Newly Jobless Throng Employment Agencies

State employment offices and private-sector employment firms are being swamped by a surge of recently fired California workers seeking new jobs.

The downbeat trend is apparent everywhere from crowded job fairs to the jammed phone lines at the state’s call-in service for people seeking unemployment benefits.

California’s rise in layoffs was underscored Thursday by a government report showing that initial claims for unemployment benefits totaled 62,619 in the last week of October. That was somewhat lower than the week before but still up 35.3% from the corresponding week last year, and further evidence that California may have begun feeling the full force of the U.S. slowdown.

More detailed figures about the extent of California’s economic woes will come today when the state reports its October unemployment rate and job totals. In September, joblessness in the state edged up to 5.4%, the highest level in 21/2 years.

Meanwhile, placement specialists are flooded with job seekers. “A year and a half ago, we couldn’t find qualified management people” for human resources jobs, said Kay Christian, chief operating officer of TLC Staffing in San Diego.

But things have changed, as Christian found when she posted an opening for a human resources director on an Internet job site.

“Before we could get the darn thing off the Internet, we had 350 responses in a day.... They were all qualified. It was amazing,” she said.

Michael S. Bernick, director of the California Employment Development Department, said job hunters also have flocked to his agency’s service centers.

He said the pickup is concentrated at EDD offices in or near the state’s biggest cities, and it hasn’t hit the rural areas. “It’s basically in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and, to some extent, San Diego,” he said.

California’s layoff numbers--along with those nationwide--started creeping up months ago, but they have skyrocketed since Sept. 11. In the state, high-tech services and manufacturing companies have shed jobs all year, but since the terrorist attacks, workers in hotels and other travel-related industries have been hard hit too.

More than 1,000 job seekers, many of them from the beleaguered travel and tourism sector, converged on a job fair Thursday at a restaurant ballroom near Los Angeles International Airport. Job hunters waited in a line that, at times, snaked around the building for a chance to meet with prospective employers, who found themselves inundated with resumes and applications.

By 2 p.m., Denise DiPasquale, a recruiter from FedEx Corp., figured she had talked with at least 200 prospects. She said people with college degrees are applying for entry-level package-sorting positions that pay $11.34 an hour.

“I’ve taken a half-dozen resumes from pilots, some of whom have told me, ‘I’ll take anything,”’ DiPasquale said. “It’s really unbelievable.”

That kind of competition worries Guy Brent O’Veal, a 39-year-old unemployed X-ray screener who came to the job fair hoping to land a baggage-handling job.

“It’s very tough,” he said, surveying the crowd. “There are a lot of people out of work right now.”

For executive recruiters too, the dynamics have changed.

“There is an air of desperation,” said Gary Kaplan, head of a Pasadena-based executive search firm bearing his name.

These days, Kaplan is keeping a portfolio of resumes on his desk. It is filled with the resumes of friends and close associates who are looking for work. “I’ve never had as thick a file of quality people,” he said.

Another sign of the times: The telephone service for people filing for jobless benefits at the California Employment Development Department is overtaxed. Callers, after negotiating through a multi-step automated phone system, are greeted with a recorded message saying that they might have to wait 10 minutes or more to speak with a representative.

And those are the lucky callers. During the busiest moments, which often come on Mondays, callers simply get a busy signal.

“We realize that clients have had some degree of frustration with the phone system,” said Deborah L. Bronow, the department’s deputy director in charge of unemployment insurance.

The call-in service is now the main way Californians apply for unemployment benefits--heading to the department and waiting in line to submit a claim is essentially a thing of the past.

But, to relieve the stress on the phone service, agency officials are encouraging applicants to mail or fax in their claims for unemployment benefits.

The strain has prompted the agency this month to start hiring 270 more workers to handle claims.

Still, there are signs the post-Sept. 11 pace of layoffs is easing. The U.S. Labor Department report on claims for unemployment benefits provided some cause for encouragement.

The bad news from the department was that the number of laid-off workers continuing to receive unemployment benefits rose to 3.72 million nationally, the highest level in 181/2 years.

But officials also reported that for the workweek ended Nov. 3, new jobless benefits claims fell by a seasonally adjusted 46,000 to 450,000. That followed a drop of 11,000 the week before. Likewise, the latest California numbers, for the week ended Oct. 27, remained far higher than the year-earlier tally but were down 4,473 from the previous week.

Among the optimists are Bernard Howroyd, president of Glendale-based Appleone Employment Services Inc. He said he expects the continued hiring by many small companies to lead to an eventual economic turnaround.

“It’s not as bad as people think,” he said. “Everybody’s hesitating. The economy is in recession. The job market is seeing more applicants, but there are a lot of people out there looking for employees.”