Bait and Switch (8 page)

them with computer programs searching for the desired keywords, and event planning—and casting about for further tips and and I can only hope that
public relations
and
health
are among them.

leads. Sometimes the effect of my afternoon labors is to 3:00-4:30: Proceed to gym for daily workout, as recom-undermine whatever I accomplished in the morning. For example, mended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would one day I spend the morning on my resume and the afternoon work out anyway, but it's nice to have this ratified as a legitimate reading
Don't Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help
job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time
Land a Great Job,
by Jeffrey J. Fox, who informs me bleakly: available—from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to A resume with a "for everyman" cover letter is junk mail. A resume wrestle any job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I without a cover letter is used to line the bottom of the birdcage . . . All unexpected and standard resumes go from the IN box to the trash box.

have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity.

Some may generate a rejection form letter; most get ignored; 99.2 percent With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow get tossed.
22

who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The According to Fox, no one is interested in my background or anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are

"career objectives"; all the companies want to know is what I not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an can do for them—which means many more hours at the com-accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how puter, researching each company in detail, identifying its problems, many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations and dreaming up solutions. Another afternoon's fishing produces never seem to get beyond "Do you mind if I work in?" and the distressing information that employers, especially the

"Whoops, I guess that's your towel."

BUT YOU CANNOT spend all your job-search time at the com-

22 Jeffrey J. Fox,
Don't Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land
puter. At the Forty-Plus Club, Joe exhorted us, "Get out of
a Great Job
(New York: Hyperion, 2001), p.5.

your caves!" so I resolve to make an attempt to network with are no interruptions from the audience, no whispers, groans, or the actually employed. Joanne alerted me to the monthly meet-attempts to sneak out early. Certain phrases keep recurring: "skill ings of a local businesspersons' club just a few miles from set," "end of the day," and "due diligence"—which I write down to home in Charlottesville, at which, for S30, I can get a box add to my corporate vocabulary. The only other entertainment lunch and the chance to mingle with current jobholders. I ar-possibility is my box lunch, which seems to have been designed rive a few minutes late, pockets filled with my business cards, at as a direct rebuff to the recently deceased Dr. Atkins: chicken the hotel meeting room where the session is being held.

salad wrap, macaroni salad, potato chips, and a giant chocolate About seventy people are seated around tables listening to the chip cookie.

hotel manager welcome them with a rundown on the hotel's at-Who are these people? Though I'm sitting against the wall in tractions, should anyone decide to check in after lunch and the back of the room, most of the assembled businesspeople are stay for the night: 118 rooms, each with coffeemaker, blow arranged around tables, so quite a few name tags are visible to me dryer, and ironing board. I guess you could say he is networking and most include company names: CVS, Moneywise Payroll too.

Solutions, WBT Advisors, and a few realty firms. The attached A panel of three speakers on the theme "Funding Emerging humans are hardly intimidating; I see the same desultory coiffures Growth: Venture Capital and Other Strategies" is introduced, and dulled, passive expressions you might find at the Forty-Plus but I am too far back in the room to see them. So, from my Club. It must be that the same corporate culture embraces both vantage point, there are only disembodied male voices to ac-jobholders and job seekers, and that it is a culture of conformity and company the PowerPoint presentations, all of which highlight studied restraint, maybe something like that of the Chinese the same trend: a dramatic decrease in venture-capital-backed imperial court in the heyday of hardline Confucianism.

IPOs throughout the state of Virginia since 2001. Everyone But I have to wonder what distinguishes the jobholders as a class.

seems to handle the bad news with admirable stoicism. There If they don't look any better or radiate any more zest than the job seekers, how come they were chosen for their jobs? Of hands? Throw them up in the air and let people scramble to claim course, they no doubt possess skills I can barely imagine—in them?

finance, for example, or accounting—and will go back to There's nothing to do but get my coat and return to the car as perform complex, even—from my perspective—occult,

friendless as when I arrived. Maybe Kimberly, if she had been activities at their desks.

perched on the cheap chandeliers lighting the meeting room, One person attracts me. A panelist is indulging in a rare attempt at could have told me where I went wrong. But for now I only note humor, telling us that an SBA (Small Business Administration?) with relief that the search part of the day is over and the time has loan cannot be used to fund "strip joints or porno," at which a come to repair to the gym.

woman sitting near me mutters "or for overthrowing the Lesson learned: I am not ready for the next step, the step government." Funny gal—or hardened revolutionary? I decide she that involves face-to-face interactions with people who might will be my first networking target, but when the program comes actually have jobs to offer. There's the matter of my business to an end she escapes before I can catch her. This leaves me cards, for example. It's the end of January, and in two months I standing near a scary-looking guy of about forty, who is turned out have managed to give away no more than five out of 100 of to resemble Michael Douglas in
Wall
Street—well-tailored suit, them. I understand that with respect to the cards, my job is like emerald green silk tie, hair slicked back to a curly fringe that of those guys on the streets of Manhattan who try to hit brushing against his collar. I should say hi and put out my hand, you with deli menus—the point is simply to get rid of them.

but he dismisses me with a look of impatience and strides out of Until the cards are out there, fluttering around in the world, I the room. I should go up to someone else then, but they are all might as well not exist. But to hand out even a single card, I moving in clumps toward the cloakroom. I smile at anyone whose would have to engage someone in conversation long enough eye I can catch, but everyone is hastening to reclaim their coats.

for it to seem natural to say, "Here, why don't you take one of What do I do? Start thrusting my Kinko's cards into their my cards?" Something is holding me back—maybe "lack of confidence," as Kimberly and I agree to call it, though I sus-meet his or her individual needs.

pect also a prideful resistance to "selling myself."

These objections, though, are in the present circumstances Other job seekers seem to suffer from the same reticence.

only excuses. Whatever is holding me back—shyness or Hillary Meister, for example, whom I met by e-mail through pride—it must be vanquished, and in this enterprise I can see I need the Atlanta Job Search Network, says she has trouble with "the further help.

whole networking thing":

The Forty-Plus Club's boot camp is not an option. On my next trip to D.C. for its Monday-morning get-together, Ted It's personality. I'm very quiet, not very extroverted. It [networking] feels confronts me with the question "What's holding you back?" I so fake to me, but I know that's the game.

freeze, sure that this is a Joe-type query to which the possible It feels "fake" because we know it involves the deflection of our responses include "procrastination" and "nonlinear career natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we path." "Money?" he continues, and I realize he's asking what meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be holds me back from enlisting in the boot camp. I say no, I can't strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each commute two and a half hours each way every weekday for human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is three weeks of 9-5 sessions.

no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak,

"There's a guy who commuted all the way from Pennsylvania,"

looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conver-Ted reproaches me. "Or you could stay in a hotel."

sation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned If I went through boot camp, I would be entitled to become an from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact. This instru-actual member of the club, which might put me in a position to mentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, hang out with Merle, exchange views on the correct hanging of as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how scarves over suit jackets, and absorb some of her executive aura for crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to myself. But I have found an appealingly condensed alternative; or rather it has found me. One day when I was weeding through the Atlanta job possibilities, I came across an announcement for an "executive boot camp" to be hosted by something called the ExecuTable and scheduled to take exactly three

one day. It isn't cheap, especially when you factor in airfare and a night in a hotel, but the difference between 7 hours and the 120-hour commitment required by Forty-Plus is compelling.

So I go to Travelocity.com and, after about thirty minutes of Surviving Boot Camp

comparative shopping, come up with a travel plan.

I've been to Atlanta twice in the last two years, just long enough to gain the impression that it's a city without a heart.

From one of the downtown hotels I stayed in on a previous trip, I could walk two blocks in any direction without encountering another pedestrian. I even asked the doorman where the Atlantans could be found, and he directed me to take the subway out to a mall in the suburbs, where indeed there were hundreds of people, none of them showing signs of having recently fled a neutron bomb attack. This could be the latest urban trend—the depopulated includes all the requisite skills, I expand beyond the pharmas effect—since I've encountered it also in Dallas and Oklahoma and leap to offer myself to any company seeking:

City. What it means, for the unemployed, is that there are no public spaces in which to congregate, have a coffee, and maybe strike

[an] experienced and highly motivated Director of Communications. Duties include branding organization throughout up a conversation. The only options are home, workplace, or mall; local corporate community, creating general community and if you have no source of income, the mall is not recommended.

awareness, media outreach and creation of promotional ma-But the boot camp is to be held in the thriving northeastern terials.

suburbs, where life apparently goes on.

Or perhaps:

I arrive in Atlanta with something less than a winning attitude. It's already February, and I have precious little to show

[a] skilled writer with solid professional editing and communications for my time. I've been laboring steadily away on my resume strategy skills (health care communicatins exp. is a big plus). You will with Joanne, which has become a project on the scale of a have at least 2 yrs of exp. (w/sample portfolio) that includes working w/media. Must possess a BA degree.

graduate thesis, and—after endless tweakings and arguments over how best to highlight my strong points—she has proA couple of companies send me automatic acknowledgments by nounced me "almost there," maybe just because I've let her e-mail, and one—Wyeth—goes so far as to send me an actual know I'm not willing to pay for another month of her services. I postcard. That's it, though; for the most part, corporate have furthermore posted this nearly finished product on America seems willing to soldier on without my help.

Monster and HotJobs.com and sent it off to a dozen major In my declining frame of mind, even boot camp has begun to pharmaceutical companies—from Abbot to Wyeth—that are loom as a test I may very likely fail. Do I have the mental looking for PR people and allow you to apply right on the stamina for the boot-camp experience? What if it's conducted in company web sites. Confident, at this point, that my resume incomprehensible corporate jargon? Is there a chance that, in the intensity of the day's interactions, I'll be exposed as a fraud?

protuberant eyes and a distinctly uncorporate paunch, he begins on We sit, about fifteen of us, around a horseshoe-shaped table an oddly therapeutic note:

facing our leader, Patrick Knowles. Based on the number of times the word
executive
came up in the web description of the I'm going to make eye contact with you. You need to trust and see where this experience will take you. It's based on experiential boot camp and in one brief phone conversation with Patrick, learning, which has three parts: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.

during which he requested a resume as a condition for atten-There are four major questions: What do you want your life to dance, I pictured something a bit more imposing than a win-look like a year from now? What challenges do you face to make that happen? What commitments do you need to make to face dowless meeting room in the ultraminimalist Hampton Inn.

those challenges? What is the price you're going to pay if you There aren't even any water glasses at our places or free pads to don't make those commitments?

write on. I am hoping we will go around the table and introduce ourselves, though there are only a few exceptions to the usual Three parts and four questions—except for the eye contact blank corporate look. I cannot help but wonder about James part, it all sounds dismayingly Morton-like. The difference is (identified by the name card in front of him), for example, if that, despite his appearance, Patrick has charisma; the more he only because of his crazy overgrown crew cut, or Billy, a handsome talks, the more energy he absorbs, apparently from the vibra-man in his forties who seems a little too tightly wound for tions of his own voice in the room, since there is not the slightest the occasion, almost straining to contain his excitement. And stirring of response from the group.