A divisive decade helped unite job seekers -- Career Center Blog

September 11, 2011

A divisive decade helped unite job seekers

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By Randy Woods
NWjobs

I don't have to ask you what you were doing this morning 10 years ago today; I already know the answer. Like everyone, you were trying to go about a typical Tuesday, only you probably spent most of it either glued to a TV for hours on end -- longer than you thought yourself capable of watching in one stretch -- or trying frantically to reach loved ones on the East Coast through overloaded phone lines. We didn't all agree how to respond, but we were all more or less united.

A full decade later, the images of the towers and the planes are still hard to watch, but the visceral impact has dulled through numbing repetition. Since that terrible day, we've launched two wars and endured the dot-com tech crash, a rash of corporate scandals, a calamitous real estate collapse and worst recession since Roosevelt was in the White House. Politically, we have not been so divided in this country since perhaps the civil rights era of the 1960s.

In the job-search world, however, the opposite has occurred. With unemployment hovering between 9 and 10 percent for the last three years, we are more interconnected than ever. Networking has always been an effective method for finding work, but today it is absolutely essential. Online social media has allowed the almost instant dissemination of information about job openings to alert job seekers. Digital resumes can be easily customized for each prospective employer. Blogs and podcasts can broadcast your expertise and personality to more hiring managers than job seekers could ever imagine in 2001.

Most importantly, 10 years of adversity has brought out the best in job hunters. Most people I know who are looking for work are the first to help their fellow job seekers with recommendations and tips. Even for people within the same hyper-competitive industry, the veil of secrecy about promising job leads has been lifted. At a time when so much information can be accessed instantly online, the development of lasting business relationships has trumped the urge to get an edge on the competition. In essence, the competition itself has become one of the best networking tools.

With more than 200,000 people in Washington state losing their jobs since the Great Recession began in 2007, most successful job seekers have realized that treating the competition as the enemy will get them nowhere. Instead, by offering assistance to others, the odds are greater that their largesse will be returned to them down the road.

This wasn't always the case. In September 2001, I was about a year into my first experiment with being a freelance writer. After working in conventional 9-to-5 magazine-editing jobs for 11 years, I decided in the summer of 2000 that I would break free of the routine and become a free agent. For much of the late 1990s, it seemed like everyone was reinventing the business world. Eight years of peace and prosperity produced mountains of venture cash, which was being lavished on new dot-com enterprises. Individuals were celebrated for creating their own rules, and Seattle was abuzz with secret deals being made in coffee shops. It seemed like everyone was on their own.

With the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate at a ridiculous low of about 4 percent in 2000, I thought I'd put my toe in the entrepreneurial waters. Little did I know that the dot-com wave had already crested and that fiscal reality was beginning to wash over the business world. By the summer of 2001, with my credit card debt rising and clients retreating, I was ready to return to the workaday world. It turned out to be a four-year journey.

If you were looking for work 10 years ago, networking was still the best way to find it, but the most popular way to find jobs was to scan the classified ads in the local newspaper and bombard employers with identical resumes. Twitter and Facebook were not even imagined yet. LinkedIn wouldn't arrive until 2003, and even then it was regarded as more of exclusive club than a flexible networking tool. It took many years and the 2008 financial crisis for job seekers to understand that it was much more productive to help each other out than to go it alone.

This summer, I found myself again in the situation of looking for work (though not by choice this time). I prepared myself for another slog of many months through the networking trenches, but was surprised by the number of great leads I immediately received from my contacts. Through networking, I was able to pick up several terrific freelance gigs to help pay the bills and discovered a few job openings that had not yet been advertised. Just last week, one of these leads turned into a job offer, which I gladly accepted.

As we look back on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, grieve anew for the victims and lament how divided the country has become, I want to say thanks to my network contacts for the help they provided me over the last two months, and beyond. I also celebrate the resourcefulness of the nation's unemployed, who -- like the 9/11 responders and victims' families -- have helped to pull each other through a difficult decade. Let's hope our nation's leaders can learn a few lessons from them.

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.