Professionals Face Tough Job Market

An email showed up in the newsroom recently. The author lives on the Seacoast and she wrote “I'm starting to get emails and LinkedIn requests from those who have lost their jobs in the last few weeks and are looking to network.”

In case you haven’t already heard of it, California based LinkedIn is an online social networking site for professionals. It helps you connect with former colleagues. It’s been around for about five years and growing pretty well. But company spokesperson Krista Canfield says now, sign ups have really taken off.

CUT Canfield: Right around the August-September timeframe, we just started seeing accelerated growth. So we were growing at an extreme amount of users, one every second or two, so pretty quickly.

That’s good news for LinkedIn’s investors. This summer, the company raised 53 million dollars through a venture capital firm which pegged the value of the web site at one billion dollars. A down economy is good for some people. Not for Matt Towne of Rochester.

Towne has been using LinkedIn to find work. Towne is in his mid-50’s. At one time, he oversaw safety at some 600 work sites for Tyco International. He describes his former salary as well into the six-figures but --he was restructured out of a job. Which has left him on unfamiliar turf.

CUT: Towne: I’ve always had a job and without exception, I’ve always been promoted. So my entire career path has been one of stability and growth. And to now submit a resume and get silence is a little intimidating.

Towne uses every online employment service he can find, both the general ones like Monster.com and several that focus on his specialty of workplace safety. Using the web might be easy, but as far as Towne can see, you rarely know if your resume got through. To make things worse, he sees firms using the web to keep job seekers at arm’s length.

Matt Towne volunteers in the community -- to give back and to build his network of job contacts. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

CUT: The companies around here, I’ve tried to drop off hard copy resumes and they won’t even accept them. You’re not allowed to call or you just get an answering machine or they refer you to the web site. So you don’t know as a professional whether your application reached anybody. So I don’t have a lot of faith in the online search. I do it because you don’t have much choice.

The people who help other people find work agree that the web, for all its power, may not be all that useful. A tiny percentage of jobs is ever posted online. Leslie Combs is with Lee, Hecht, Harrison, an international human resources company. Combs says the old fashioned personal network is still the best path to gainful employment. In that light, Combs says the LinkedIn site is almost magical in its ability to track down people who might be in a position to help you.

But Combs has this critical bit of advice. When you reach that person you worked with eight years ago, do not ask them if they know about a job.

CUT I mean never ever. I’ve been in this business 23 -- I’m in my 24th year. I never know of a job that would be a good fit for the person that’s asking me, at the time that they ask me. That’s true of everybody. So you just don’t put people in the position where they’ll have to say No to you. Because it’s the question they’re worried about you asking them. So don’t ask them that question.

Combs says do ask them about the industry, about which firms are looking solid and which ones are not.

And he warns his clients, be prepared to be looking for work longer than you would expect.

For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg.