It’s 4:30 a.m. and Victoria Villalba is awake, BlackBerry in hand, pondering the e-mail she received a few minutes earlier. It’s another desperate plea from a laid-off worker asking to find him work, another e-mail ending with the same three words, “I’ll take anything!”
By the time Villalba, 43, settles back into bed 17 hours later, she will have received at least a half-dozen similar pleas from victims of corporate downsizing. She will have given up an evening walk and dinner to answer each e-mail with a balance of optimism and reality, even with the ratio of qualified candidates to job openings hovering at about 40 to 1.
“I don’t tell them anything I don’t believe is true. I believe that this is a cycle,” Villalba says. “I put myself in their shoes and wonder if I were to be without work how my life would be impacted.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a half-million American jobs disappeared last month, the worst mass layoffs in more than three decades.
Recruiters like Villalba are on the front lines of this new war for work. They have become social workers, therapists, career counselors, and targets of misdirected anger. Like Villalba, most are bracing to hold onto their personal lives in the likelihood that the worst is yet to come.
For 17 years, Villalba has operated Victoria & Associates Career Services in Miami, placing people in temporary and permanent jobs for clients such as Royal Caribbean Cruise Line and Baptist Health. Some clients, like most businesses, have laid off staff, too.
Villalba spends increasing hours making phone calls and networking to learn who might be hiring. Typically, recruiters are not paid by the candidates, only by the companies that hire them to search and screen job seekers.
This day, she is lunching with an executive whose position was eliminated after 16 years. She has chosen a restaurant instead of her office to put him more at ease. “When you’re in the same position 16 years, change might be a good thing,” Villalba tells the job seeker.
But it’s unclear whether her advice has been heard; instead she sees only a creased forehead and look of concern. The reply is: “What are my odds of finding a job and how long will it take?” Villalba tells him the truth: Companies are postponing hiring. “If you need income to make your mortgage payment, you may have to take temporary work.” Throughout the day, Villalba will scroll through her BlackBerry, trying to come up with leads for the job seekers flooding her lobby or phoning her in tears.
“When someone calls that had been gainfully employed and has three kids and tells me that their power has been cut off, it is extremely difficult for me,” she says. “I try to be strong, but I take all of this home with me.” Each night when she returns home, Villalba forces herself to turn her BlackBerry off, at least for a few hours. “I know I have to relax to recharge my battery for the next day,” she says.
Still, Villalba finds herself awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the people she has met with, those desperate for work.
“It’s hard to let go. I feel like I owe it to the person to help them.” Across town, Jason Galvao, 27, wrestles with the same reasons for insomnia. “I’ve started getting to work an hour and a half earlier because my voicemail and inbox would be full. But as early as I now get in, it’s not early enough.” Galvao, a senior recruiter for Manpower Professional in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., specializes in placing people in finance/accounting and information technology positions. In this competitive industry, his company has a policy of getting back to job seekers within two hours. Galvao struggles, like Villalba, to respond to each caller with a mix of sober reality and empathetic encouragement.
“Candidates think we’re magicians,” Galvao says. “I tell them it’s hard now, but I’ll keep you in mind.” In between returning calls and scanning resumes into his corporate database, Galvao meets in person with as many job seekers as possible.
“I really have become close to some of them,” he says. “If I can’t help them with a job, I give them market information or advice on how to market themselves.” But when a candidate doesn’t land a sought-after job or the hiring process drags on, some will snap. “I try to find out why they didn’t get the job and deliver the information in a way that won’t hurt their feelings. Sometimes they take out their frustration on me,” he says.
Surrounded by desperation, Galvao finds himself young, single and battling to claim a personal life. “I’m having a hard time with time management. Almost every night I take resumes home and call people or update the system. I’ve worked every Sunday for the last three months.” people who need jobs to avert foreclosure, others here on visas who face deportation unless they find work. “Even when it gets depressing, that’s what drives me to put in the extra hours.” On Friday night, Galvao hangs out with friends. But he can’t steer clear of conversation about work. “I’m just so shocked by what I’m seeing, more and more people losing their jobs.” Right now, he has 23 positions to hire for, yet the hiring managers are reluctant to fill them until the new year. Still, Galvao holds out hope. He just placed a candidate in an accounting position on Monday.
“It’s unpredictable right now. You never know.”
