Career counselors: Do they really help?

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Stop. You were not “laid off.” Your “position” was “impacted” in a “restructuring brought on by business decisions.”

And no. You are not “looking for a job” right now. You are “a solution” waiting to connect with some employer who has a “pain, need or opportunity” that you can “satisfy.”

Feel better? You would if you had joined three people whom the San Jose Mercury News recently paired with career counselors. The plan: one coach, one hour, one laid-off job-seeker in search of a tune-up. We’d eavesdrop on the exchange and write about it. Then, we’d circle back in a few weeks to see if the advice helped.

With each wave of layoffs, a cottage industry of job-help startups, career advisers and life coaches continues to mushroom. So we wondered, does any of this advice actually work?

While each of our experts sported a unique style, there was plenty of overlap in their messages. In a nutshell: This isn’t about finding work. It’s about screwing your head on differently, going out on limbs and making end runs around all the other unemployed “solutions” wandering the job market.

We started with bookkeeper Elise Sandusky, one of the three laid-off Silicon Valley workers the Mercury News has followed since the beginning of the year. She has sent out more than 2,000 online r sum s, and she’s starting to get it — this ain’t working.

Maybe management consultant Abhijeet Khadilkar can jump-start her campaign. He started his job-help network CareerTiger as a way to help friends, and it’s still largely a pro-bono labor of love.

As Sandusky looks on, he hits the whiteboard and doodles out the job-creation chain, from a CEO with a need, to middle managers with a plan, to hiring managers with a posting. “They are creating a funnel, and most job-seekers’ r sum s flow in through that point. But can we do something different, maybe be part of the research before the job posting is even approved?”

Get upstream, ahead of the torrent of applicants. He drills down for details of companies she’s worked with in the past — Phillips, PG&E — and roles she’s played — quality control, billing, dispatch, operations.

“Let’s compose your ‘elevator speech,’” he says. “This should go out to the employer before a r sum . Don’t send a r sum first!”

Sandusky looks shocked. “That’s a switch.”

“When you send out a r sum ,” Khadilkar says, “you hope and you pray — that’s not a strategy.”

Her homework: Find 30 companies similar to PG&E or who are competing or partnering with PG&E. “Your job is not to go to HR, but to go to people who are doing your type of work inside those companies. Use LinkedIn to find them, request meetings, then compose a message completely customized to that position. Identify opportunities and problems they face. So it’s not an interview, it’s a sharing of ideas.”

It was Kris Rowberry, a laid-off aviation technician who used to wait hand and foot on the corporate jet set, who first came up with the off-handed job description: “I’m a concierge who sweats.”

But it was his mentor, UC-Berkeley-trained management consultant Susan Bernstein, who took it and ran. What Rowberry needed was “a verbal calling card, so that when people hear what you’re up to in the world, they want to know more.”

A hardworking “concierge” who can gas up a Learjet and unload baggage while stroking egos such as Larry Ellison’s has a good story to tell. Bernstein was going to help him tell it.

“Instead of ‘looking for a job,’” she said, “you need to hone in on, ‘This is what I do for people and I’m looking for a place to do it.’”

What did Rowberry like about his job? “Sweating my butt off for eight hours made the time fly by.” And “the camaraderie, with death at every corner, cooperation all around.” And “I like to be kept busy. If I’m busy, I’m happy.” She scribbles it all down.

Now, she tells Rowberry, “tell me a story about a time at work that felt great.”

One Sunday after Thanksgiving, he says, “We were very busy and there was no room to park any more planes, but we still managed to squeeze in a large jet and it was so cool to see all of us working together like this well-oiled machine. Nothing could stop us.”

She tells him to jot that down and save it for “the next time things get hard. It’ll bring back the memories and all the good feelings along with it.” She dug deeper. Rowberry, she determined, was not just a problem-solver, but a problem-preventer.

Tim Johnston shows up at the home of software test engineer Roopa Govindarajan, dressed in dark jeans and black T-shirt, loaded for bear. He has an intense passion about job-hunting, culled through years of recruiting for firms such as Sun, AMD and Cadence.

“I’m a hunter-gatherer of talent,” he tells Govindarajan, mother of two small boys and chronically overwhelmed by her joblessness. She tells him: “I was laid off from Citrix on Jan. 29 ...”

“Stop!” he blurts out. “Depersonalize the process. People say. ‘I lost my job’ and I’ll say ‘Where did you leave it?’ It’s not like losing your car keys. It’s not about you having done anything wrong. You weren’t laid off. Your position was impacted by a restructuring. This isn’t the time to think of ‘you’ but of how people can help you.”

Johnston is a bulldozer, plowing through his hour and leaving enough gems of advice for a job-seeker to ponder for weeks: “Companies don’t hire; hiring managers hire.”

Rethink the way you look for work. First, forget the past (“The whole ‘Why me?’ thing. You’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter.”). Second, flip things around (“Think about that interesting opportunity over at Intuit and ask yourself, who within that company sits up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat wondering where you are?”) Her job is to find that person.