Finding a New Job During an Economic Crisis

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I was in New York City on a morning in mid-September when planes flew into the two towers of the World Trade Center, into a field in Pennsylvania and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. I remember leaving our offices in midtown Manhattan and watching the second tower collapse in front of me leaving us stunned at what we had just seen. Suddenly, there was a hole and a view of the sky that I had not seen from that vantage point in many years. In shock, America fell into recession and, soon a war, as it slowly worked to extricate itself for the trauma of what happened.

At the time, I was a recruiter, a headhunter, working with New York area firms to fill technology positions in New York. I called my consultants who were assigned to clients in the buildings. I couldn’t reach them for several days. Both were alive, having been on trips to DC and were out of the office when the planes hit the Towers.

In January of the following year, I got a call from someone named Jerry whom I had known for a long time who was beside himself. He’s a guy who has always been successful in his career, never had to look for a job for very long, but when he called me up, well, I can’t say he was hysterical, but he was certainly frantic. He had been out of work for a while. He had sent out more than 100…