all bad, just like anything else in real life. He doesn't get why I don't love big business or corporate. By the way, he's a centrist Democrat, so no fire breathing Rush stuff here. I explained to him the other day that part of the reason we have unemployment is that private corporations aren't as hungry for new talent and may be unable to make good hiring decisions. It's much easier to scapegoat college students with "the wrong majors" than to say that HR managers aren't good at their jobs.
Case in point.
I've authored five books, speak three languages fluently (a total of seven at various levels of fluency), and had experience teaching overseas. I have a Masters from a top university. I volunteered for a non profit and helped them with brochures and all manner of tech type stuff. Nothing on my resume says "lazy." I show a lot more personal responsibility than the average Republican, but I would never be arrogant or adversarial about it as they are. I put myself through college working two minimum wage jobs and got scholarships. My strategy with scholarships was that I might not get the $20,000 scholarship, but I could get 10-20 $100 scholarships. Those scholarships most people overlook and they only require writing a 500 word essay about using fewer plastic bags and saving the environment. I did try to get the "Fountainhead Shrugged" scholarship, but you couldn't even pay me $10,000 to read Ayn Rand all the way through.
I digress. I have a pretty good resume that shows a lot of different skills in different areas. My friend works in Texas at a computer company in their HR department and asked me if I wanted a job two years ago. I was unemployed and working part time at a McJob because my resume had been previously ignored. I had two interviews at two different companies, but was turned down. I figured that would happen; I had never done an interview before and I wanted to gain some experience with them so I'd do better in the future. My friend said the company was looking for someone similar in temperament and intelligence as her, and she knew I could do the job. I wasn't excited about nepotism, but I felt anything was better than one more day at the McJob, so I sent her my resume and told her good luck.
What happened next was a farce. She put my resume in with the rest of the pile and she waited a few days to ask the hiring manager what he thought. She didn't want to make it too obvious she wanted me hired, but then again, they asked her to find someone she knew to try and fill the job. The hiring manager skimmed my resume and grunted. "This is the resume of a linguist. If he told me he wanted to be VP of HR in 10 years, I'd think he was lying. He doesn't even have an MBA." First off, the man has no idea what a linguist does. My friend was angry, but decided to just turn around and walk away. On her way out the door, she turned and said "If you had used that logic when you looked at my resume, you would've never hired me." She was right. Nothing about her resume said "VP of Human Resources," and she was hired by a different person. In 3 months of working, my friend has been promoted and received two hefty bonuses for her excellent performance.
My friend told me and to this day she is still angry about it. The person they did end up hiring had the correct alphabet soup next to his name. He had an MBA with a human resources certificate. He apparently got along well with the hiring manager...and was let go within two months. My friend told me the new guy was incompetent and cost the company money because he was inflexible, not creative, and wasn't much brighter than the hiring manager. Also, the hiring manager himself has been in the same position for ten years, without any sort of promotion. He tries to make my friend look bad on her job, but then fails and actually strengthens my friend's position within the company, but has yet to figure out what he's doing is stupid.
To be honest, I'm not bitter at all. I'm glad I didn't, because now I get to do something different, that I really like, and will start my own business where I'll have a lot of autonomy. I would've liked to have worked in a company though. My friend said I would've done as well as she had, but would have had an aneurism working for dumb people.
Next time you hear a right winger going on about how the unemployed are lazy because "There are jobs out there! They just don't want to work them!" then think about how many people who would do well that don't get in because there is a wall of private sector stupidity holding them back. Hiring managers, like the one mentioned in this story, stick around because they show loyalty and don't make any sort of waves. So long as the company has plenty of revenue coming in (and this one does), they set themselves up so that their position is never in jeopardy...but they never move up. An economy that does not take its high level people and put them in arenas where they can grow is a stagnant economy.