Take a look at this: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm

Who's going to get a competitive advantage by hiring the 5 million people with a HS diploma or less?

Edge case whizzes are not effected by this. Anecdotally, yes, but in practice it's those without economically valuable skills. Two hands and a strong back ain't what they used to be.

You're definitely right about the competitive advantage thing. You want to create a silly blanket rule? Fine - I'll be happy to interview the guy who's a rockstar engineer but decided to travel Asia for 6 months.

We're talking about unemployed, not somebody who has the money to burn on traveling to Asia for 6 months.

To be honest, traveling some parts of Asia isn't exactly expensive. Only when you get into Korea, Japan, HK. Most of the other places in Asia are pretty cheap, especially if you're backpacking.

Still unemployed! But we are talking edge cases here.

No. http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm#Ques5 "Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work."

This is the definition used for assembling official statistics. It is unlikely that this is used by companies setting hiring rules.

Well now, that's anyone who currently has no employment, and is applying for a particular job ("actively looked for work"), isn't it?

And this advantage goes to smaller, leaner companies who are not hobbled by policies handed down from on high about who can and cannot be hired.

Laws making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of employment status would only help the organizations who are not already doing it.

Laws making it illegal to discriminate like this would also help the people who are currently unemployed.

Laws that make it illegal to discriminate would not help businesses (they lose the ability to use every signal available to them, and it might become taboo to ask about why one is unemployed, etc), and it will probably result in more discrimination lawsuits from disgruntled interviewees. No one needs more of those.

That said, the stance of some of the companies in the article is silly.

I don't think there are necessarily enough firms who are intelligent enough to gain a competitive advantage by hiring the unemployed. Some sort of blanket government protection might be useful.

It's unlikely that the number of people who think like you is large enough to make a significant difference in the lives of the unemployed.