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.

Four months have now elapsed since my layoff.   In between emailing resumes, interviews, and meetings with headhunters I’ve done almost everything I can think of to keep myself busy and sane, pay my mortgage and earn a little extra money. I’ve liquidated my 401K from my last employer and sold off all the deferred compensation stock shares I had vested from my previous one. I’ve volunteered multiple times at soup kitchens through NY Cares (including one particularly traumatic stint involving four hours of sorting bagels while I was doing Atkins) and for the bone marrow drive of a boy with leukemia. I’ve started writing for a blog that has given me a whole new support network of laid off “colleagues” and a small measure of celebrity – largely within France. I’ve sold gold for cash, redeemed used books at the Strand and participated in three different stoop sales. I’ve gone all over the city to consume free and cheap meals of comforting carbohydrates while simultaneously trying to lose weight. I’ve served on two mock juries at a college of criminal justice, worked retail at a sample sale for a week, petitioned for a candidate for Manhattan district attorney, done mystery shopping for a bank, visited bars to assess the placement of Red Bull, interviewed customers at Walgreen’s on their candy buying preferences, gone to the movies to assess the reaction to trailers, registered for extra work at a casting agency and bird-sat for a bird that bit me on my first day of work.

The one thing that I unfortunately hadn’t done until recently was anything in any way, shape or form related to the professional work that I’ve done for the bulk of my career, or something that could actually be a positive and not pitiable addition to my resume.  That has now changed. I have now started a short-term assignment at a business school I recruited from for several years, and visited a campus that immediately suffused me with happy memories of when I was the head of recruiting for the investment bank that seemingly 98% of the business directed students there wanted to join.  In my pre-Recession glory days this campus made me feel like Rob Pattinson of “Twilight” in a roomful of teenage girls; at one career fair and reception years ago I was stripped of business cards within minutes and entertained a long line of students waiting for me to give them an “autograph” and email address on any sheet of paper or cocktail napkin they could find.  My return visit was, of course, nothing so grand.  I didn’t have any jumbo shrimp to bestow or an entourage of representatives and charismatic CEO Lloyd Blankfein in tow, and rather than taking the Acela train I traveled on the Bolt Bus.  If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that the Bolt Bus is a very inexpensive alternative to Amtrak and that they have excellent seats and Wi-Fi access!  It is going on the long list of cost saving ideas I’m developing in my unemployment that I plan to continue with when I hopefully return to the world of corporate expense account holders.

Beginning this month, I will be serving as part of an external team of reviewers for resumes of first and second year MBA students.   Although I’ve been a recruiter and recruiting manager for many years, and also served on the advisory board of the company that packages these resumes for employers, I never realized that business schools’ CVs didn’t spring – perfectly formatted and concisely worded – into the software that I used to search for students to hire.  The school’s career services professionals reviewed all student resumes not long ago, but the number of students and the demands of providing so much counseling and programming made it impossible for just the staff alone to handle.  While I’ve spent months sending out resumes for jobs that I think I’m well qualified for, many of them for positions in academia, I secured this job without formally applying through a career adviser I worked with in my next-to-last job as a recruiting manager.  The longer I look, and the more I hear about the securing of new jobs by my former colleagues, the more convinced I’ve become of the importance of connections, networking and letting everyone who could possibly help you know that you’re unemployed and looking for a new job.  It can be fairly embarrassing to “come out” as a layoff victim to an extended network of friends, family, and neighbors, but pride alone will never pay your mortgage; many jobs also never make it to the advertising stage or are landed through preexisting relationships even if the listing is advertised publicly.

This training session would be the one time the extended team would get together in person since most of the work and correspondence with students will be done remotely, and it was quickly obvious how much the nine other external reviewers relished not only the free lunch but the opportunity to spend four hours interacting with well educated people who were not employed full-time.  Within minutes the majority of attendees started talking about the escapades of their assorted offspring and praising the cookie tray.  It was a predominantly thirtysomething female group, with only one male career services attendee who joked that he was a beneficiary of the school’s affirmative action campaign.  As lunch concluded the introductions began, and each woman spent a few minutes describing what had led her to part-time seasonal work with the school.  “I taught for ten years before having children,” one woman with a big sparkly diamond ring said. “My children are two and four, and I’m excited about the prospect of using my professional skills and mind again,” she continued half-jokingly.   As each consecutive woman listed her former career or MBA affiliation and the ages of her kids I began to panic.  I had forgotten to have children! Not having them as a career girl traveling to campuses across the country and visiting international offices was fine, but now it was dreadfully inconvenient.  Should I make a few up to explain what happened to my career?  “I was the head of recruiting at an investment bank and a law firm,” I would say modestly. “But Rainforest and Samuel became so mischievous that I had to give all that up to devote myself to keeping them from destroying the neighbors’ yards.”

I decided, however, to go with the truth.  “I’m Janet,” I said. “I was the director of recruiting for a large law firm until the law firm determined that it didn’t need to recruit lawyers anymore.  That wasn’t good news for me.  Before that, I spent nine years recruiting for an investment bank and saw many resumes from this school from the other side.”  I had a few minutes to silently lament my poor timing in not having children to occupy me after my layoff, and to envy all the women in my extended recruiting community whose childbearing and toddler parent years had coincided so fortuitously with the Recession, but then it was down to work.  We ran through the standard formatting of the school’s resumes, a list of action verbs to suggest when verbs grew repetitive or passive, strategies on creating descriptive bullet points and what to do when a student appeared to have no internship experience to add to his or her second year resume.  Since the start of the downturn many junior professionals have found refuge in business school classrooms, and the pursuit of an MBA represents one of best opportunities to switch careers and attract prestigious employers, but even matriculation at a top program isn’t a guarantee of placement success.  As many as 20-25% of the rising second years, we were told, could be without summer internship experience to add to their resumes.  It could fall to us to help them extract a worthwhile bullet or two from three months of lying on a beach.

While I may have had some trepidation about helping students craft their resumes for employers while I myself was between jobs, I soon realized that my years of experience around the candidate selection table for first round interviews and searching for particular keywords in the resume software would come in handy.  My confidence grew as I remembered the interview and resumes workshops I had led over the years for high school and college students, and accepted that business school students could be equally needy in this environment. As the session progressed, I tossed out insider secret after secret about how my old firm decided on candidates and what raised a red flag for them.  As we looked at examples of good resumes and those that clearly needed remedial help I also began to review my own resume in my head and think about ways I could revise it when I got home.  This would be a win-win situation.  I’d get valuable experience in student counseling to help me transition to the nonprofit side of the hiring spectrum if that proved to be my next step, I’d get the satisfaction I’d always enjoyed from interacting with young professionals at the start of significant career transitions and I’d be able to steal an idea or two from the group to help me craft a better resume for myself.

When I returned home I hit the computer for my daily perusal of “Above the Law,” the blog that is the gossip page of the legal community, and a well known refuge for bitter lawyers and law firm employees everywhere.  My old firm was prominently featured yet again in another horror story of the downturn.  The 2009 summer associate class I recruited so enthusiastically and never had the chance to welcome was now being diverted until 2012 if they were lucky enough to receive full-time offers, and the firm was withdrawing from the all-important early on campus interviewing cycle and deferring interviews for future summer associates until later in the fall and 2010.  The author of the well-crafted and clearly thought out but incredibly depressing memo sharing the news with law school deans was none other than my beloved hiring partner.  One of the nicest and most decent men I’d ever worked with, he had thoughtfully fedexed me a thank-you note to arrive on my last day and apologized profusely when he heard about the layoff.  The update was followed by the usual string of angry anonymous comments, many of which opined that the firm wouldn’t make it until 2012, and a few of which pointed to the similarity of the firm’s name to a vacuum cleaner brand and noted that both sucked.  I certainly miss having a good corporate job and I miss him, but would I want to be the Director of Legal Recruiting there now?  Not so much.  I’m looking forward to receiving my first batch of business student resumes to review.