Some Recently Laid-Off Workers Finding New Jobs

According to a recent Careerbuilder survey that polled 807 people between Feb. 20 and March 11, 41 percent of people laid off in the last three months found other full-time, permanent positions.

How many in this study were laid off in the last three months? Good question. It’s not clear. The study says that it polled these 807 people, but it also included people laid off in the last 12 months. No numbers were provided in terms of how many people are in that three-month category.

However, the most interesting aspect of this study to me is not the three-month window stat. Consider the steady rise in unemployment just in 2009 as your gauge, as well as the expectations around further cuts from CFOs and corporate comptrollers.

Here’s something to pay attention to (from the Careerbuilder release):

“The financial implications of job loss were significant for affected workers. Of those workers who were laid off in the last 12 months, only 32 percent received a severance package from their employers. Sixty-nine percent reported the severance sustained them for 2 months or less. One-in-four said it sustained them for less than one month. Forty-five percent of workers who were laid off in the last year had to tap into long-term savings as a result of losing their jobs..“

Money is tight and shrinking for businesses, but especially for afflicted workers–look at the number of people eating into their emergency and long-term savings. Forty-four percent of those polled are looking for full-time work wherever they can get it, regardless of what their former profession happened to be. Forty-nine percent of those who found work in the last year took a pay cut.

Change, and a bit of desperation, is in the air. These numbers from the Labor Department this week don’t help me feel as confident as the Careerbuilder survey would like us to believe:

“For the week ended March 28, the number of people collecting state unemployment benefits reached yet another new record, gaining 95,000 to 5.84 million – double the level in the prior year. These continuing claims have gained for 12 consecutive weeks, and have reached new weekly records since late January.“

If you’re looking for work, Careerbuilder and just about every recruiting or job-hunting advice site suggests using social networking media and technologies as a key way of building a searchable, online brand. Getting noticed for a job these days appears to require making the most out of distributive networking technologies–a force that is expanding at a pace that many struggle to keep up with. Remember, if you aren’t coming up in Google easily by searching on your name, you may not exist to some hiring managers, at least, professionally.