Mid-Career Job Seekers Face Unfamiliar Hurdles

The last time Ginny Westermayer was looking for a job, the job pretty much found her.

Westermayer was 26 then, and a friend and former manager who knew she was unhappy in her job tipped her to another position and told her whom to call. That was 21 years ago and Westermayer hasn’t had to look for a job since.

Until now. Westermayer, now 47, has been back in the job market since January, when her employer shut down the information technology division where she worked as a business analyst. Like other baby boomers who are out of work for the first time in years, she’s finding this re-encounter with job hunting to be something of a shock.

“Just being at some place for so long, you know, you get more comfortable. I think if I had been moving [from one job to another] I would have been used to being out there searching,” said Westermayer, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of Des Peres, Mo. “At first, I really did feel more like Rip Van Winkle.”

Career counselors say the job market is swimming with baby boomers, many whose middle-management positions were eliminated and who are trying to quickly get up to speed.

“People tend to reenter the job market psychologically at the same place that they left it,” said Ollie Stevenson, a Houston-based regional vice president for DBM, a counseling and placement firm. “It’s kind of like dating [after a divorce]. You got married at 25, then you restarted at 45 ... but you start back at the same point you were at at 25.”

Many boomers find that their resumes are an emblem of sorts of the changing job search culture.

Resumes they wrote years ago -- essentially lists of past positions and responsibilities -- now are supposed to be boiled down to emphasize workplace accomplishments. They’re now supposed to be written so they can be digested by a computer, anticipating and including the “key words” that employers use to search for candidates from databases, career coaches say.

Nancy Smith, who lost her job as a sales manager after 38 years with Xerox Corp., had maintained a resume over the years. But it was designed for applying for internal openings at Xerox where she didn’t have to explain the special terminology and responsibilities to co-workers.

“It’s an incredible difference now,” said Smith, who lives in West Bloomfield, Mich.

The job search process also has been new to Bryan Molter, 40, who lost his position in computer support at a pharmaceuticals company in January 2002. Molter, who lives in Dayton, N.J., always had dealt directly with personal contacts or recruiters who knew him and placed little premium on his resume.

The last time Molter really had to look for a job, in 1989, headhunters insisted that he work exclusively with them, and when he sent out letters to companies, he expected a response. He recalls how friends laughed back then when he showed them a form thank-you note from one company sent on a pre-printed postcard.

Now many companies, inundated with online applications, rarely send out any response to job seekers, and the chance of interaction is limited. To Molter, the change is about more than the advent of the Internet.

“I’ve got to call it economy-based,” he said. “I don’t just think it’s because of the technology shift.

“Now, to trim down the list of candidates, it’s your skills that are getting you past the first, second and third cuts before somebody actually reads your resume.”

But getting back into the job market is about more than revising resumes and getting used to automated response e-mails. Those things, at least, Joe Rothbauer can get used to.

Rothbauer, of Spring, Texas, spent 20 years with an oil company before taking a job two years ago as a vice president with a new firm in Florida. His position was eliminated eight months ago.

“The hardest part of this whole search is protecting your emotions,” he said. “The highs are very, very high and the lows are very, very low.”