THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WHERE THE JOBS ARE : Prolonged Joblessness Can Limit Your Opportunities
Collecting unemployment insurance for a lengthy period of time may diminish your chances of finding work, employment agents say.
Although less true for middle- and high-level managers, clerical workers and other support personnel may find they’re not as sought after when they look for work again.
Allan Halcrow, editor of Costa Mesa-based Personnel Journal, said companies are tending to write off the long-term unemployed.
“I think it’s true,” he said. “Whether or not it’s reasonable is another matter. The personnel people we talk to are asking the question, ‘Why haven’t they been working for so long?’ ”
Irene Cohen, president of a New York employment agency that services most of the city’s Fortune 500 corporations, said: “Some of these people probably worked off the books on the gray market after their unemployment ran out.
“Now they’re finding that employers don’t want them with a one- or two-year employment gap,” Cohen said. “Companies are turning off on resumes that end in 1991.”
Terming this “a very unfortunate development,” she noted that employers are passing up applicants with considerable skills and experience--applicants who are hard to find, even given today’s high unemployment rate.
“They’re putting a work-ethics issue here. Maybe these people could have gotten work. Maybe they could manage on unemployment. But it’s coming back to haunt them now that they want work.”
Human resources executives are scanning resumes to see if applicants laid off from their last jobs “at least have been working at a McDonald’s or retailer part-time to keep in the job market and make ends meet,” Halcrow reported.
They’re taking the view that unemployed workers “may not be dead wood but they’re not exactly the most talented, ambitious or desirable new employees to be hired,” he said. Despite the glut of laid off job-seekers, Cohen said, secretarial, administrative assistant and supervisory jobs in New York City “are going begging” because only one out of every 20 applicants meets the standards of corporate employers.
Her firm, Irene Cohen Personnel Services, interviews 300 to 400 job-seekers weekly, but cannot find enough starting secretaries, even though their pay starts at $24,000. Experienced clerical help can earn more than $30,000 a year.
Cohen said New York ad agencies and publishing houses insist on hires who can type 55 to 60 words per minute--a standard the majority of applicants cannot meet.
Skills and experience, she added, are primarily what hard-nosed employers are looking for. “Personality is not going to make it” by itself, she added.
