Job Hunting in Hard Times

If you're looking for work in today's marketplace, it sure seems like hard times. Your calls aren't returned, and recruiters have lost interest in your skills.

In fact, the situation is worse than you may realize. The overextension of the dot com movement, the wave of financial unrest, and recent technology shifts have combined to wipe out entire market sectors.

The Obvious

Some reasons are obvious.

Many of the dot com endeavors weren't backed by sound business models. Unfortunately, their demise also wiped out their support industries, including advertising, marketing, home sales, and the hardware support companies.

A year after the worst Internet failures, just as investors started to loosen their checkbooks, a series of fraudulent financial practices came to light. Money returned to the mattresses.

Adding to the crises, technology industries are by their nature cyclical. Whole industries follow technology developments — they take off with the latest new thing, ramp up to hyper-growth, and then slowdown. Personal computers rode the hyper trend for decade; cell phones rolled for a couple of years. Eventually, these products became commodity items.

How Does It Balance Out?

Supply and demand drives the shifts. In the early part of a product's cycle, demand is high. It's hard to find enough of a new product — standards are incomplete, manufacturing must be retooled, and inventories are slow to grow. High profit margins support this early growth.

When mass production takes over, prices drop, margins drop, and the shake out begins.

In the past, emerging technology industries picked up the slack when an old product slowed. Laptops, for example, surged as disk drive prices dipped; the Internet began its climb as the PC slowed. New business absorbed displaced employees. The system had a built in balancing strategy.

With the dot com breakdown, however, other technologies were also in a downturn. Telecomm was struggling, PC sales were slow, and no new breakthrough was in sight. Workers lost their technology safety net.

The Not So Obvious

Making matters worse, current employment infrastructures are ill prepared for the flood of people entering the job market. Human resources departments simply can't look at an extra two thousand resumes per position per day. It's physically impossible. The system is grounding to a halt.

In the old days, a resume based job hunt got results. The resume said, "Here I am," and that was enough to land you an interview.

Today, statistically, your resume won't be read. Your odds must be running 2000 to 1 against. In hard times, there are simply too many resumes floating around.

The processes being discarded are the very methods that helped you find a job in the past. Worse yet, no alternatives surfaced. This lack of search options aggravated the hard times situation.

What Else?

Traditional networking was the next to fail. With no emerging technology and no savior industry, every sector found itself with cutbacks.

Your friends and colleagues were in the same situation as you. They had no leads to offer.

Completing the cycle: when networking isn't working, people send out more resumes.

(This sounds bad, but don't be discouraged. There are steps you can take to handle the job hunt situation.)

Enter the Internet

Ironically, though the Internet created much of this instability, it has the potential to help you land a position. By using Web articles to present industry solutions, you can generate job contacts and showcase your skills.

In addition, Web articles provide an option for self-sufficiency that is difficult to ignore, especially in hard times.

Unexpected Opportunity

This is a positive, unexpected opportunity. Without the breakdown of traditional job-hunt methods, you might not have explored the use of Web solution articles. You would have missed out on a technique that can make a substantial difference in your career strategy.

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