May 27th, 2009 | Posted in Important Career
Kristin Konopka sent out nearly 100 copies of her résumé in January in search of receptionist work, but got only one callback. That’s when Ms. Konopka, a 29-year-old New York actress and yoga teacher, took her master’s degree and academic teaching experience off her résumé.
The calls started coming in. The slimmer version of her résumé landed in 30 in-boxes and earned her three callbacks and two interviews. “It definitely picked up the interest,” says Ms. Konopka, who realized quickly that people don’t “want to hire anyone who is overqualified.”
Securing work in a tight economy means more job seekers might find themselves applying for positions below their qualifications. Many unemployed professionals are willing to take paycuts for the promise of a paycheck. But to get a foot in the door, candidates are gearing down their résumés by hiding advanced degrees, changing too-lofty titles, shortening work experience descriptions, and removing awards and accolades.
In the past eight months, Jamaica Eilbes, an information-technology recruiter for Milwaukee employment agency Manpower, has had to weed out more overqualified résumés than usual from the stacks that cross her desk each day. “I’d never feel comfortable putting a really high-level candidate into a lower level position,” says Ms. Eilbes, who recruits for Manpower and other clients. “We don’t want to take you on if we think you are going to jump ship.”
But in recent months, Ms. Eilbes has seen more master’s and doctoral degrees at the bottom of résumés instead of at the top. She’s also seen candidates omitting or trimming job descriptions that showed they had substantial years of work experience. Résumés on which job descriptions taper off as they progress down the page raise Ms. Eilbes’s suspicions. “How do I know I can trust them later down the road if there’s something on their résumé they decided to take off so they could have a better chance at getting that job?” she says.
Still, for some professionals who find themselves constantly rejected despite decades of experience, scaling back the truth — or at the least, some of their experiences — can feel like the only chance at an interview.
Lenora Kaplan, 49, has 26 years of marketing experience but doesn’t want her résumé to show it. When she lost her job as vice president of public relations at a small Las Vegas marketing firm in January, Ms. Kaplan searched for work with little success. At an interview for a shopping-mall marketing-director position in February, she was told that the hiring budget had only enough for a junior-level employee and that her résumé showed she was overqualified.
Many of the jobs she comes across ask for far fewer years of experience than she has. “There is nothing to apply for” at my level, Ms. Kaplan says. She quickly realized her job experience was pricing her out of too many positions. Her solution: To try not to look as senior level as she really was. So she eliminated certain jobs and removed details about speaking engagements and board positions.
In some cases, job seekers are being told by hiring agencies to tone down their résumés if they want to get hired. When Bridget Lee, 29, moved to New York from Shanghai eight months ago and put her application in at three temporary agencies, she was told to play down her work experience before they would send her résumé to potential clients. The temp-agency version of her résumé changed titles like “manager” and “freelance trend researcher” to “staff” and “office support” and omitted entirely her title as partner of a small marketing agency. “It’s been a lesson for how I present myself,” Ms. Lee says.
Career counselors advise against making too many drastic changes. But they also say the demand for this kind of restructuring is on the rise. In the past three months, Tammy Kabell, a Kansas City, Mo., job-search coach, says more clients are requesting her help to “dumb down” their résumés, whether by changing job titles, playing down experience, or altogether omitting some impressive achievements. One recent client, a 61-year-old former chief learning officer at a tech company, insisted on omitting her C-level job title from her résumé. She was fearful her application would be weeded out by the Web search-optimization tools companies use to manage résumés.
Some résumé writers advise reworking a résumé into a functional one stressing transferable skills instead of past job titles and accomplishments. “Instead of focusing on the big achievements that might scare an employer away, you can spell out what you can bring to an employer in the next position,” Ms. Kabell says.
Of course, reducing your résumé to a skeleton of what it truly should be isn’t likely to land you the job you really want. While it took Ms. Lee eight months to get a call back for a job that matched her real experience, this month she landed a position as a temporary account manager — with potential for permanent work — at a New York design firm. The interview and job offer weren’t earned using her dumbed-down résumé, but rather with the original.
“You have to make those creative edits when it comes to short-term work, but in terms of long-term work, you have to stay true to your experience,” says Ms. Lee.
by Jane Porter
Provided By Wall Street Journal
April 7th, 2009 | Posted in Important Career
Revenue may be down and the pressure to slash costs intense, but some companies say job cuts are not an option.
Companies that have avoided layoffs amid this recession are the exception, not the rule. Employers have cut 5.1 million jobs since the recession began, including 663,000 last month alone. But some are looking to shave costs while keeping their work forces intact, so that when the economy does turn around, they’ll be ready to ratchet up production again.
Economists say that’s a wise move.
“If you overshoot on the downside and lay off workers, it puts the company at a disadvantage when the economy comes back to life,” said Sean Snaith, economics professor at the University of Central Florida.
Costco Wholesale Corp.’s profit is down 27 percent year-over-year, but the discount store has not laid anyone off, choosing instead to freeze hiring at its corporate offices. The only workers let go have been holiday seasonal hires.
The company says it recognizes that labor remains its most valuable — if costliest — resource.
“We’re certainly sharpening our pencil everywhere we can,” said Bob Nelson, Costco’s vice president of financial planning and investor relations. Nelson couldn’t recall any layoffs at Costco since the closing of some stores in the 1980s.
Other steps companies are taking to cut costs are not exactly harmless to workers. Chief among them: capping the number of hours employees can work, cutting or freezing pay and suspending matching payments to 401(k) plans.
Casino operator Wynn Resorts is trimming pay and cutting back on retirement fund matches. Credit agency Equifax Inc. froze pay for all U.S. employees for 2009 and at some of its foreign offices as well.
A survey by job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas this year found 71 percent of companies polled had laid off some workers. More than a quarter had implemented pay freezes or cuts.
Despite the alarming job losses nationwide, John Challenger, the firm’s CEO, said it’s more common now than in past recessions for companies to find other paths to savings than laying people off.
That’s because many companies have concluded that layoffs could be costlier down the road. Employers who have laid people off have to find, hire and train new ones when the economy recovers. Workers with specialized skills or strong customer contacts aren’t easily replaced.
Marvin Windows and Doors, a Minnesota company, hasn’t laid off any of its 5,300 workers — despite the collapse of the housing market. Its sales were flat in 2008 and have fallen this year.
“We can’t easily replace skilled craftspeople and their decades of experience,” said Susan Marvin, president of the company.
Instead, Marvin Windows and Doors has trimmed the time factory workers are on the clock — from 40 hours a week to 32. It’s a sacrifice David Peterson, who is 56 and has worked there for five years, is willing to make.
“You may have your hours cut, and that’s not easy,” said Peterson, who maintains machinery for the company. “But you still have your job, which gives me a lot of peace of mind.”
Layoffs typically mean companies have to pay severance costs, which vary widely by occupation and industry. A retail clerk, for instance, might cost a company $1,000 in severance. A low-level white-collar manager paid $50,000 a year could get $5,000.
And higher-paid professionals who earn well into six figures — accountants and lawyers — could get $50,000 in severance, estimated Terry Connelly, dean of Golden Gate University’s Ageno School of Business in San Francisco.
There also are other costs that are harder to put a price tag on, including the loss of talent and leadership. Layoffs can drag down the morale of those who managed to survive the job cuts but fear they could be next.
And when it comes time to rehire people, a company usually ends up paying a new hire more than what the laid-off worker got paid. That’s because an improved job market gives workers more negotiating power than if they’d remained at the company, Connelly said.
Some companies that have had layoffs say they’ve done so in targeted ways. Many have decided they can’t cut any more. Defense contractor ITT Corp., for example, plans to cut about 1,200 jobs, mostly factory and office staff.
“We are certainly not looking to cut engineering positions, because of how valuable those jobs are and how difficult they are to replace,” said spokesman Andy Hilton.
Manufacturing has been clobbered by the recession. The industry lost 161,000 jobs in March and has lost 1.5 million since the recession began. But “a lot of these companies are hitting the limit of where they’d like to be,” said Craig Giffi, U.S. head of consumer and industrial products at Deloitte LLP.
From lathe operators to specialists in computer-controlled industrial machinery, some manufacturers have made costly investments in skilled workers and want to keep them.
“When you have talent that is really special, and you know what you got — it would be costly to let them go,” said economist Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics.
Economists say unemployment, now at 8.5 percent nationwide, could climb above 10 percent by year’s end. Some economists say the labor market may not return to normal, meaning a jobless rate of about 5 percent, until 2013.
And once the economy rebounds, companies that didn’t slash payrolls could emerge with an edge.
“You don’t want to lay off 15 percent of your work force, because you want to be prepared to move quickly when the economy turns around, and that will obstruct your ability to do so,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal-leaning Center For Economic Policy and Research.
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
