The Job Scramble : Employment Prospects for Class of ’92 May Be the Worst in a Generation

Labor Day is past, and back-to-school sales are over, but for many in the Class of ‘92, the job hunt lingers on in an environment every bit as bad for newly minted graduates as predicted. In some cases, it’s actually worse.

As a result, this year’s college graduates are having a harder time than perhaps any class in a generation.

There are jobs out there for recent grads, career development experts say. But the market has forced those grads to learn new ways of finding the jobs. It has also forced them to take work that they don’t want.

“It’s probably the worst I’ve seen in the 30 years that I’ve been in the business,” said Victor Lindquist, associate dean and placement director at Northwestern University and author of a widely quoted yearly report on hiring trends.

The picture in Southern California is even darker than elsewhere. Universities in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego report sharp drops in jobs available for graduates and in corporate recruiting compared to the heady days of the late 1980s.

Mike Miller, for example, is just a thesis away from a master’s degree in human factors engineering at Cal State Northridge, but has had no luck in a job hunt that began last January.

“I got the good grades, and there’s supposed to be a job here and it’s--grrrr--so frustrating,” Miller said.

Although local schools have no data yet on the job picture for 1992 graduates, the anecdotal evidence is largely of fruitless searching or bitter compromise.

For what it’s worth, the experts mostly predicted this. Michigan State University and Northwestern conduct national surveys to determine corporate hiring plans and salary expectations, and both predicted that a tough ’92 would follow a bad ’91. Companies have been cutting back for months, and new graduates find themselves in competition with newly unemployed workers who have much more experience.

Northwestern’s survey discovered a 4% drop in the demand for graduates with bachelor’s degrees and 7% slump for students with master’s degrees. Overall, 1992 hirings are off 30% from 1989.

If anything, the situation is worse in Southern California, which entered the recession later than the nation but is stubbornly refusing to leave it now that the rest of the country is beginning to recover. Companies in aerospace, finance and construction all have been slammed by the economic slump.

“We’re the eye of the storm,” said Neil Murray, director of career services at UC San Diego.

Officials from a major aerospace company told Leland Gassert, director of Cal State Northridge’s career center, that they might hire 150 new engineers in 1992. Two years ago, they hired 1,500.

“They’re still hiring, but the change in numbers is so dramatic that it is really devastating,” Gassert said.

Miller is just renewing his job hunt now that he has completed a three-month temporary assignment with Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho. He figures that he’s sent out 40 queries individually tailored to the company and job. At one company, the interviewer confessed that he, too, was sending out resumes.

“I may end up struggling to find a lousy sales job that pays $8 an hour,” Miller said.

The job outlook is discouraging many graduates, said Jerry Houser, director of the career development center at the University of Southern California.

“It makes them insecure and they don’t do well in interviews or they give up,” Houser said. Some put off the search, maybe taking a vacation after graduation, he said.

The procrastination effect was apparent at a Los Angeles job fair last January for journalism students and professionals sponsored by the California Chicano News Media Assn. The number of participants was down 20% because “people think there are no jobs out there, and they don’t bother to look,” said Henry Mendoza, executive director of the nonprofit statewide organization, which is based at USC.

Still, 35 people or nearly 13% of those attending got jobs soon after, he said.

The bad economy sent more students back to school. Applications for fall enrollment in the nation’s graduate schools probably increased sharply again, following two years of recession-influenced application spurts, said Peter Syverson, director of information systems for the Council of Graduate Schools, which tracks grad school enrollment.

Fall statistics are not in, but Syverson said he expects an increase of 7% to 8%, compared to more than 9% last year and more than 10%% the year before.

Some graduates are settling for a lesser job than they thought they would be getting.

A recently completed survey of 1991 graduates of UC San Diego found that 16% took non-professional jobs, compared to between 8% and 9% in the previous year’s class.

“A lot of people took jobs that don’t necessarily take a college degree,” Murray said.

Graduates of Cal State Fullerton are not reporting high unemployment, partly because the bulk already were working part- or full-time before graduation and have elected to stay with those employers, at least for now, said Bobbe Browning, director of the school’s career development center.

And yet there are good jobs out there.

Early in his senior year at Cal State Fullerton, Eric Alonzo focused on the Home Base retail chain as a place he wanted to work. Alonzo was hired on his second attempt at a job there after obtaining an interview through carefully nurtured contacts within the company. He’s been working happily since May as a purchasing analyst.

If anything, the bad times have made students more realistic, said Walter Brown, director of UCLA’s placement and career planning center. “By the time they get out there, they have read enough headlines, and the operative word is humility, “ he said.

The slump has changed the job search. First of all, forget about sending out 500 resumes.

“Resumes coming through the mail are pretty much like junk mail being dropped through the front slot in your door,” Lindquist said.

Individual tailoring of resumes and cover letters is more effective. But most jobs seem to come from networking and contacts.

High-tech job listing networks like Westwood-based Jobtrak and electronic resume networks like Princeton, N.J.-based Connexion have sprung up in recent years. Most are available to students and alumni only through college placement offices, although some, like Connexion, gather job-seeker listings from several sources.

In addition, career placement professionals advise targeting smaller companies rather than the Fortune 500. Unfortunately, those small companies seldom recruit on campus, and when they have an opening, they need to fill it immediately.

Just as in good times, some students sabotage themselves.

“I’ve had students come in here saying, ‘I’ll work anywhere between Zuma Beach and Cabrillo because I surf,’ and I’m supposed to have a lot of sympathy for these kids?” asked June Millet, senior career counselor at UCLA.

She added: “The old days of just breathing and signing up for a job interview don’t work anymore. Companies are no longer fat and happy. They are lean, and they are looking for people who can hit the bricks running.”