Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 30, 1993 TAG: 9305280066
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEIGH ALLEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I knew I was in the pits of depression when I started watching `Beverly Hills 90210,' " said the 22-year-old aspiring computer graphics artist from Fries. "If I start coming home in the middle of the day to watch `The Young and the Restless,' I'm going to slit my wrists."
But don't call the paramedics yet.
"I'm still looking. I just haven't found my dream job yet," she said.
Five years ago, Martin would have had the perfect resume to land a job straight out of college:
Degree from a respected Virginia university.
Major in a specialized, high-demand computer field.
Near-perfect, 3.9 grade-point average.
Motivated and eager to work.
So why, after sending out 150 resumes and sitting through more than a dozen interviews, is Martin still unemployed?
It's not the applicants, according to corporate personnel managers in the region. It's the economy.
Even though economists months ago decided the economy is pulling out of a three-year recession, hiring directly from colleges has been slow to turn around.
Martin, like an estimated 40 percent of the class of 1993 from colleges across Southwest Virginia, still doesn't have a firm prospect either for employment or graduate school. That estimate is based on comments from career placement advisers at several colleges and universities in the region.
Although overall hiring rates appear to be recovering from the recession, college graduates more often are settling for less prestigious jobs for lower pay than they would have accepted five years ago, the placement advisers said.
One symptom of the decline affecting recent graduates is that recruitment is down. Many companies stopped visiting campuses during the recession and have not yet started back, said Rol Walters, Radford University's director of career services.
"In four years we've lost 40 to 50 percent of our companies coming onto campus," Walters said. "Even though we are pulling out of a recession, companies aren't going into a real mode of hiring until they are back on their feet. We're still in a downward slide."
But the good news is that hiring by small businesses is taking up some of the slack, said Washington and Lee University's Director of Career Development and Placement Rick Heatley. The problem for students just emerging from college is that small companies often don't have the resources to recruit on campuses.
"They tell me that 80 percent of all new jobs in America are coming from small businesses," Heatley said. "But they're notorious for not recruiting."
Heatley said small businesses simply wait on qualified applicants to seek them out. But positions often go unfilled because the companies hiring the most people are relatively new and unknown.
That trend poses a problem for Heatley and other college placement advisers whose departments are not designed to steer students toward small businesses.
Heatley said he encourages students to attend regional jobs fairs which attract more small businesses and to do more individual research into companies. "That often means calling alumni who work in your intended field and asking them to help you out. Students have to turn the tables around to go out and find these businesses," Heatley said.
A prime example is FiberCom Inc., a Roanoke Valley fiber optics firm with 210 employees. Since its founding in 1982, the firm has expanded every year except for 1991, said FiberCom president and chief executive Dick Popp. FiberCom, whose sales were $24 million last year, expanded its staff by 29 people, or about 15 percent last year, Popp said.
FiberCom's personnel director Lacy Carter said the company plans to hire about 30 people this year. A third will be computer engineers with the balance coming in administrative and manufacturing positions, she said.
Although FiberCom does some recruiting on college campuses, most of its hiring is from other companies in the fiber optics industry, Lacy said.
"Most of our employees have experience somewhere else," she said. "One of the engineers we hired out of college had worked for us during the summers and at Christmas.
"Internships are very important. We try to offer those whenever its possible," Lacy said.
Virginia Tech's Director of Placement Services James Malone said hiring of Tech graduates peaked during the 1980s when large companies such as IBM, DuPont and General Electric Co. each would walk away with as many as 50 Tech students a year. The companies hiring now are smaller, hiring fewer students and looking for applicants with more experience and specialized skills, he said.
Malone said Tech has responded to the change by installing a computer program that matches students with employers. He said that service has been particularly popular with small businesses that can use it to match up with qualified applicants without having to visit campus.
Malone also said companies are placing more emphasis on hiring people with experience, which is putting a premium on students who've had internships in the fields where they want their first jobs. Internships and cooperative work programs offer students the best opportunities to show companies that they can cut it in a tough job market, he said.
Washington and Lee senior Sean O'Rourke spent six weeks this spring as a sports broadcasting intern at WDBJ, a Roanoke television station. He's counting on the experience to set himself apart from other applicants when he competes for a permanent job this summer.
Could he land a job in broadcasting without the experience he's getting?
"No way," he said. "Not in a million years. I might not even get hired now, but at least I'll have a shot."
In some career fields where internships aren't vailable, graduates have taken the initiative to land jobs the old-fashioned way: Being aggressive.
Richard Yates said he got a job as a credit analyst with NationsBank Corp. in Roanoke within one month of graduating from Washington and Lee last June. He said other people in his class with better grades and more work experience are still looking for jobs because they were not aggressive enough with employers.
"The jobs are out there," Yates said. "People decide they want a certain job in a certain city at a certain pay scale. When they don't get that, they just give up and say there are no jobs."
Yates, who was a history major at W&L, said landing a job in a tough market had more to do with how he approached the job search than what he studied in school
"The key is to start making contacts and talking to people in the field where you want to go. And don't be afraid to do something else. Jobs are where you find them," he said.
Martin said that if given the chance to take her last years of college over again, she would spend less time studying and more time making contacts with graphics design firms. She said she was lead to believe that her 3.9 grade point average would land her a job even though she had limited experience.
What she found is that it takes more than good grades.
"If I had spent as much time visiting places and going to workshops as I did studying for tests, I would probably have a job by now," Martin said.
Walters said he is encouraged by the slight upturn in hiring this year. He said he believes hiring might pick up even more in the next few years as businesses adjust to fill gaps in their ranks left by firings during the recession.
"There is a lot of stress in the workplace," Walters said. "Employees are facing a lot of overtime and long hours because they are spread so thin in order to keep overhead down."
Although Walters said he expects a rebound, the '90s will not match the last decade in terms of producing new jobs.
"We will never be back up to the staffing levels that some companies were doing back 5-6 years ago," he said.
by CNB