Making Up for Lost Time

We said earlier that you should not let someone’s long stretch of unemployment prevent you from hiring them. Your goal when hiring is to find people with the right talents who can fit well into your organization. Being unemployed should not be an automatic disqualifier. There is a good chance that this person has spent their unemployment enhancing their talents and can offer you something fantastic.

That being said, there may be some basic workplace skills that can atrophy during extended unemployment.

For example, it is easy to fall out of the habit of following a structured schedule when you are unemployed. Unless someone makes a special effort to create a “work day” while unemployed, it’s easy to just do things as they come along, not worrying about deadlines and just getting things done when you get them done. That may not mesh well with your requirements for your employees; if you expect them in the office at certain times, if you’re holding them to deadlines, if they need to be setting a schedule and meeting it, then you may need to reintroduce long-unemployed people to those concepts.

While your employees might maintain and even enhance their talents while unemployed, their ability to merge those talents with others might suffer. Collaboration is so important in many roles, and months of flying solo can make it tough to get back into the team spirit. See if your new employees were engaged with others while unemployed, say, though volunteer work or team sports, or anything that puts them in a situation where cooperation is as important as individual skill. If not, you may need to slowly work them back into a cooperative environment and wean them off the sense of individualism they may have developed.

Take a look at the work style and the culture of your organization and see if there’s anything that might suffer during a long period of unemployment. If so, figure out how you might overcome that and help your newly re-employed employee be a fully-functioning contributor as quickly as possible. Be careful, though, about making “retraining” a mandatory thing for everyone with an extended unemployment period. Putting people through unnecessary training wastes their time and yours, and can really upset some people if they don’t need it but are forced to sit through it. But if there is a workplace skill that’s important, and if through your discussions with your new employee you think they may need some remedial help, don’t be afraid to provide it.