The Unemployed Life

Recruiting Retooled

A publishing executive with 25 years’ experience would like to walk your dog. Although she’s still perfectly ensconced in her senior level position, she knows the industry’s still feeling shock waves from the Great Media Meltdown of 2008. Ad spending crashed 14 percent in the first part of the year, hitting record lows, and if advertisers don’t start widening their wallets soon, she may soon be counted among the growing ranks of unemployed expected to hit 10 percent of workers before the end of the year. So she may turn to dog walking.

“She’s exploring,” says her coach, Tonia Mattu at Mercury Group. “She would do anything from dog walking to opening a bed and breakfast.”

Mattu is the newest member of the Mercury Group team and part of the new direction the company was forced to take in the downturn. Earlier this year, founders Jeff Lundwall and JD Rehm saw their recruiting leads dry up and put a plan in place quickly to retool the business toward other potentially more lucrative areas. Seeing many people, especially in the publishing industry where they did most of their business, looking for ways to remake their careers, Lundwall and Rehm expanded their career coaching practice. Mattu was hired for her background as a career coach, as well as her experience in business development and sales in the media industry.

The service, at an affordable (for publishing execs, we think) $1,200, includes some “exploring” discussion and help figuring out what to do next. Tools like self-evaluation and Mattu’s assessment of their career transition potential are standard fare. And that’s all fine and good. But to survive and thrive in this recession, career changes need more than a Zen-like insight into their new purpose in life. They need tangible goods.

“We give them a script,” says Mattu. “They need a good answer for what they’re doing if they run into someone they know at the supermarket.”

Over five sessions that includes homework and access to Mattu at any time, clients get to know themselves and gain the ability to articulate their predicament and where they’re headed.

Perhaps most valuable of all, Mercury Group makes introductions to possible employers and other influential individuals in clients’ area of interest, but mainly publishing execs. “Contacts are not as beneficial to those looking to get out of media,” Mattu says.

Tags: careers, transition