BW Online | August 26, 2002 | Recruiters Are Looking for Work

AUGUST 26, 2002

B-SCHOOL NEWS

Recruiters Are Looking for Work
The shriveled employment market has lots of these MBA and executive talent scouts in an unfamiliar position: Out of a job

STORY TOOLS

Keith Stemple, who used to hire new college grads and MBAs at Arthur Andersen, has been unemployed going on eight weeks. A victim of Andersen's demise, the former corporate recruiter now finds himself on the other side of the interview desk as he looks for work in the Washington (D.C.) area. Stemple is interviewing and chatting up fellow recruiters to improve his chances, but he's hardly optimistic: He just doesn't see any openings.

Stemple's plight exemplifies the cutting irony in the recruiting world today. Only a couple of years ago, the job market was so hot that businesses couldn't throw enough resources into finding top talent. But now that layoffs and hiring freezes have become the norm, lures and inducements for new hires seem things of the past -- and so does the market for corporate recruiters.

Recruiter.com, a Web site for recruiters based in Stanhope, N.J., estimates that more than 50% of corporate recruiters have been laid off or reassigned since November, 2000. That makes for uneasy times in human-resources departments: "Anyone in the recruiting world is keeping their eyes open so they aren't blindsided," says Stemple.

NO MORE PARTIES. For MBA recruiters, who used to jet back and forth between top-ranked B-schools, interviewing hotshot MBAs, making job offers, and negotiating bonuses, the change in circumstances has been especially jolting. Take Karrie Goldstein. For over three years, she made congratulatory phone calls to MBAs, handled start-date deferrals, and threw parties for the new hires of a Big Five accounting firm in Washington. Now she, too, is looking for work, more evidence of a recruiting milieu that is grimmer than at any time since the late '80s and early '90s, experts say.

Then, as now, the sour economy and hiring freezes rendered recruiters essentially irrelevant -- and worse, a drain on the all-important bottom line. "I don't see as many recruiting opportunities out there," Goldstein says.

Recruiters who've managed to keep their jobs live perched on a precipice. Stuart, a corporate recruiter in Washington who doesn't want to give his last name, is just plain edgy. His company is "reassessing its needs," he says -- corporate doublespeak for figuring out whom to fire next.

SWEPT AWAY. "We're reinterviewing for our jobs," he adds, so he's hedging his bets: Stuart "refreshes" his resume on Monster.com every weekend, so that it looks new. "I'll see another resume of one of our colleagues on Monster.com. That's not uncommon," he says. Just last week, two recruiters at his company left the department. One took a nonrecruiting job, and another left the company altogether.

Still, some manage to land on their feet, such as Elizabeth Hoban, who, like Stemple, was swept away last April in the Andersen disaster. Before the Enron scandal took the accounting giant down with it, she was up for a promotion and all set to start a family with her husband of two years. Hoban has had to defer those dreams and start over.

But because she sensed danger before the pink slip arrived, she put out an early all-points-bulletin to her network of recruiting contacts and landed a human-resources job at consultants Booz Allen & Hamilton. "My heart goes out to recruiters," says Hoban, recalling former colleagues who weren't as fortunate.

QUICK PICK-UP? Of course, recruiters have plenty of company. Richard Gast, who runs headhunting firm Richard Gast & Associates in Lake Forest, Calif., has about 35,000 resumes in his job-seekers database, and he gets about 300 more every day. His usual clients want only three to five applicants. "I feel like a social worker," he says. "I hold a lot of people's hands right now."

Meantime, experts warn that mass firings of recruiters could hurt employers in the future. "Things will bounce back," says John Worth, the interim director of career counseling at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. "When needs [for recruiters] pick up, they pick up quickly," adds Worth, who was an MBA recruiter at Deloitte Consulting for 10 years before moving to academia. "It's going to be hard to find the talent...because an awful lot of experienced people left."

And if this year's rash of business scandals is any indication, one thing Corporate America could use is a lot more talent.

By Aliya Sternstein in New York

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