The dot-com downturn is loosening up the tech world’s notoriously tight labor market. Twenty-two thousand employees have been canned from Internet start-ups this year alone, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. With most of those folks out looking for new kinds of occupational punishment, surviving start-ups are having an easier time filling new slots. In the old days (i.e., six months ago), the tech industry was a seller’s job market. There were too many job openings and too few talented people, so prospective employees could harass companies into sweetheart deals with lots of options. Today, giddy tech CEOs say, the resume piles have gotten taller, the quality of talent has improved and there’s actually a glut of people in some fields. “We’re getting amazing resumes that we would never have seen four months ago,” says Sanjay Goel, CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Ideas.com.
Of course, Silicon Valley is a long way from having an unemployment problem. Engineers, the industry’s MVPs, are still snapped up like PlayStation 2 consoles when their companies go bust. But other types of tech workers pounding the pavement are finding it harsh. Many marketing and business-development execs left traditional companies for dot-coms, ended up managing expensive and fruitless ad campaigns and portal deals, and are now competing against folks with scarily similar resumes. “My story is not a lonely story. There are a lot of people like me right now,” says Larry Brown, a 48-year-old veteran of Seniornetwork.com, which closed after it couldn’t get funding. Brown expects that the job search could take as long as a year.
Folks like Brown are seeking good salaries, as opposed to stock options that may be worthless. They also want to utilize their Internet experience, although with stabler, more traditional firms. If there’s one defining sentiment of the new job seekers, it’s that they don’t want to make the same mistakes again.
