How the Long-Term Unemployed Can Find Work

From US News & World Report | Oct 1, 2009

5 million Americans have been looking for work for six months or more

By


Liz Wolgemuth

Another unemployment benefits extension for the jobless in states with high unemployment rates
sailed through the House last week, but faces a more complicated route
through the Senate, where some members want a bill that provides some
relief for all states, not just the hardest hit. While the extension
itself is not exceptional, what it represents is. Eligible workers in
the hardest-hit states already can receive 79 weeks of benefits. With
the new extension, some workers will be able to collect nearly two
years' worth of unemployment checks.

The nation faces an unprecedented number of long-term unemployed-5
million workers were out of work for six months or more in August-and
proponents of benefit extensions have a critical piece of data to
support their cause: Job openings have bottomed out just as the volume of the unemployed has sailed higher. There were, last month, roughly six job seekers
for every opening, or "simply not enough to go around," says Christine
Riordan, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

The most basic key to getting these 5 million people back to work is
really "a more robust macroeconomy," says Harvard economist Lawrence
Katz. Firms are not yet showing a willingness to risk new hires in the
kinds of volumes that would put significant numbers of the unemployed
into jobs. Even when they do hire, employers show a proclivity for job
seekers with briefer tenures of unemployment. So, the challenge for the
long-term unemployed is, in some respects, sharply different from that
of fresh job seekers.

Preserving mental health. "It is a horrendous experience to go through long-term unemployment," says sociologist Thomas Cottle, author of Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long-term Unemployment. "It
has devastating physical, psychological, and spiritual effects." After
going many months-or years-without finding a job, such effects no doubt
also prolong joblessness. Any kind of physical or mental disorder a
person might have is exacerbated by the experience, Cottle says.

Although the long-term jobless experience their situation in
different ways-perhaps because they represent multiple
demographics-there are common patterns of angry depression, drops in
self-esteem, and major transformations in their senses of themselves,
Cottle says. Human beings are constantly exploring and assessing
themselves in multiple domains, and "the domain of work is so
essential," he says. Research shows that within two weeks of a person
being told he may be laid off, he and his family show the effects of
stress. While government can offer financial support to the unemployed
by extending unemployment benefits, it's not clear how the jobless are
supported-or should be supported-psychologically. But this appears to
be a crucial element of success in regaining employment.

[See the research on job search success.]

Staying positive and having a plan.
Researchers at the University of Missouri recently studied the efforts
of 327 job seekers, ages 20 to 40, and found that developing and
following a plan at the start of your job search, and having positive
emotions later in the job search, had a significant impact on success.
Daniel Turban, a professor and chair of the Department of Management in
the University of Missouri's College of Business, says that for the
long-term unemployed, it can be very difficult to stay energetic and
positive. Making plans and following them up becomes difficult.

Positive emotions were particularly effective in face-to-face
meetings, according to the study. That may be because those emotions
are contagious or because people with positive emotions actually
perform better in their interviews. Negative thoughts can be
self-fulfilling and very harmful to a job search, so it's critical that
job seekers be aware of their emotions. Nevertheless, Turban says he
understands that "it can sound very trite to a long-term unemployed
person: 'Just be happy!' "

[See the best careers for 2009.]

Expanding the network. Any career
expert can tell you that networking is critical to finding a job, so,
older workers would seem to have an advantage on their younger peers
through the rich networks they've built over the course of their
careers. But job seekers
ages 45 and older actually represented a larger percentage of the
long-term unemployed than of the total unemployed in 2003, the Labor
Department found.

Often, workers who are out of work for long periods are challenged
by social networks in which many of their contacts are also out of work,
says Mark Granovetter, a Stanford University sociologist. That may be
particularly true in this recession, which has been characterized by
downturns in specific sectors-such as residential construction and auto
manufacturing. There is some promising anecdotal evidence, however,
that employers are using online social networks such as LinkedIn and
Facebook effectively, to help make connections with potential
employees, Granovetter says. Time spent making online connections could
help job seekers circumvent the challenge of an unpromising offline
network.

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