Getting back into work: What helps and what hinders?

The article focuses on factors that affect individuals' effort to regain their employment. Despite the importance of getting people back to work, we do not yet know as much about factors that hinder such efforts. The research that is described in this article looked at two such factors: whether unemployed people consider themselves fit enough for work (regardless of their actual health), and procrastination tendencies, which are especially likely with tasks that are aversive (e.g., difficult, tedious) but nonetheless critical for achieving a valued outcome, such as finding employment. In addition, the study looked at the ability of employment counselors to evaluate unemployed individuals' probabilities of re-entering paid work. Measurements were taken at three different points in time with 236 job seekers. The findings showed that counsellors' assessments of job seekers' job search intensity and procrastination were able to predict reasonably well whether these job seekers would find work later. On the other hand, job seekers own evaluations of their job search intensity and procrastination behavior could not reliably forecast whether they would manage to find employment. In addition, counsellors were able to predict fairly well from the outset which job seekers would find work later. The findings also showed that job seekers' attitudes (what they believed about the search itself, the pressure they felt from significant others to find work, and their confidence in their ability to effectively search a job) could predict the intensity of their involvement in job search. These results were very much supportive of the capacity of counsellors to add substantial value in the reemployment process. In addition, they revealed the importance of taking into account factors that deter the reemployment process, such as self-perceptions of one's health condition and procrastination.