Out of work 6 months. Now what?

From WorkQuest

 If
you've been unemployed for half a year in this market, should you just
take any job you're offered? Rewrite your resume? Enjoy the break?

NEW YORK (Fortune) - Dear Annie:
I got laid off from a senior management job in marketing last
September, just as the worst of this recession was getting underway, so
I'm now coming up on six months' unemployment. As a hiring manager for
many years (I'm 47), I always looked askance at candidates who had been
out of work this long, so now I'm worried that prospective employers
will do the same to me.

I've
been called for a couple of interviews, but neither job seemed right
for me. Am I being too picky? Should I take just any job, if I get
another chance, simply to avoid having such a big hole in my work
history? Also, should I rewrite my resume? Currently it's
chronological, but maybe a functional one - emphasizing types of
experience rather than when I did what - would serve me better now.
Please help. -Sleepless in San Francisco

Dear Sleepless: Granted, half a year can seem like an eternity when you're on pins and needles, but chin up.

"In this market, six months is nothing," says Nancy Keene, director of the Dallas office of executive recruiters Stanton Chase.
"This is unprecedented. In the dot-com implosion, for example, lots of
managers got laid off - but many other industries were still strong, so
there was someplace for those people to go." Not this time. "You have
to take a long-term view and expect that it may take you a full year to
land the job you want," says Keene.

A
couple of new surveys back her up. Executives can now be unemployed
nine months before it even begins to hurt their marketability,
according to a poll of hiring managers at 1,000 big U.S. companies by Robert Half Management Resources.
And the average senior-management job hunt now takes even longer than
that, according to a survey of 5,060 executives and 476 headhunters for
the 2009 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report from ExecuNet. In fact, 10.1 months is how long most senior managers have to job hunt these days, the poll found.

Moreover,
you were smart to turn down two opportunities that didn't seem right
for you, Keene believes. "The worst response to this situation is
jumping into the wrong job. That leads to a series of short hops, which
spells career derailment," she says. "Look for consulting projects
instead. As a senior manager, two years of consulting looks much better
on your resume than two jobs where you only stayed a year, or less."

She
adds: "You need to do a dual marketing campaign for yourself: One where
you're seeking your next full-time job, and the other in search of
appropriate consulting work to keep your resume filled up, get new
experience, and add new people to your network."

Wendy Enelow, a longtime author, trainer, and career coach (www.wendyenelow.com),
agrees. "Not long ago, putting ‘consultant' on your resume screamed
‘couldn't find a job'," she says. "That stigma is gone now. If you're
an expert at something, it's perfectly acceptable to sell that
expertise on an interim basis."

And
don't change your resume from a chronological to a functional one,
advises Enelow. "For people who have been out of work for a very long
time - for instance, moms who took 10 or 15 years off to raise their
families and now want to get back into the workforce - a functional
resume makes sense," she says. "But for you, out of work just six
months? It's a mistake. It makes it look as if you have something to
hide."

"Be
100% honest and just tell interviewers you were laid off last fall and
are still looking for the right opportunity," she adds. There's nothing
wrong with taking the time to explore all your options in depth,
especially if you're also sharpening your skills and building your
network with short-term consulting gigs, maybe even lending a hand to a
nonprofit in your community.

"The
same people who sit on corporate boards are on nonprofit boards," notes
Nancy Keene. These are good people to be visible to."

As
a 47-year-old senior manager who presumably has been toiling away
nonstop for a quarter of a century or so, Enelow says, you should feel
free to mention to prospective employers that you've used some of these
past six months "to slow down and smell the roses" - spending more time
with your family, brushing up on a foreign language, taking photography
classes, or whatever else you've been doing to recharge and re-energize
yourself for the next phase of your career.

"A
long job hunt can be demoralizing," she says. "But if you go into an
interview feeling and acting like a victim of the economy, it will sink
you. You need to find ways to keep your spirits up and maintain a
positive, forward-looking energy."

In
other words, try to have some fun. If that sounds like a waste of time,
consider Ben Wallace, age 40, who two weeks ago started his new job as
chief operating officer of Penneco, a Pennsylvania oil and gas
exploration company, after being out of work since last June. Wallace
says he spent those nine months doing what he calls "quality
networking," which led to consulting assignments that eventually landed
him his current position.

"As
soon as I was free and clear of my old employer, I started calling
senior managers at other companies in the industry and asking them out
to lunch," he says. His companions would start talking about gaps in
their current talent pool, which Wallace would then offer to fill on a
temporary basis.

Between
consulting projects, he says, he enjoyed life. "I took my 9-year-old
son to Boy Scout camp for a whole week and left my BlackBerry at home,
which is something I never, ever would have done when I was working
full-time," Wallace says. He adds: "Everybody who has been working very
hard for a long time has neglected some part of their personal life and
at some point thinks, ‘Gee, wouldn't it be great to take a 6-month
sabbatical, spend more time with my family, go to the gym every day and
get back in shape...' So if you're job hunting, in a sense this is your
sabbatical. Make the most of it!"

The
advantage of not obsessing over your career 24 hours a day, Wallace
says, is that "you will feel great, which will boost your
self-confidence - and that will help your job search." Worth a try, no?

One Comment on "Out of work 6 months. Now what?"

1. 
   
   
   
   cwe
   
   
   June 13th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
   

   I
   found when looking for my last job using the powero f small was the
   best way to manage the process and not get overwhelmed. Break your to
   do list into smaller sets of mimitasks that you can actually accomplish
   in each day.