How to Advance Your Career During the Pandemic
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Here's your Money Briefing for Wednesday, July 29th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Millions of people lost their jobs in the wake of the pandemic, but hiring managers say job hunters can turn the lockdowns into an advantage if they focus on how they spent that time at home in their next job interview.
Did you get in shape? Did you lose weight? Did you build a flower bed out of railroad ties? But to show that you did something.
Staffing company LaSalle Network CEO Tom Gimbel joins me to talk about how hiring managers rate drive and skill building and whether you should go for that bridge job after the break.
The coronavirus pandemic didn't just put millions of people out of work.
How did the pandemic change hiring priorities for jobseekers?
It also forced them to stay in their homes, in some cases for months. Now job seekers are looking to reenter the workforce. Tom Gimbel is CEO of the LaSalle Network staffing company, and he joins me to discuss what hiring managers will be looking for. So Tom, usually when people lose their jobs, they can turn around and look for another one. But that's really not the case this time. Some businesses have been closed or working remotely. And people, they may have lost friends or family members, and they may also just be struggling to deal with the lockdown. What are companies looking for?
Companies now are looking for people who are doing things. And so if you've been unemployed, what have you been doing with your time? If you can demonstrate that you created a plan and you are executing a plan, it goes a long way in selling yourself to a potential employer versus somebody saying, so you've been unemployed for three months and you've watched every show on Netflix. I don't think that's very inspirational. But even if you lost 20 pounds or you created an online curriculum for your kids or you took master class or any of these types of things that show that you had some drive and initiative, it goes a long way for selling yourself. So what they want to see is effort. Yeah, which I don't think is any different than pre-COVID.
It's just a matter of creativity can really come into play in this time. And the ability to say, you know, an employer is going to sit there and say, I was working during this and our business may have dipped, but I was working. Why weren't you working? And I have children and I was raising them and educating them and I'm scared for them, but I was working. What were you doing? And it doesn't mean that we have less empathy. It just means we want you to have empathy. An employer wants a candidate to have empathy on the other side of saying, what were you doing to make good use of your time?
Now, somebody's collecting unemployment and not actively looking for work or spending their time wisely. What kind of damage are they doing to their career?
Well, what it really ends up being is a game of supply and demand. And as long as the supply is really high and 14, 15, 16 percent of unemployment, 25, 30 million people who are unemployed, then it hurts you. If all of a sudden there's a vaccine and things go like that right away and unemployment dramatically drops and there truly is a V curve, then when it gets up to the top of the V, then you're probably okay. But if unemployment's hovering over 7%, 8%, which I think it will for a while, the harm is compared to others, you weren't doing anything. You didn't show any motivation.
But millions of jobs have been lost. What if there aren't jobs available in their field?
This is truly a challenge because there is the line in the sand of are you afraid to leave the house for health reasons or are you not wanting to leave the house because you don't want to work and you're taking the unemployment money? And I think if you're going to have convictions on the health, make sure in this day and age that you really are being careful with your social media. because if you are connected to people on Instagram or Facebook or what have you, and you're out posting pictures of yourselves with people, but saying you were scared to go get a job, you've got a real intersection of lies meeting reality, and that can cause some problems for you.
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