He’s a poster boy for perseverance

Six months after Joshua Persky lost his job as an investment banker, he hung his faith in finding a new one around his neck on a sandwich board.

Carrying a stack of resumes, Persky took to Manhattan streets wearing a white board scrawled with black marker: “EXPERIENCED MIT GRAD FOR HIRE.”

The move garnered newspaper and blog headlines: “An ex-banker’s unusual job pitch,” “MIT graduate will work for food” and “Joshua Persky: desperate and alone.”

His search would stretch on for a year, with no paycheck and no prospects.

Somewhere along the way, seeped in a post-layoff muck of sacrifice, humiliation and rejection, Persky found the resolve to keep hoping. That is the lesson he wants to share with the nearly 2 million people who have lost their jobs this year, and the millions more who will next year, when the U.S. unemployment rate is expected to climb to 7.8%, from an estimated 5.7% this year.

Keep hoping. Keep exercising. Keep savoring time with family.

“You can’t give up,” said Persky, 49. “You have to try to keep your sense of humor, if you have one, and be creative.”

But those lessons would come only after time passed.

Persky had been working with Houlihan Lokey for two years when he was laid off last December.

At first, he turned to headhunters and job search engines. Nothing. He contacted associates he knew from other firms. But their businesses were collapsing.

By June, his savings had dwindled. He had applied for unemployment benefits, but those ran out too. Persky and his wife decided to let go of their upscale Upper East Side apartment and put their belongings in storage. All around them, neighbors who had also lost jobs were packing up and leaving New York.

One night, over a dispirited dinner, the Perskys hatched a plan for what to do next. It was their weekly date night, and although the couple had scaled down on spending money on cuisine, they decided to splurge on drinks and a shared entree at their favorite Argentine steakhouse. It would be the last of such dinners for a while.

Following their plan, Persky’s wife, Cynthia, moved in with her parents in Omaha, enrolling their two children in school there. Persky moved in with his sister in Westchester, N.Y., while continuing to send out resumes and keeping his Manhattan contacts alive.

After six years of marriage, the family was splitting up. But their bond remained strong. Persky would visit his children, ages 4 and 5, when he could. He called every day. Nevertheless, said Cynthia, 44, “I felt like the world was going to end.”

But before all that happened, Persky tried something he thought of that night at the Argentine steakhouse. In the restaurant, he asked his wife: “Why don’t I go out on Park Avenue with a sign and pass out resumes?”

She looked at him and smiled. “That’s brilliant.”

The next day, Cynthia bought a sign board for $2, printed out resumes and wrote up a news release, which she e-mailed to media outlets across New York and the country. Persky put on a dark pinstriped suit and a silk tie and the sign bearing his phone number.

He stood in front of the Charles Schwab building near 50th Street and Park Avenue during the lunch hour for a week, waiting. Cynthia, a photojournalist, snapped shots and sent them out.

Newspaper reporters interviewed him. Television news crews filmed his stunt.

“We thought something would happen,” Cynthia said. “He had a lot of calls and a lot of interest. They said they liked him.

“Then,” she said, “we wouldn’t hear back.”

After a week, Persky put away the sandwich board and kept trying through search engines and headhunters. He started a blog, oracleofnewyork.com, to chronicle the experience and promote his hiring qualifications. Like the board, the blog got attention but no work.

“I was talking to investment banks, and by the beginning of the summer they were very excited,” Persky said. “By the end of the summer, they were frozen and saying, ‘We don’t know what’s going on. Things are getting very dark very fast.’ ”

One equity firm flew him to Texas. The interview went delightfully well. When it was over, Persky remembered recruiters told him: “We would love to hire you but we don’t have any money.”

“It got very frustrating,” Persky said. “I kept getting my hopes up, and things didn’t work out.”

In September, Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. collapsed and “things went from bad to worse,” said Cynthia, who had not lived with her husband for three months.

But Persky kept trying. In October, a search firm contacted him. An accounting company, Weiser, came across his resume and recruiters were impressed. Would he consent to an interview? Persky agreed. The screening and interview process was rigorous. He submitted writing samples and met with company leaders.

His wife didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“We had so many things come and go,” she said. “As time went by, expectations became lower.”

The recruiter called Persky again. He got the job.

“It was like a miracle,” his wife said. “The threshold was finally broken.”

This month, he began working as a senior manager doing valuation work for Weiser.

Cynthia said she planned to move back to New York with the children in the summer, after they completed the school year. The family is looking for a Manhattan apartment.

As they reflect on the year, a few lessons stand out. The stunt with the sandwich board turned out to be just that: a stunt.

His new boss, Elliot Ogulnick, said he was impressed by Persky’s resume. “He got hired on his own merits,” Ogulnick said. “I didn’t even know about all the publicity until later.”

And at times like these, the only thing to do was to move forward and stay united as a family, despite the difficulties and the distance.

“When you have responsibilities,” Cynthia said, “you have to find a way to get through it.”

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erika.hayasaki@latimes.com