The news, let’s face it, is almost universally bad. Companies are laying off scores of people regularly. I sat at a graduation in Dallas at SMU earlier this summer and heard the Dean of the Cox Business School state that the job market for MBA’s was the worst in thirty years.

Other Business Schools, even more prestigious than SMU, are seeing somewhere near half their graduates find jobs when, a year ago, that figure was closer to 80%. The collapse of the telecom marketplace hasn’t helped. Nor has the melt-down on such companies as Enron and the wave of re-statement of earnings from companies that ought to know better. And the glut of deeply experienced IT and Telecom people is painfully obvious to recruiters who are sharing their pain because their commissions and earnings are also at an all-time low.

In Pittsburgh, recently, I met with a young man with an excellent work history involving various jobs working for very well-known companies as an analyst in IT. He talked about his background and his unsuccessful job search (he had been looking for a year) in sweeping, authoritative terms that included the firm conclusion that the job market would not recover for at least a year and possibly two. His attitude was one of resignation in the face of such an overwhelming economic climate. He sounded so sure of himself and his conclusions about the economy, that it left no room for the possibility that he might, just might, be able to find a job in the interim.

I mention this young man because, of course, his air of certainty was bravado. It was protection against the rejection that’s invariably involved in a job search. His tone, so certain and knowledgeable, particularly, grated on me and I began seeing him as something of an icon standing for all of the disappointed, scared, scarred people out there who are engaged in looking for a job and not finding it.

Now I’m not saying that finding a job is easy today. I’m not even saying that we all need to be optimistic. What I am saying is mirrored in the old joke: ilegitimi non-carborundum. I’m saying that, even in a bad economic time, even in a time when there are fewer jobs, there are still jobs that need filling, and someone will fill them. They may be fewer; they may be harder to come by; the competition for them may be fierce; but such job openings do exist.

And I’m saying that, when you give in to despair, when you begin seeing the future as overwhelmingly dismal, it colors your attitude and your outlook, and that, in turn, affects the way you conduct yourself.

What you want to be is almost ubiquitously non-judgmental. This means that you neither accept nor reject what you observe, but you can’t allow yourself to be sucked into the deep dark pit of pessimism.

There’s a good book out, Learned Optimism by Martin E. Seligman, that includes a discussion of pessimism, optimism, learned helplessness (giving up because you feel unable to change things), explanatory style (how you habitually explain to yourself why events happen), and depression -- and how these all affect success, health, and quality of life. Seligman supports his points with animal research and human cases. He also provides the reader with resources to teach changing from pessimism to optimism, with worksheet pages to guide you. To anyone who has been at the job search for a substantial period of time, with no excellent prospects in sight, I recommend this book.

I mention this, not to promote the book, but because it backs up my belief that an optimistic person invariably will function more effectively than someone who is pessimistic most of the time. And that goes doubly so for job hunting in this frustrating, gut-wrenching economic period!

Preparing for the big interview

Interviewing: As good as vs. better than

Dirty little secrets of interviewing

Age discrimination

Answering questions in interviews

Interviewing means big problems