America’s three-year job dearth is finally over. In most places outside California, home builders can’t find carpenters, trucking lines scramble for drivers, mortgage bankers scrape to hire loan processors. Yet there’s famine amid the feast. Although total employment rose by 217,000 jobs last month, 8 million people are out of work, and 17 million more can expect pink slips in the course of 1994. Despite lower unemployment-the Labor Department said Friday that the jobless rate dropped to 6.5 percent in February-many of them are in for a nasty surprise. The dramatic restructuring of U.S. business has made for major changes in the job market. Work is more specialized, information is harder to come by, employers are smaller and exceedingly cautious about hiring. In searching for a job, what you don’t know can hurt you badly.
If it’s a company you’ve heard of, it probably isn’t doing much hiring. In manufacturing, University of Chicago economist Steven Davis calculates, three quarters of new jobs in the late 1980s were at plants with fewer than 500 workers. New service jobs are widely dispersed, too. Those midsize hirers are more likely to occupy obscure suburban business park, than to blaze their names atop skyscrapers. job One is simply to locate them. Figuring out what they do is even tougher. Many are in specialized businesses-making truck-engine washers, importing Philippine canned goods that laymen don’t even imagine. Divining exactly what niche a company fills means watching trade magazines, reading the business section of the local paper and, most of all, asking around. “It’s really a lot more costly process to link up with small firms,” says University of Kentucky employment expert Dan Black.
Matching up is harder for employers, too, because the small companies that dominate the job market can’t afford big-ticket recruiting. Low-budget, single-employer job fairs are in; recruiters on commission are out. Why advertise to thousands if only a handful of folks have the particular skills you need? Advanced Technology Materials doesn’t; instead, the Connecticut developer of diamond semiconductors posts a help-wanted notice on the Internet, a global computer network used by scientific types. “It’s tremendously efficient,” says CEO Gene Banucci. “Sometimes we get a response in an hour.”
If you’re not wired, you’d better be. In Phoenix, recruiter Barry Franklin has a client looking for “someone who’s pricing look-backs, kudos, collars, index-amortizing swaps, and has a Ph.D. with two years of experience in selling that sort of thing.” Folks who know what he’s talking about likely use the Bloomberg electronic financial service, which is why Franklin advertises there. If you’re unemployed, however, you probably can’t afford a $1,500-a-month Bloomberg machine. That’s all the more reason to network with those who can.
Networking, of course, is as old as the saw that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” But in the job market of the 1990s, networking has a whole new meaning. just ask Bruce Hanson. The New York executive spends evenings with NetWare Users International, the Certified Network Engineers Professional Association and similar groups. He attends not to find jobs but to offer them. After the speeches, he can meet techies he might want to employ at Technology Education Network, which broadcasts training programs via satellite. “Probably 90 percent of the people I’ve hired in the past eight years have come from my networking in professional associations,” he says.
Want ads, of course, haven’t disappeared, but they aren’t what they used to be. Though an ad may bear an employer’s name, it may well have been drafted by one of the specialized agencies, such as Nationwide Advertising Service or Classified USA, that have sprung up to craft scripts that draw the applicants the client wants and, equally important in an age when every rejection represents a potential lawsuit, discourage others. A decade ago, ad agencies were bit players; now, most big employers use them routinely. job seeker beware: responding may not put you in touch with the advertiser. The ad agencies often screen replies according to the employer’s criteria. If the ad asks for three years’ experience designing gears on Autodesk software, a resume that doesn’t state that precise qualification may not be sent on to the employer.
Getting it there is only half the battle. Never have employers been more nervous about extending a job offer. That, too, has to do with basic changes in the business world. With companies everywhere shedding supervisors and managers, average workers have more autonomy-and responsibility-than in the past. At the same time, lawyers have driven up the cost of firing nonperformers. Before they hire, employers want to be sure applicants can handle the demands.
Screening job seekers, though, is an increasingly dicey task. Using off-the-shelf tests can open the door for a discrimination suit. Checking police and driving records may be illegal, although a growing number of consultants offer the service. References? What you get depends on whom you ask: Cornell economist John Bishop finds that workers with references from their former personnel managers are less productive in their new jobs than those recommended by previous super-visors. That’s because lawyers instruct personnel staffers to clam up. “I start with the supervisor, because the supervisor will tell you things he shouldn’t,” says Amy Shoemaker, who hires for Railroad Savings Bank in Wichita, Kans.
In the face of such obstacles, temporary employment-originally a means to cut costs-has become a way to check out would-be hires. At Bridgestone-Firestone’s plant in Wilson, N.C., temps had an inside track when the tire company decided to add permanent jobs. “That gave us a 2,000-hour job interview. We got very, very confident with their mind-set, their abilities, their interest,” says plant manager George Ruccio. Not far away, BMW has built even higher hurdles at its new auto-assembly plant in Greer, S.C. Beyond customized pencil-and-paper exams and the test of assembling a wheel mounting, applicants must take 48 hours of classroom training-on their own time-before they even receive an offer. Only the very serious need apply.
Not every employer is as picky as BMW, but the days of walking into the personnel department, filling out a form and stepping into a vacant slot are fading fast. Many companies are prepared to move work around the world or contract it out if they can’t find workers they want to hire. That may be the biggest difference between the economy of the 1990s and the one that used to be. This time around, business is refusing to scrape the bottom of the labor barrel-and job seekers bear the burden of proving that they don’t belong there.
