Job site’s employment guarantee not targeted to most jobless

A fascinating article on Slate looks at a new service offered by a high-end job search website, which guarantees it will find work for job seekers willing to pay a $2,500 fee. The catch: The service is only open to candidates the site, TheLadders, deems good prospects, and TheLadders already focuses on white-collar jobs that pay more than $100,000. In other words, the site's services are not exactly targeted to your average unemployed worker.

Slate cites a study from last year (pdf) that found the jobs crisis hasn't hit all Americans equally--a point we've made at The Lookout in different ways before. According to researchers at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, the jobless rate for workers in the bottom 10 percent of the income scale was more than 30 percent. By contrast, for those making around $100,000 a year--the second highest of the 10 income groupings--it was 4 percent. And for the top 10 percent of earners, it was just 3 percent. As the study concludes: "There was no labor market recession for America's affluent."

In other words, as Slate notes, the people who are likely to take advantage of, and then be accepted by, TheLadders' service aren't representative of the average job-seeker in today's market.

And the long-term unemployment epidemic only bolsters the point. Around 45 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for six months or longer. We've already seen that not having a job can make it harder to get one. Does being one of the 6 million long-term unemployed make it harder in practice to be accepted to TheLadders' service?

We've asked TheLadders, and will let you know if the site's proprietors respond.