Ohio wants to keep track of applicants who skip job interviews
A reader writes:
Earlier this month in Ohio, a pair of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill to create a website with lists of people who’ve no showed for interviews. I’ve included a link to Ohio’s Statehouse News Bureau’s reporting information — because truly when I first heard about it, I thought for sure the person was doing a bit.
It seems to be specially focused on those receiving unemployment benefits, but it seems it could quickly turn into including everyone.
I’m curious about your thoughts in general, but also in application. How on earth could they validate that the person no showed, and what if the person who entered the name into the database is an ex or disgruntled employee? I’ve received unemployment benefits twice in the 30+ years I’ve been in the workforce, so what’s to say my name would ever be dropped from said lists? Would future employers know I’d no-showed to an interview in five years prior?
This is a fully bananapants idea.
Private employers don’t need the government to track who does and doesn’t show up for interviews; this is not a problem that is in need of a government-level solution.
If the government wants to make sure that people who are receiving unemployment benefits are genuinely conducting a good-faith search for work and not cavalierly blowing off interviews, they can do what most states do: require benefits recipients to fill out periodic reporting on their job hunt, with spot checks for accuracy. Is this 100% foolproof? It’s not; people who just want to collect benefits for as long as possible without putting real effort into find a job can lie, or they can deliberately send in applications that won’t get them interviews, or they can target jobs they’re not qualified for, or they can show up for interviews and deliberately bomb. Some people will always look for a way to beat the system, but a database to find out who ghosted their interviewers won’t solve any of that.
Moreover, how are they going to guard against inaccuracy? After all, we’ve all heard about interviewers who get their interview scheduling wrong — are they going to report someone for not showing up for a 10 am Tuesday interview when they accidentally told the person Thursday? To deal with that, they’d have to include a way for people to challenge a report — and now we’re talking about significant additional bureaucracy for a problem that didn’t require a solution in the first place.
And to be clear, this proposal isn’t confined to people receiving unemployment benefits — they note that would be part of it, but they’re proposing it would cover all job-seekers. Why? Once you take unemployment benefits recipients out of this, what part of it is the government’s business?
Then, of course, there’s the obvious elephant in the room, which is that employers ghost candidates far more often than candidates ghost employers. Orders of magnitude more. The numbers of each side are so disproportionately out of whack that, again, you have to ask: how is this a problem that needs a government solution? If they want to do a public service, they’d be helping more people if they tracked employers that mistreated candidates, not the other way around — not something that will ever happen, of course, but come on. (Hmmm, kind of seems like maybe people aren’t who they’re looking to help.)
Apparently these two legislators in Ohio feel that they have solved all the other problems in their state and thus have the leisure time to contemplate weird Orwellian measures like this, but they could better serve Ohio by staying out of it.
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