Pink Slips Have Harvard Grads Singing the Blues
In a long, windowless room hung with modern art and suffused with recessed lighting, they leaned forward over the 15-foot slab of a conference table, carefully taking notes on yellow legal pads and in small leather-bound notebooks.
“You are selling yourself. A resume is your brochure for you,” the consultant said, and they wrote it down.
“Seven Ways to Get People to Like You,” explained a list beamed onto a screen by an overhead projector. “No. 1: Smile.” And they wrote it down.
The group of unemployed, underemployed and merely worried professionals was like scores of others attending similar meetings on job-hunting strategies around Los Angeles, save for one thing: As Harvard graduates, they had expected even less than other white-collar victims of the recession to end up in this position.
It was, in fact, the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California that had sponsored the meeting. Hugh McMullen, its organizer, helped set up job placement activities for the club beginning last October in response to the recession. “We saw a need--lots of people were about to get laid off. A lot of people were ‘between employment opportunities,’ ” he said.
McMullen can sympathize. Despite a blue chip resume, the lawyer has been “independent--that means underemployed” since he was laid off last year from an entertainment company.
Bradford Taft, the consultant from Lee Hecht Harrison, one of many “outplacement” firms that have seen their business swell with the recession, said, “There’s been a real increase in demand from alumni groups” asking him to give talks on job hunting--not to new graduates but ones suddenly out of work after decades of experience.
He has given presentations to the Los Angeles Ivy League Alumni Assn., to groups from the Wharton School and Cornell. Last month he gave advice to a roomful of Stanford MBAs and graduates of its undergraduate business program, a third of whom were unemployed.
McMullen said these meetings are “a sign of the times--that the recession and the tight job situation hits everybody, not just the GM plant in Van Nuys. It’s hitting people all the way up the corporate food chain.”
The Harvard group was as diverse as the white-collar recession itself. There was a lawyer, an architect, a telecommunications manager, an actor, an entertainment industry executive, a manager at a manufacturing firm, a college teacher. There were bright-eyed young women and silver-haired men. There was a mother trying to re-enter the work force and her daughter, looking for a career change.
None, to be sure, was anywhere close to being on the streets: The better off remain better off. These folks knew how lucky they were to have the degrees they had, the clubs and associations that at least could fill days of unemployment with networking. While the unemployment rate for professionals and executives in Los Angeles is around 3% to 4%, unskilled laborers suffer a 15% rate, assembly workers 11%. But the psychological shock has been tough at the top end among folks more accustomed to handing out pink slips than receiving them. The unemployment rate among executives has increased just as fast as the rate among factory workers--both are up by more than two-thirds over the past year.
“You never expected to be unemployed,” said one participant at the Harvard meeting. “I don’t know anyone who really wants to talk about it. It’s hard to admit you’re unemployed--there are a lot of euphemisms used.”
For everyone, the fancy degrees they thought would at the very least get them a paycheck have sometimes become a burden. The biggest laugh of the session came when Taft showed a cartoon of a job applicant saying to an interviewer: “I’m not really overqualified--my resume is a pack of lies.”
One woman, a general manager at a manufacturing firm that is relocating to Georgia, said she knew what it was like to be on both sides of the desk. “I get people so overqualified I’m afraid to hire them . . . And I find the same reaction when I go out looking.”
Listening to the outplacement counselor and a headhunter who also attended, there was a distinct feeling among some of the Harvard grads of being reduced to a piece of meat in a buyers’ market.
“You want to be as palatable as possible,” said Taft, advising against revealing individual passions and persuasions.
Taft told how the executive recruiting firm where he used to work would hold a “resume-of-the-month” contest to get some yuks out of the most absurd resumes that came in over the transom. “Avoid fluorescent lime green paper for your resume,” he chuckled, recalling one winner.
And forget using your resume to try to tell people about yourself as a human being. “So you’re an avid reader, play tennis and golf. Who cares,” said Rick Manning, the recruiter.
In this environment, it’s no surprise people are networking with a vengeance. The Harvard Alumni Affairs Office in Cambridge, Mass., said that while many clubs in big cities are organizing job-hunting seminars, even purely social events have seen increased attendance by people eager to schmooze.
