Bait and Switch (20 page)

occurs to me that much of my job search so far has involved I don't think I actually pitch forward in my seat or otherwise sitting in windowless rooms while someone—most commonly a betray my attention deficit, but there is a moment at least of ab-white male in his fifties or sixties—stands at the front testifying, solute discontinuity, from which I awake to a slight shuffling in preaching, exhorting, or coaching. Maybe it isn't the content the room. We have finally gotten to what we've all been waiting for: of the presentation that matters, but the discipline the chance to do some problem-solving ourselves. Each of us is required to maintain the sitting posture and vague look of at-handed a number, from one to five, assigning us to a new table, and tentiveness for hours on end. While blue-collar workers invite injury each table will undertake a different "crisis."

and exhaustion through physical exertion, white-collar workers Lurid as they are, Jim insists that each one is based on a real endure the sometimes equally painful results of immobility. Maybe situation: A company runs a free Christmas gift program for needy children, and one of the wrapped presents turns out to with establishing a timeline of events, but no one seems to have be a porn tape, provoking much righteous indignation in the been paying attention. Without thinking, I find myself morphing community, especially the churches. A corporate jet crashes into ENTJ mode, pounding the table and insisting on a thorough into a neighborhood containing a day-care center. A company investigation: "We've got to get the timeline down. We've got to doing community clean-up work in south-central L.A. gets know why these allegations got to the press before they got to caught in a shoot-out between the Crips and the Bloods. A us!"

company finds that its baby products cause rashes. I'm in the Someone writes
timeline
on our flip chart, where it joins a group whose company faces a wave of sexual harassment series of disconnected entries like
meet with victims
and
sensitivity
charges that has attracted the unwelcome attention of a na-

training,
then we move on to the issue of what to do about the tional women's organization (the activists).

national women's organization that has arrived on the scene.

Here we are at last, sitting face-to-face instead of all facing One of the guys at the table suggests that we offer the group a Jim, free to interact, and within minutes I am seriously an-sizable donation to go away. Fools! I picture the redoubtable Kim noyed. My tablemates, among whom middle-aged males from Gandy, current president of the National Organization for the insurance industry are heavily represented, seem to be Women, responding to a proffered bribe.

uniquely clueless. Someone proposes that we (the company)

"It doesn't work that way," I interject forcefully "We're provide medical care and counseling for the victims, leaving talking about people with
principles."
Then I proceed to outline me to explain the difference between sexual harassment and how we might go about co-opting the national women's rape, and how an offer of psychiatric counseling to a victim of organization more cleverly: Set up an independent commission to sexual harassment might easily be construed as an insult.

investigate the allegations, or pretty independent anyway, and But mostly I'm irritated by their flounderingly unsystematic put representatives from the women's organization on it. They'll approach. Jim gave us a general outline to follow, beginning feel like they're doing something, and it'll make the company look like the best thing that's happened to feminism since
Roe v.

blower in a chemical company; dissatisfied or injured customers—

Wade.

"that is,
victims,
heh, heh," as Jim had put it in his presentation—

Blinking slightly, my tablemates accept this plan. But what am anywhere. Thus every company needs a crisis communications I doing? I'm not here to save Mitsubishi, which went plan, whether it knows this or not, as well as a person—that is, through a major sexual harassment scandal in the nineties and is, me—to design it. In my new cover letters—which go out to all the I suspect, the prototype for our particular crisis. I'm here to pharmas I have applied to so far—I explain that the function of network, which means being likable, as opposed to being suc-PR "is not only to light fires, but to put fires out." If I can sell the cessful or right. Everyone else at the table seems happy enough to threats—the homicides, the lawsuits, the face-painted, anar-get along by going along. Abashed, I pull back and content chistic, antiglobalization activists—I can sell myself as the myself with nodding encouragingly as my tablemates continue to knight on the white horse, savior of corporations.

spatter their uninspired, nonstrategic entries on the flip And I'm sure now that I can do it. My entire life experience is chart. Without me, I can see,
they have no plan.
So yeah, I can do part of the skill set I will bring to the firm that eventually hires this PR thing, without any further training than what life has me. Jim makes the perfect role model: Naturally he's a nice already afforded me. But only if I'm in charge.

guy—that's just part of the job. He's spent hours explaining how As soon as I get home from Boston I rush to update my challenged corporate management is in the area of values and résumé on the job boards, adding the impressive-sounding compassion; so of course it's his job, as a PR person, to compensate. I PRSA Crisis Communications Seminar, and start to rethink my have some of the same .advantages: compassion, empathy, a cover letters and general approach. What I've learned from Jim familiarity with unions and community groups, some notion of is that corporations are scared, if not actually paranoid, and for the principle-driven life. I can carry all this to the throne, just as good reason. Give me an industry, and I can think of a "crisis"

Jim has, and set it at the feet of the king.

menacing it: an angel-of-death nurse in a hospital; a whistle-

ciety of America web site or that comes to me through the BUT THE FACT is that no takers are presenting themselves. My Atlanta Job Search Network, and one of the latter suddenly one big lead, given to me by Ron in exchange for a $35 lunch, shows a flicker of promise. Locum Tenens, a small company that collapses ignominiously. My letter to Qorvis, which asked for no serves as a temp agency for physicians in the central Georgia area, is more than a twenty-minute "informational interview" in which looking for a PR director, so I write back emphasizing my extensive to learn about their business, received an encouraging response. But involvement in the health-related field and my veritable passion by the time of my follow-up call, the Qorvis guy has gone cold.

for working with physicians. When I make my follow-up call,

"Am I to understand that you've been operating for the Deborah—the designated hiring agent—picks up the phone herself past three years as a one-person consultancy?" he asks.

and asks whether I have any questions. Indeed I do, since this

"Well, yes," I tell him, and mindful of Ron's advice that a encounter will be a test of my expanding skills.

beggar has to have a good story, go on to burble about how

"Do you have any philanthropic involvement in the

"I've taken an unusually entrepreneurial approach, I admit, community?"—the idea here being that a company's philan-and done extremely well with it, but now I'm looking for the thropic activities should be seen, somewhat coldheartedly, as an camaraderie and shared mission of a firm blah blah."

extension of its PR efforts, and even small companies, to my certain

"Ah" is all he says.

knowledge, can afford to buy a couple of tickets to the annual YWCA He gives me the names of two others on the "hiring team," whom or Big Brother, Big Sister luncheon.

I diligently pursue with e-mails and phone messages, to no Deborah says she's not sure, and seems uncertain as to what response at all. A consultancy, no matter how energetic and

"philanthropic involvement" might involve, so I press on, profitable, must count as a Gap. Meanwhile, in addition to armed by my training with Jim: "Do you have a crisis commu-maintaining my résumé on the job boards, I am of course ap-nications plan? For example, if there were to be complaints plying for every job that shows up on the Public Relations So-about one of your physicians? You know, sexual harassment or an unusual number of deaths."

of modular buildings and how this might be corrected by creative Again, she's not sure, and while I attempt to alarm her with PR.

the absolute necessity of a crisis communication plan, which I But it is the rare application that generates human contact of am uniquely prepared to create and implement, she must be any kind. When I can follow up with a phone call, which is not fishing for my résumé, because she says, "Oh, here you are," and always possible, since named contacts are seldom given, I might be then, after a pause, the familiar rejection: "There's a Gap."

told, as I was by a firm called IR Technologies, that my résumé I'm not sure whether she has my original, Gap-ridden ré-had entered some complicated industrial batch process, along sumé, or, like Qorvis, is interpreting the consultancy in the new one with hundreds of others, which process could take weeks to as a Gap, and there's no way to check my records while we're resolve. Or I might get a recording saying that "due to the volume on the phone. One thing I've learned, though: a Gap of any of applications, we are unable to verify the status of your application."

kind, for any purpose—child raising, caring for an elderly parent, G. J. Meyer, in
Executive Blues,
reports from his job search in the late recovering from an illness, or even consulting—is unforgivable. If eighties that

you haven't spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job.

unless you're luckier than most or the job market gets a lot better than it has been lately, you'll discover that it's possible to send off five hundred resumes with The brief encounter with Qorvis, the nibble from Locum five hundred customized cover letters and not get a single reply more substantial Tenens—these are the exceptions in what is becoming a life of than a preprinted postcard saying thanks?
45

unrelenting rejection. I have, by this time, applied for over 200

That was in a more genteel era. I have received, for all my efforts, advertised and posted jobs, even branching out from health and only one such preprinted postcard. Usually an automatic pharmaceuticals to banks and the trade association for the mod-response appears in my in-box seconds after electronically ular construction industry, which latter at least yields a pleasant phone conversation about the unfortunate down-market image 45 Meyer,
Executive Blues,
p.34.

submitting my résumé and cover letter, but it offers no thanks, sealed shut in your face. I remember once reading a complaint about just an acknowledgment of receipt and a code number to use the invisibility of middle-aged women in our society, and thinking, should I be pesky enough to follow up. Mostly there is nothing at
bring it on.
Because invisibility is something every child aspires all, and it is this—the unshakable, godlike, magisterial to—the chance to flit around snatching cookies and making indifference of the corporate world—that drives my fellow job gargoyle faces, immune from punishment. But now, like all seekers to despair. Neal, whom I met at the ExecuNet those fairy-tale characters who are unfortunate to get what they meeting, told me:

wished for from an overly literal-minded wish granter, I am left frantically trying to undo the spell. Is it my résumé that consigns me You ring people and no one returns your calls, or apply by computer and just to darkness or, in the case of the people whom I encounter at get an automatic response. I had got to the stage where I'd just get up arid sit around and drink coffee until it's time for lunch, really do nothing all day.

networking events,.something about my physical appearance?

Dealing with the rejection is quite difficult.

I start fantasizing about ways to bring myself to the attention of the faceless executives, the "hiring managers" on whom the But rejection puts too kind a face on it, because there is outcome of my search depends. I should develop a new circle of hardly ever any evidence that you
have
been rejected—that is, friends, more usefully connected than the existing ones. I should duly considered and found wanting. As the
New York Times
get out to parties, like the glitzy one I read about in the
Washington
reported in June 2004: "The most common rejection letter
Post
where the CEO of Qorvis was sighted chatting up the nowadays seems to be silence. Job hunting is like dating, only worse, as you sit by the phone for the suitor who never calls."
46

political
machers.
Steve, a marketing man and fellow member of The feeling is one of complete invisibility and futility: you the Atlanta Job Search Network, is taking a similarly creative pound on the door, you yell and scream, but the door remains approach to hobnobbing with the decision makers.

46

I'm interested in a waitstaff job in the Capitol Grill [an upscale restaurant in Lisa Belkin, "No Yes; No No; No Answer at All,"
New York Times,
June 6, 2004.

downtown Atlanta] . . . where serving gives you a chance to network with the big shots by giving them your business card with the check. The most expensive bottle of wine on the menu costs eight hundred dollars. So I'm going to take a three-day course on wines.

seven

This could be me in a few weeks or months—a cocktail waitress or member of the catering staff, deftly slipping resumes to my customers.

In Which I Am

Offered a “Job”

In late May, six months into my search, I get an e-mail request for an actual interview. AFLAC, the insurance company, is looking for sales reps in the central Virginia area, with opportunities for management positions, and my resume—which they must have come across on one of the job boards—suggests that I may be just the woman for the job. This is not, of course, the first job offer that has found its way to my in-box. There was the one from a verbally disabled firm looking for female models, for example, stating: