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.

After I was laid off in March I quickly realized that my job search would be different than the one I’d engaged in only the year before, and all the other job searches I’d undertaken in two decades as a recruiter.  A significant number of my former colleagues were out of work, and senior level jobs in the industries I had experience in – consulting, law, and banking – were increasingly hard to find, and still undergoing contraction. I knew I’d have to take on some part-time work to fill the days between interviews, and I was lucky to find a wide variety of odd jobs that kept my spirits up even if they didn’t exactly fill my bank account. I “babysat” for the bird of parents whose children I’d minded years ago, I dodged flying clothing while doing a retail stint at a sample sale, I cater-waitered for a comfort food entrepreneur, I petitioned for a Democratic candidate for District Attorney, served as a guinea pig for psych and science experiments at Columbia, and hit the streets to cast shopaholic women for a reality television show.

Some of the jobs made me feel like I was back in college again and that all my years of professional experience had been mysteriously dissolved, and others proved valuable largely because the manual tasks involved helped me burn more calories than I ever had while working at a desk job.  Of all these short-term gigs, the one that I’ve been doing the longest and still find the amusing is my job as a trailer-checker – a marketing research associate who gets paid to go to the movies.

I discovered the company that sponsors this cinema-going, Certified Field Associate (www.certifiedfieldassociate.com), while researching unusual ways to make extra money, and since June I’ve been going to movie screenings at least three times a week to note the placement of trailers and the audience reaction to them. I now “own” a particular downtown theater which happens to be directly opposite the still under construction office of my longest term employer, and every Friday morning I head there with a clipboard, a flashlight, and the goal of running back and forth between different auditoriums to spend twenty minutes watching multiple rounds of trailers.  As you can imagine, I’ve become an expert on previews, and can name the movie within seconds of the opening scene or even the first few notes of music before images from the movie appear. I also have watched certain trailers so many times that I dream about them, and have started believing that I’m a character in them.  The one that has made the biggest impact on me is the romantic, violent and then fantastical trailer for “The Lovely Bones.” The main character, Susie Salmon, has been murdered, and narrates the action from a place in between heaven and earth that is referred to as the “in-between.” It’s not the horrible state of limbo where the decreased in “The Ghost Whisperer” dwell as they wait to be guided “into the light,” and in fact it runs the gamut from being frustrating to downright uplifting.  The more I think about it, the more I believe that despite the fact that I have not been murdered recently, I am also in the “in-between.”

Over the summer, one of the business school administrators I’d worked with to hire interns and full-time MBAs offered me a short-term job reviewing student resumes.  MBA resumes are put into an online database that employers purchase, and during my years as a consulting and banking recruiter I’d not only purchased and used the database, but helped the company that creates the software make it more user- friendly.  After a day of training on campus the job was all done remotely, and I put in roughly 50 hours between reviewing the resumes, sending markups to the students, and reviewing and approving final versions.  It was a job I never knew existed; as a consumer of the database I’d assumed that the students completed their resumes without any oversight, and that they all magically conformed to the same format at each school.  I also discovered that reviewing resumes was a job that I was good at – I had seen thousands of them and knew what attracted me as a recruiter, and I loved the writing challenge of helping to create crisp clear bullets that showed quantifiable success.  For my first assignment I had several weeks to complete the 50 hours or so of work, and I did it at odd hours and frequently while wearing only underwear.  Because it was a short-term job with no set hours in a day, I had no idea of how to declare it in terms of unemployment insurance.  I ended up not declaring it, and it was a good thing since I didn’t see a check until two months after I started.

The first school passed my information to another top business school, and the staff there asked me to help in their review process as well.  This school was much smaller and ran a far less formal process.  I only got twenty students to work with, or twenty hours of work, but was at least paid quickly and not as an employee so no taxes were taken out.  I almost always spent more time on each resume than I was paid for, but I didn’t mind.  I was busy and felt useful, and there aren’t many legal jobs that you can do at all hours at home in your underwear. As with the first job, there were no set hours to work, and I didn’t notify the Department of Labor that I’d taken on 20 hours of work spread over a couple of weeks.

Completing the first two jobs gave me the confidence to pitch myself to a third school, and one close enough to allow me to do the job in person.  I began working at the third school a few weeks ago, starting out with two days a week, and am now putting in three to four days a week as the deadline for resumes approaches, and the intern recruiting season draws nearer.  I am paid through a temporary agency and not the school, and while I haven’t done more than 20 hours a week yet, I’m making more than $405 and so have stopped filing for unemployment.  While working on campus for my new employer, I’m also finishing the first–year review process at the first school, and have just begun the intense two week process for the second school.  You could say I’ve gone from being unemployed to being overemployed, but each of these jobs will wrap up early next month, and none of them come with any of the perks associated with a real full time position.  It’s frightening to stop collecting unemployment knowing that you’ll likely soon be unemployed again, but it’s also frightening to think about being caught collecting when you’re technically working for three employers at a time.  I’ve learned, of course, that honesty isn’t always the best policy.  A few weeks ago, after trying for months, I finally landed a day of “extra” work for “Law and Order.” The gig paid $85 for 10 hours, but since it was a real full day of work I declared that I had earned a full day of pay. Since $405 works out to around $81 a day I figured it would be roughly equivalent. When I got the check for my star turn as an enraged blogger it amounted to about $68, and I was docked over $100 for declaring that I’d had a full day of work.  I had succeeded in actually losing money by working!

For the next few weeks I’ll be in the “in-between,” and it’s a simultaneously unsettling and exhilarating place to be.  I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated putting on a business casual outfit and taking the subway during rush hours as much as I do now.  The students sign up to meet with me in advance, so each day I work there’s someone waiting for me to show up who’d be annoyed if I didn’t.  I’m working practically every minute I’m paid for, and don’t have the luxury of the downtime I’ve had in prior full-time jobs, but on the positive side I can plan my own hours and on most days don’t begin work before 1:00pm. I’m also amazed by how gratifying it is.  I never thought I’d feel as appreciated as I was as the chief recruitment contact at an investment bank that almost every MBA student wanted to work for pre-recession, but it’s actually much nicer to know that people want to speak with you without thinking you’ll be able to offer them a 6-figure job.  Gate-keeping at a top employer can be glamorous and well-paying, but it doesn’t give you the emotional satisfaction you get from helping people open the gate, or spilling the secrets you’ve learned from years inside of the gate.

I keep reading that the recession is over, and though I’m starting to feel a little movement I’m not taking any chances.  I recently had three headhunters call me in a day, two of whom were excited about submitting me for a 6 month role for which the job description was apparently “the mirror image of my resume.” I haven’t heard from either of them since their enthusiastic calls.  I’ve had a wide range of first interviews that I received no followup from, and even had second round interviews where I never heard from the employer or the headhunter again.  I did, however, just get an email from the retailer whose sample sale I worked on over the summer. They want me back, and can offer about 8 days of work for $10 an hour. I’m also holding on to my trailer-checking job for dear life.  Last week the hours of my Friday only theater gig conflicted with my resume review hours, and I had to bring in my last unemployed friend as a trainee. I was actually in a position to give a job to a fellow 405er, even if it was only for a few hours. She took over seeing three movie’s trailers for me, and I was able to pay her $40 - $37.50 from the money I’d receive from the assignment, and a $2.50 “signing bonus” that I’d kicked in because I was feeling flush from the prospect of being gainfully employed for at least a month.