Tag Archives: Unemployment

By John Sumser

This morning, I got a note from an old friend who has been out of work for two years. He used to be a social worker in the state parole system, budget cuts and new ways of thinking eliminated his job. It will never come back.

In the note, he told me how happy he was to have finally secured an interview. Given that this was the first interview in months, he was sure that this was going to be the one.

Another chum worked hard in his late 40s to get a degree in Computer Science. After eighteen months without work, he joined a company that sells sports equipment. He says he got hired as their retail manager because he told them he would fire under performers quickly. Also, to get the job, he had to relocate 900 miles away at his own expense.

At the very same time, I know a host of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who simply can’t find any software development engineers. In that niche (and there are similar niches in most population centers), finding a new job is as simple as signaling that you’re available.

The truth about employment is that there is always a job to be found. As long as you are willing to compromise on pay and the work itself, you can find a job. In this sense, all unemployment is voluntary.

The most important question is whether there is any demand for the skills you have. The second question is whether you’re willing to do what it takes to be the person that an employer wants to hire to deliver those skills. The third question is whether you have the ability to rearrange your lifestyle and expectations to get the job.

If you haven’t seen the movie Company Men, give it a look. It’s a fictionalized story of the lives of key executives in a company that used layoffs as a tool to make the company attractive in a sale. The CEO does well financially (of course). The rest of the characters wrestle with the difference between the lifestyles they are financing and the available work.

It doesn’t go well for any of them. Lost houses, destroyed families, alcoholism, infidelity, despair, rage and magical thinking are the results of dramatic and sustained unemployment.

Shifting gears in an economic transition is really, really hard. Over the last 20 years, the domestic American economy has softened. Global competitors have gotten good at what they do. The internet has eliminated ‘friction’ in every supply chain.

The result is a world in which some skills are valued and some skills are no longer needed. Sometimes (as in Detroit), the change devastates an entire region. In other cases, it’s a matter of being willing to accept a smaller pay check.

Deciding whether you are going to be able to get it all back or going to have to totally rearrange your life and expectations is not a simple process. Over the next several columns, I’ll help you explore the information you need to make these decisions.

John Sumser, a member of the Glassdoor Clearview Collection, is the founder and editor-in-chief of HRExaminer, a weekly online magazine about the people and technology of HR. Widely respected as an independent analyst, Sumser has been chronicling and critiquing the HRTechnology industry for eighteen years.

Glassdoor.com is a career and workplace community offering a free inside look at jobs and companies with access to millions of job listings. Glassdoor enables employees, job seekers, employers and recruiters to simultaneously see – for the first time – unedited opinions about a company’s work environment along with details on salaries, company reviews, CEO approval ratings, job interview questions and reviews, and office photos as well as career advice.

 By John Sumser

Wall Street is happy about the midterm elections because a divided Congress is not likely to get much done. Business prefers gridlock in its governments. While some hiring uptick is possible, high unemployment is here to stay.

Really, it’s a part of a larger trend away from the idea that all personal income comes from employment. Think about your friends and family. Chances are that many of them have non-traditional employment. Currently, only 58 percent of the population has a job that produces a paycheck.

The rest of us are contractors, freelancers, temps, business owners, home makers, handy men, gray market workers. We juggle multiple streams of income. We don’t have unemployment insurance so they don’t count us.

The only people with unemployment insurance are people who work (or used to work) for companies big enough to pay into the pot. Again, that’s only 58% of us. Barely half. Not much better than a banana republic.

Learning to live without a reliable paycheck requires that you do a number of things differently. Here are the five most important things you can do as you adjust to a life without a paycheck:

1. Always Have a Job

Just because you don’t get paid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work. Start a project that you would be proud to put on your resume. You could research local businesses to understand their problems. Develop a plan to change the face of your downtown. Build something. Create. When you are done with the first project, make a second bigger project. Long-term unemployment is an opportunity to choose the work that you do. Build your skills in your profession (if your profession just died, learn the next one.) No company ever refused work offered for free. Go ahead. Show up somewhere and start working. (If they try to get rid of you, you can always say, “You can’t fire me. I don’t have a job here.) In the big picture, working is far more important than income.

2. Get To Know Your Family

Without the rushing around associated with always having to be at work, there’s time to learn some new things about your family. The old saying goes, “On their deathbed, nobody ever wishes that they had spent more time at work.” Total control over your time is one of the primary benefits of unemployment. Use it to change your relationships. Go to those teacher meetings you missed. Take walks. Read your teenager a book. Babysit the grand kids. Ultimately, the requirements for money will take the luxury of spare time away. Use it or lose it.

3. Join A Social Organization

Red Cross, Kiwanis, local choir, sports team, hospital volunteer, business coach. It doesn’t matter what the organization is. Join something and get really involved. Having a social foundation outside of your employment is a critical cushion against the devastating loss of social context that comes with unemployment. If you ever get another job, do not let it interfere with your social organization. The feeling of being unemployed comes from the idea that your job was somehow permanent in the first place. The only permanence in this life comes from the relationships you make that serve something bigger. Find your place in a neighborhood group of some kind.

4. Cultivate Your Familiarity with Uncertainty

Once you’ve gone a while without a job, it’s normal to try to figure out how to stabilize things. Jobs provide membership in a social group, reliable revenue and a host of other benefits. The easy to believe illusion (fostered by companies who would rather pay less and infer long-term loyalty) is that all of the aspects of the job will last. They don’t. While you are unemployed, practice a few things that interrupt your routines. Try shaving a different way each morning. Stop wearing socks for a week. Keep changing things up. If you don’t, the universe will. That’s how you got here in the first place. Learning to remember that things are transient makes you more effective in the long run.

5. Develop a Meditation Practice

Meditation doesn’t have to be a part of a religious tradition. I like the scientific tools offered by the Heart Math Institute. They integrate computers (or a hand held device) into a technique that reduces stress and increases your ability to relax in the face of anxiety. It turns out that you can learn to manage your heart rate and the degree to which it changes. This, in turn, leads to healthier adjustments. Whether you use their tools or take a stress reduction class, meditation is a key asset when you are making a big transition.

How many times have you stared into a fridge full of food and you can’t find anything to eat?  Or, how many times do you find yourself flipping through 500 HD channels to find that there is nothing on television?  Today we have access to so many options in our day to day life that it is paralyzing.  From what music we want in our ears to what kind of dairy product we want in our coffee, the decisions are endless.

If you are a hiring manager or the leader of a sales organization, you are probably experiencing the same issue in your hiring efforts.  You get into the same mindless, robotic process that delivers the same results day in and day out.   You find that you have many choices, but none are what you are looking for.  At Treeline we keep a fine tuned ear to what is happening in the market and we have been hearing a reoccurring message: “Why can’t we find any qualified sales people in a market saturated with them?”  To answer this question, let’s go back to the refrigerator for a second…

…here you stand, in front of your fridge, you’re hungry.  Your shelves are full of food and beverages, you’re overwhelmed, and yet you keep coming back every 10 minutes.  You continue with the same behavior which nets the exact same result every time.  So you chose something.  But, before you reach for the jalapeños, which you know you do not want but they are in arms reach, stop and ask yourself, “what do I really want and what is it going to take to get it?”

This is the key question which deserves a key answer.  The answer in the refrigerator case is not just “food”.  You have to identify what you want and essentially need: snack or meal, sweet or savory.  Should I have a jalapeño with that?  You get the idea.  Now apply the same questioning to the sales professional that you are seeking.

The key question needs a key answer – “What do I want?” – the answer is not “a top producing sales professional.”  That is the same as saying I am going to watch some TV for entertainment and you find yourself surfing 500 channels of nothing.  You must dig deeper and get more specific.  What is your plan?  Who do you need to hire?  Is it a junior sales person that you can mold or tenured sales professional with a book of business?  A strategic sales person with a lengthy sales cycle and a multi-million dollar quota or an activity driven sales professional with a short sales cycle and a $500k quota?  Direct industry experience or different industry experience yet selling into the same decision makers?  There are so many different species of sales professionals – it is crucial to identify what type of sales person can produce for your organization.

Just because the market has a bigger pool of sales candidates does not make it any easier to identify who is a good sales person for your company.  In fact, it makes it more difficult.  There are still the same amount of qualified candidates out there in the market but they are now much harder to find and hidden amongst the growing number of unqualified candidates that are also targeting your company’s opening.  You must be able to sustain a bandwidth that will allow you to effectively screen every resume and quickly identify the qualified from the unqualified.  The organizations that have identified resources that help them source outside of their own refrigerators are the ones that are able to effectively snatch up top talent from the market and build stronger sales teams.  They tap into less traditional resources.  They use social media and specialty boutique search firms with resources to tap into their endless network with a laser focus to find candidates that fit your criteria.  This is bad news for their competitors.  

Don’t fall victim to the paralysis of being overwhelmed by choices.  Don’t be afraid of change or to try something new.  Mix it up and build a new process and system that will force you to ask the key questions and find candidates that are outside of your norm.  If you need help, Treeline has built a system that will help you identify the right sales professionals for your organization – try it for free by clicking here. 

However you decide to build your sourcing system, if you do not ask these key questions and identify the key answers, you will find yourself staring into the fridge and eating jalapeños every time.  And every time you will be unsatisfied and find yourself right back in front of the fridge, guessing and looking at the same unsatisfying options.