Corrections or additions?
This article by Kathleen McGinn Spring was prepared for the June 26, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Tips for the Unemployed
Unemployed? Don’t spend your days sending out resumes.
In fact, maybe you should not E-mail, snail mail, post online, or
hand deliver even one. And don’t rise in the morning, put on a suit,
and spend the day working from a desk in an outplacement center cold
calling employers. Both activities will soon plunge you into a despair
so deep that after 12 or 14 weeks you will have become a different
person.
This advice comes from a man who sees more unemployed professionals
in one week than most people encounter in a lifetime. Tom Brophy
is an unemployment counselor for the state, and he is also an entrepreneur.
Raw with empathy for the increasingly desperate out-of-work people
he speaks with every day, he is developing a business to help them
find jobs faster — and with a lot less pain. He has a website
(www.tombrophy.com), is planning a series of audio tapes, and gives
motivational speeches.
Brophy speaks on “Transitional Layoff Counseling” on Thursday,
June 27, at 7 p.m. at the Princeton Hyatt. Cost: $25. Call 609-259-9539.
Brophy’s empathy for those who find themselves suddenly out of work
springs, at least in part, from his own experience. Beginning in 1896,
his family owned and ran a shoe store under the family name in Palmer
Square, first where PNC Bank is now located, and then across the street
in the storefront now occupied by Bucks County Coffee. “I started
to work in that store when I was nine years old,” Brophy says.
He was the third generation in his family to sell shoes to Princetonians.
“Have you seen the Images of America book?” he asks. “On
the cover there is a man sitting in a doorway.” The year is 1901,
and the doorway is that of his family’s shoe store.
In the early 1980s, says Brophy, “Collins [the development company
that then owned Palmer Square] evicted us.”
It was the beginning of a bleak period for him. “I went into real
estate,” he says. He found a world where he considered no one
to be loyal, a world very different from the small town retail world
he was used to. “It was two-and-a-half-years of hell,” he
says.
Someone suggested he apply to the department of labor. “I was
not enthused,” he recalls. “I remember the frustration and
fear of becoming a state employee.”
Now, some eight years later, he is exquisitely tuned into the emotional
turmoil unemployed people suffer, and has developed programs —
some implemented, some in the proposal stage — to help them. In
short, Brophy appears to have found his niche. It is easy to see the
entrepreneur under the skin of a state worker. His mind is constantly
working, constantly devising strategies to let the unemployed know
what he knows.
Here is the crux of what Brophy knows.
“Do you have children?” he asks. When the reply is affirmative,
he says “okay,” and settles into a routine he obviously has
gone through many times before. “Your oldest is 29 now,” he
says, setting the stage. “Go back. It’s 28 1/2 years ago. You
just got back from the pediatrician. Are you married? Okay, you’re
married. So, you get home, and you tell your husband `the doctor says
our son has a rare disease. It has to be addressed quickly, and there
are only three specialists in the world who can treat it.’
“That’s all he tells you. That’s it,” says Brophy. “Is
there any doubt in your mind that you’re going to find one of those
doctors?”
The answer, he knows, requires no thought whatsoever from any parent.
“You’ll go through walls,” he says. And that is what job hunters
need to do. Forget the formulas; forget the standard advice. “There’s
no formula for this deal,” he declares.
Here is Brophy’s description of what job hunters go through, and his
advice on getting back to work before their self-esteem is too tattered
to put back together.
The standard curve. “In the first three months, you’refull of enthusiasm,” says Brophy. Shoved out the door by an employer,and worried about how to pay the bills, he says, “adrenalin takesover.” The newly-unemployed send out resumes and make phone callslike crazy. “Reflexes take over,” he says. “You do everythingyou’re told to do. But it doesn’t work. Your in the new neighborhoodof unemployment.”By the 10th or 11th week, says Brophy, who has spoken to tens of thousandsof unemployed people at every stage of their job search, “symptomsbegin to manifest.” Within another two to three weeks, he says,”you’re so weighed down from rejection that you’re a differenthuman being. Your world is full of employed people; it’s all you cansee.”By this point, personal relationships very likely have deteriorated.”If your husband or wife has never been unemployed, and says `Iunderstand how you’re feeling,’” says Brophy, you want to scream— or worse. You are living a lie, not telling friends and familyhow afraid and depressed you feel.And it gets worse, by 26 weeks, says Brophy, the $32,000-a-year secretaryand the $750,000-a-year CEO are indistinguishable in their agony.”They talk on the phone the same way,” he says. “Theyconstruct sentences the same way.” Constant rejection rules theirlives, and forms their every waking minute.The resume. Part of this unhappy state of affairs canbe laid at the feet of that job-hunting staple, the resume. Standardadvice is to spiff up and send out as many resumes as possible. Big,big mistake, says Brophy.”The average person sends out 112 resumes in the first three months,”he says. “They get 4.3 responses.” For the unemployed, hesays, those numbers quickly translate into “108 people think Isuck.””Ninety-two percent of resumes are not read,” says Brophy.”A $70,000 job advertised in The Wall Street Journal draws 3,600resumes a week. That’s more than 600 a day. What happens to the personwho gets the resumes?”What happens, he says, is that this person finds a way to make themgo away, perhaps by instructing his staff to pick out two or threea day and get rid of the rest. Hovering near the phone, scanning themail for responses, the job hunter, unaware that his resume most likelywas not even read, feels more marginalized, more invisible, and moredepressed.The phone call. About as fruitful as a mass resume mailing,but a lot more uncomfortable, cold calls to employers depress jobhunters’ spirits further, and rarely result in a job offer, says Brophy.He reels off a typical phone call opening: “`I’m calling aboutthe job in the paper for an ad sales regional manager. I’d like tospeak to the HR manager.’” The reaction, says Brophy, is no differentfrom the one a homeowner feels when he races to catch a ringing phoneonly to hear a polite voice ask “may I speak to the lady of thehouse?”If you don’t know the decision maker, if you don’t know exactly whatit is you can offer to solve a need the company has, the person answeringthe phone will think, says Brophy, “you’re a pain in my neck.”Job hunters have a fantasy about these calls, he says. It goes somethinglike this. The HR guy will come on the phone and say, “I havethis job. It pays $62,000, and it’s waiting just for you.”As time goes on, and the fantasy does not come true, job hunters makematters worse, adopting a phone monotone that signals an ever-more-off-puttinglack of hope. They’re just going through the motions, and they knowit.The interview. If there is an upside to the despair ofa months-long bout of unemployment, Brophy says it is that a keennessof perception kicks in. The unemployed, exhibiting behaviors not unlikethose of abused children, are able to read volumes into the merestchange in tone, expression, and shift in body language.This skill can bag the prize.Most job hunters blow their interviews. They use their precious hour,says Brophy, reciting the facts on their resumes, information theinterviewer has already seen. Up against seven or eight other candidates,they end up sounding like all of the rest.Stop, says Brophy. Analyze the interviewer. Scan his desk and hiswalls. Notice what he is wearing. Read his body language. And thentake one minute of your interview time to connect with the thing thatmatters most to him, whether it be religion, his new baby, or hisupcoming nuptials.This has to be done subtly, says Brophy, and the reading of the interviewerhas to be right on target. If it is, he says the candidate who makesthat vital connection will get the job — every time.The strategy Do not set yourself up for failure. Do notspend a single minute on a job hunting task that is an odds-on favoriteto lead to another rejection. Look for the back doors into the goodjobs. Find out the names of the decision makers — and their businessphilosophies, hobbies, and favorite shore towns and restaurants. Takeon consulting jobs or freelance work that will get you into the mainstreamfast. Mine your contacts. Make new contacts. And count every scrapof information as a victory.It all comes down to ignoring standard job-hunting advice andthinking like the parent of a sick child who needs the help of anelusive doctor — and needs it right away.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
