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A Job Search Pans Out - Though Not Quite as Planned
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Business New Haven
9/01/2003
By: Karen Singer
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Kathy Rickert found her dream job on the Internet.
But it took more than a year, and wasn’t exactly the position she was seeking when she responded to an online ad.
For Rickert, 49, the job hunt began in early 2000, when she was laid off from the purchasing department at Computer Sciences Corp. in East Hartford. Just a year earlier CSC had taken over the information technology (IT) department at United Technologies Corp., where she had spent 26 years in management-level positions.
The job loss complicated her already complicated life. She was in the midst of a divorce, and was just about to go on medical leave to undergo major surgery.
Despite the obstacles, Rickert was clear about her career objectives: She wanted a managerial job, and she didn’t want to relocate from New Haven.
Though she says she had the discipline to conduct the search on her home computer, Rickert felt she needed a support system.
She found it at the One-Stop Job Center on Ella Grasso Boulevard in New Haven, where staffers reaffirmed her goals and helped fine-tune her résumé.
In fact, by late 2000, when she was feeling well enough begin her search in earnest, job-hunting at the center had become her main job.
"I got up. I got dressed and went to work [at the center]," she recalls. "It was very much a routine."
Rickert spent Mondays and Tuesdays trolling the net for job openings.
"Four sites I always went to were Monster.com, CTNow.com, CTJobs.com and the Newhavenregister.com," Rickert says.
Wednesdays was devoted to follow-ups, including updating her own database detailing which jobs she applied for, and when and how she applied.
Thursdays were for interviews, but because those were few and far between, she often spent them recapping her progress for the week.
On Fridays, Rickert worked on correspondence, including phone calls to make sure companies had received résumés. Relationships developed during those calls sometimes resulted in new job leads.
Because the process was painstaking, she took a part-time job as office manager at a local H&R Block office during tax time.
When prospects looked especially bleak, she says, job center personnel supplied the encouragement to keep moving her forward.
"In the whole year I was searching, I had only 12 interviews," Rickert says.
One interview resulted from a face-to-face contact with Verizon recruiters at a New Haven job fair. "They kept posting this job to run a call center, which I had experience doing, so I confronted them at the fair and asked them why they hadn’t called me in for an interview." They subsequently did, but the position was for a second shift job in Wallingford, which was not what she wanted.
Rickert’s luck finally turned when answered an ad she’d seen posted on Monster.com for a job at General Electric in Fairfield. "It was farther than I wanted to go, but I applied anyway."
Pitney Bowes Management Services, which was hiring for General Electric, called her in for an interview, but by then GE had cancelled the job listing.
Apparently impressed by Rickert’s credentials and presence, the Pitney Bowes human resources director promised to be in touch.
"She called me a week later, which was last July [2002]," Rickert says. The call led to a job offer from Pitney Bowes Management Services to manage an imaging center in New Haven for a client.
Rickert currently oversees a staff of 26, who transfer medical records into electronic form.
She is three miles from home, and walks to work.
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