After a health insurance company laid him off in 2012, John Columbus spent the next 20 months answering as many questions about gaps in his résumé as about his years of employment.
Then a friend steered him to U.S. Bank, which was piloting a White House initiative for hiring the long-term unemployed. "There are some companies that ask you for any involuntary termination," Columbus said. "Those companies never call back. U.S. Bank looked at me as a whole person with 30 years of experience."
If Columbus, a 53-year-old New Hope resident, embodies the woes of Americans out of work for more than six months, the Obama administration hopes a new hiring drill at Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank helps the nation address an ugly legacy of the Great Recession.
Some recent research shows that businesses would rather hire people with no experience than experienced workers who have been out of work for a long time. Using recommendations from a handbook drafted by Deloitte Consulting and the Rockefeller Foundation, Minnesota's fifth largest public corporation is searching for ways to give a fairer shake to those job seekers. The handbook "increases knowledge of conscious or unconscious bias" against the unemployed, explained U.S. Bank human resources chief Jennie Carlson.
This consciousness-raising has yielded new employees like Columbus, whose extended jobless status and age often left him drowning on the bottom of the applicant pool. The bank's work drew the praise of a senior White House official.
"U.S. Bank has taken an active leadership role in this initiative, including partnering with peer companies to engage other Twin Cities employers to embrace these practices," Byron Auguste, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told the Star Tribune in an e-mail.
Whether programs like the one U.S. Bank piloted can work nationally "depends on whether employers are doing this [discrimination] unintentionally or whether they believe it produces a better pool of workers," said Joe Ritter, a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota.
There has been progress. The ranks of the long-term unemployed have shrunk by 900,000 since the White House hiring initiative kicked off in January. But that is not yet enough to address the drag of long-term unemployment on the economy. In mid-2009, people out of work more than 27 weeks accounted for over 40 percent of the nation's total unemployed. Last month, more than five years into economic recovery, the long-term unemployed still represented almost one-third of the country's jobless. Today, roughly 3 million Americans have been out of work more than 27 weeks.