It's not like it's easy to get a decently paying job to begin with in the States. Making the interview process less frequent or more annoying falls of deaf ears when it can already be 5-7 interview stages and 2-3 months before you actually get to offer stages.

>Or they only hire them for fixed term contracts, so that if the economic winds change they're not stuck with a long term liability.

Games industry in a nutshell. They certainly try and they tried so hard Microsoft got slapped again for trying to have their cake and eat it too with "eternally contracted employees with no benefits".

Sounds like you can only go up, since the industry would only do contract gigs if they can get away with it.

>A robust unemployment system and/or social safety net mitigates the negative effects of layoffs without the affecting dynamism of the labor market, and should be the solution rather than making workers harder to fire.

I see nothing wrong with both.

^Companies are more willing to hire unproven/unconventional candidates because they know they can be easily fired if things don't work out, and they react faster to demand shocks because each hire isn't a long term liabilit y

In all honestly, I feel those kinds of hires are perfect for a fixed term contract first. That's just another weakness in that companies will try so hard to not convert someone to FTE even if they at some point are more productive than most of their staff. That can also be regulated. X months/years of work and you convert or walk. Worst case the employee gets a few good years of experience, of which should be more than enough experience to make the next step much easier than the first.

----

I feel like the best balance of this would be

- FTE gets a 3-6 month trial period (similar to an internship). This period can be treated as "at will" and can be let go if stipulations show they can't perform to the role. After that, you got an employee and that employee is protected in someone way.

- You need to layoff, fine. 6 month severance minimum. Otherwise the employee is either breaking the law or borderline breaking the law (e.g. sexual harassment, coercion, etc), has a significant breach of contract (breaking NDA that isn't whistle blowing, consistently is not available at agreed upon hours), or has multiple months of severe lack of productivity to give them the boot.

- contract work has stipulations as above. Enforce a decent minimum contract length, only allow renewals for some given period of time by the same company (my gut says 2-3 years of work at the company, but the exact number isn't important) before either breaking the contact or hiring full time. Contracting houses also cannot keep an employee for more than 2 of these contract lengths; we shouldn't encourage places to keep employees long long term as some mandated middleman

- in general, encourage more apprenticeships if you want to train unproven talent (and not leave it to a contractor). Don't know why these died down if companies are going to turn aroind and complain that new grads don't have the skills. They don't, but most of your stuff is proprietary. What do you expect? If you need specialized skills you gotta teach that and not expect a unicorn to master it in a month and be productive.

there can be exceptions of such a house is themself a company doing work (i.e. Not simply a middleman) or they hire very specialized talent. Main point is to not exploit new labor trying to get a break and it becomes the new normal.