I AUDITIONED FOR DEAL OR NO DEAL.

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Janet Raiffa’s Recessionals,” a column by a laid-off recruiting manager in New York. Prior columns are collected [here]. You can reach Janet Raiffa via LinkedIn, leaving a comment here, or emailing 405club@gmail.com.

During my tenure in unemployment I’ve developed a number of bad habits and tics.  Not sending out more resumes because I’ve had enough rejection to last a lifetime is clearly the worst. Developing a morbid fear of networking is certainly close behind.  Flagellating myself for choosing a profession that was destined to be hard hit by the recession is not healthy or helpful, deciding twenty years too late to change my undergraduate major is pitiful, taking odd jobs with no career development potential is not great but somewhat excusable, and expending serious thought about how many Diet Coke bottles I’d need to recycle daily to pay my mortgage is downright execrable.  I am, however, very proud of myself for not developing a serious daytime television habit, an easy distraction for those with practically every minute of the daytime free.

I have not watched one soap opera since I was laid off in March, and I try to limit myself to watching only the first two hours of “Today” unless an important update on Jon and Kate is scheduled for the third hour.  Many gainfully employed people watch “Today” before heading off to work so this does not seem like a particularly unproductive viewing pattern of the unemployed.  I allow myself to watch Kathy Lee and Hoda in the fourth hour only if I am simultaneously trolling a job board or working on a blog post.  The one major television diversion I do award myself is during the 4:00pm-5:00pm hour when I watch “Deal or No Deal.”  There is something remarkably therapeutic about this show and watching contestant after contestant pretend that there is some skill or strategic acumen involved in choosing an assortment of random cases.  While shows like “Million Dollar Password,” “Who Wants to be A Millionaire?” and “Jeopardy” involve significant and higher levels of literacy, “Deal or No Deal” can be successfully navigated by anyone with the ability to call out numbers loudly.  The show even once highlighted its own wide accessibility by having one of its contestants compete against a chimpanzee.

In many ways I find “Deal or No Deal” analogous to the job search.  Contestants have the option of settling for a smaller sum in the way that I might settle for the first available job I’m offered, or rolling the figurative dice and risking that guarantee for a bigger payoff (or the harder to attain dream job or one not involving a 50% paycut).  Even if the contestant claims to be employing a strategy, the game really depends on luck in the same way that so many successful job searches involve a lucky break or a fortuitous connection.  While the geekiest contestants can win huge sums on other game shows, getting on “Deal or No Deal” and engendering the support of the audience is contingent upon having a good packaged story or “pitch,” and showing boundless levels of enthusiasm and passion is as essential as it is in interviewing.  Well, perhaps I am pushing this too far, but I need to justify why I am watching a game show for an hour every day rather than doing something more constructive.

Recently the daytime version of “Deal or No Deal” advertised for aspiring contestants in the NY area, and I filled out an application online and decided to give it a shot.  I was recently rejected for jury service and the alluring opportunity of earning an extra $40 per day because I frightened the lawyers with my unusually high level of enthusiasm for service while my fellow prospective jurors were tripping over themselves looking for ways to be excused.  Auditioning for a show where the average player’s behavior ranges from mildly overcaffeinated to alarmingly manic would give me a chance to put my fervor for extra cash to good use.  The online application was simple enough and clearly designed for people like me who have extremely low levels of reticence when it comes to discussing odd ways to make money and humiliating things that have happened to them.  It requested responses to inquiries such as “What is the most interesting job you’ve ever had?” and “What is the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done?” “Tell us an embarrassing story about yourself” and “Tell us something nobody would know about you just by looking” provided additional opportunities to offer interesting tidbits for public ridicule.  My responses included the story of how I accidentally groped David Schwimmer from “Friends” when one of his movies filmed outside of my office, the revelation that half of my front tooth is fake because I cracked it with a prop liquor bottle while performing in a play in college, and the tale of backing into a wall when Robert Redford tried to shake my hand.

After receiving an email inviting me to participate in an open casting call, I joined a group of about 200 others at a midtown hotel ballroom to try my luck.  This was a surprisingly sane set-up – no lines around the block or people camping out in tents for the chance to be seen.  Our host for the event, a producer of the show, told us that were extremely lucky to be comfortably seated while 500 people were already in line in New Jersey that morning to be seen the next day, and that over 10,000 were expected for the Garden State casting session.  If we were lucky compared to the folks gathering for the next day’s session, we were told that we were already trailing our potential competitors to the North.  The aspiring contestants in Boston had apparently been smiling and outgoing – perhaps buoyed by the unemployed attendees making $200 a week more than many in the NY group – and the New Yorkers seen the previous day had been “too cool for school” and exhibited a regrettable lack of “cheesiness” for the taste of the casting directors.  As we filled out our information sheets, which contained the same questions as the online application, he gave us additional advice on how to succeed when we were given “30 seconds” to prove ourselves.  “Be the happy, smiling fun person,” he said.  “If you can’t spot the boring person in your group it’s you!” He also told us what would happen after we met with a casting director.  A number of people would be held back for additional auditions that day, but if we were released it didn’t necessarily mean that there would be no opportunity for us during callbacks to be held in the future.

I was confident enough that I wouldn’t be boring, but the information sheet reinforced my fear that I wouldn’t be the most sympathetic contestant for middle America.  In addition to the questions we needed to answer, we were asked to check off if we belonged to any groups that might be the subject of a special show.  The boxes included a number of professions and types of people with better visual recognition and clearer comic potential than HR directors.  Fireman, policeman, flight attendant, chef, garbage man, welder, taxi driver, nurse, lunch lady, cheerleader, biker, college student, senior citizen, bald, men named Howard or Howie, and people with names of celebrities were among the categories. The only box I was able to check (and it was a stretch) was “impersonator” for what I consider to be my rather unfortunate resemblance to Bette Midler without having the benefit of any singing ability whatsoever.

We were divided into groups of nine and lined up to go to the table of a casting director where we’d each have the aforementioned 30 second opportunity to display infectious excitement and describe who we were and what we did.  I decided that my best hope was not describing my years of corporate recruiting experience – “Hi, I’m Janet and I wined and dined the highly compensated people on Wall Street most of you blame for today’s economic crisis” – and focus on my hopefully more sympathetic state of unemployment and all the colorful ways I’m trying to make ends meet.  I was one of the last people in my group to go, and I already sensed that I was dead in the water before I got my turn.  The first potential contestant to pitch was an adorable college student there with her future mother-in-law.  She described how she’d met her fiancé on MySpace and noted that she and the future mother-in-law were the best of friends. She was planning to get married in two years, and wanted the money to plan their future together. The next to go were a husband and wife team with six children, and the husband described how he fixed septic tanks and said “When I get to your house you really want me there, because something smells BAD!” The next contestant was an older man who got a laugh when he said that he was frequently mistaken for George Clooney.  When my turn came I got out as quickly as possible “Hi, I’m Janet.  I got laid off in March, and since then I’ve taken all sorts of odd jobs.  I’ve worked at a carnival and a sample sale.  I birdsat and got bitten on my first day.  I’ve gone to the movies and rated reaction to the trailers, I’ve walked the streets soliciting signatures for political candidates, and I’ve participated in mock juries and sold gold for cash! And if I can’t make ends meet doing this, I’m going to get a job as a Bette Midler impersonator!” One person on my team looked at me and noted that she saw a “slight” resemblance.

The session wrapped up quickly, and as I suspected I was not in the group selected to remain for additional sessions that day.  There may still be hope, and I did sign up to be an audience member when the show starts filming in Connecticut.  Why hasn’t someone created a game show where all the contestants are unemployed?  Who needs money more than laid off New Yorkers, and haven’t we already shown our collective potential in participating in activities like “Pin the blame on the boss” and “Office phone skee-ball” during March’s first ever “Unemployment Olympics”?  Perhaps I should devote my energy to coming up with the premise for a good job search related game show with activities like determining “how many candidates applied for that job?,”  playing “hiring manager phonetag, “ and “name that resume action verb.”  Either that or I should look for a job where I get to wear a cool uniform that increases my chance of getting selected for “Deal or No Deal.”