Buddy, can you spare a job?

• At the rare firms that are hiring, applicants arrive in a flood • Oregon workers once could pick and choose; now they try not to panic

By Amanda Pennelly

The Portland Tribune, May 16, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

It’s become a weekend ritual for hundreds of unemployed Portlanders.

They flock to free-refill coffee shops to scour the want ads Ñ carefully circling the ones that seem promising and plotting their strategies for the coming week.

With unemployment surging in April to a seasonally adjusted high of 8 percent, Portland’s job market is a battlefield. On one side are the handful of businesses still hiring people, and on the other are the ranks of the unemployed.

While the dance between employers and job seekers has always felt a bit like a war for some, the rules of engagement have changed dramatically.

The advantage has shifted radically in the employer’s favor.

Long gone are the hiring bonuses and other perks that employers trotted out in the late 1990s in a desperate bid to lure applicants.

“In 1998, employers were hiring anybody,” recalled Debi Wali, human resource manager for Bullseye Glass Co. in Southeast Portland, “Back then, I would have to scrape the bottom barrels just to fill an opening.”

Job seekers could pick and choose.

“After I lost my job, I actually turned down a job, figuring that I’d find something better,” said Del Meliza, an unemployed corporate accountant. “Now, after a year of nothing É well, I guess hindsight is 20-20.”

The red hot market of those days is not likely to reappear anytime soon, said Art Ayre, state employment economist for the Oregon Employment Department.

“It’s fairly realistic to expect a 5 to 6 percent unemployment rate in Oregon during a healthy economy,” Ayre said. “In the mid-1990s, unemployment was down to roughly 3.5 percent Ñ it just can’t be like that all the time.”

It’s employers who now have the luxury of being choosy.

An explosion of applicants for every job has allowed them to raise the bar on the prerequisites they screen for. And early face-to-face meetings Ñ the favored platform for personality-plus types with skimpy rŽsumŽs Ñ are increasingly rare, largely because they touch off stampedes.

A few months ago, 133 applicants stormed Jazz De Opus when the Northwest Portland club advertised a four-hour hiring window for a part-time cocktail position.

“I like to meet applicants in person, but I will never do that again,” said Dean Vacheresse, interim general manager at the jazz club. “I’ll have to do the fax or e-mail thing next time; it was just too much.”

Increasingly, when employers do schedule in-person meetings, they are tightly constricted. Stephen Speiser, co-owner of Taqueria Nueve, shrinks them to a virtual blip.

“I put a three-hour window on the process to minimize the amount of people who apply,” said Speiser, who was barraged by 115 rŽsumŽs for a single server position.

The service industry isn’t the only market being inundated with applications. Gail Parnell, central human resource manager for Multnomah County, recently received more than 100 applications for a library page position.

“We were stunned at the response to such a low-level job,” said Parnell, who eventually interviewed 10 applicants for the position.

Any work wanted

Sarah Hart, development director for a nonprofit organization before she was laid off in February, hardly supplements her family’s income with her new part-time job. She works 25 hours a month on contract for another nonprofit group.

“Basically, the work that I do gives me just enough that I become ineligible for unemployment benefits,” she said.

The number of people who want full-time work but take available part-time jobs because of poor economic conditions has grown to a seasonally adjusted 4.7 million nationwide Ñ up from 4.2 million last year, Ayre said.

Lydia Bagwell lost her job over a year ago when her dot-com company went under. She was able to get enough freelance work as a Web site structural architect after that to warrant paying for a business license.

But the work slowed to a dribble after about a year, and Bagwell hasn’t had any real income since February.

“Technically, I am self-employed,” she said, “but lately I am feeling very unemployed.”

Hart and Bagwell are both unemployed, for all practical purposes, but they are among a growing number of people whose plight is beneath the radar of the unemployment statistics.

Adjusting downward

Many job seekers have reached the point where they will settle for anything.

“I get attorneys and people with Ph.D.s applying for $9 per hour warehouse jobs all the time,” said Bullseye Glass’ Wali. “They express their desire to make career changes, but let’s be realistic: Even if I hire them, they won’t be happy. They’ll continue to look for better work until they find it. I can’t afford that kind of turnover.”

Taqueria Nueve’s Speiser also has noticed a surge of applications from the downwardly mobile.

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