Just brainstorming here, but I wonder if one could build a market around betting on the success (but never the failure) of the hard-to-employ. Let's say I know a recovering addict who would be a good worker but employers disagree. . .
Could I buy a surety bond payable to the employer in the event the employee doesn't work out, but get a headhunter fee after a year if things go well? In a tight labor market, this arrangement would allow anyone to champion a hard-to-employ person they have personally observed...
and trust. Like any other kind of investment, you'd want to have an easy way to diversify risk. So instead of betting on any one hard-to-employ person, perhaps there would be curated groups as well.
The whole thing could be managed through an app. One can also imagine part of the investment strategy is to provide your group of hard-to-employ people with great advice, mental health care and addiction support, for example. Government wouldn't be involved.
This is another example of the Golden Age, which I define as a time in which society does not have shortages of critical goods and services so much as it has a need for new and better systems.
