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Angst For The Memories

Rahul Nayampally stood in the middle of the college gymnasium in a sea of navy-blue-suited engineers trying to make a good impression on corporate America. He was lined up with hundreds of his classmates at NJIT for the privilege of thrusting his résumé into the hands of a recruiter from Lucent -- one of dozens of high-tech firms that will hire fewer engineers this year in response to the economic slowdown.

As they elbowed past each other in the packed gym, the students didn't need calculus to do the math: Thousands of new college grads plus thousands of corporate layoffs equals a shrinking universe of career choices.

"The job market is horrible," said Nayampally, who will earn an electrical engineering degree next month. "Either the companies are laying people off or there’s a hiring freeze."

The 21-year-old then said in four sentences what six months of headlines have been screaming:

"Last year was fantastic. All my friends got jobs immediately, and my roommate got a signing bonus. I don't care about a signing bonus. I just want a job."

Welcome to the real world, kid.

Nayampally is one of thousands of graduating seniors heading into one of the most confusing job markets in years. With national unemployment at a historically low 4.3 percent, experts continue to say the job market is hot -- even though U.S. companies announced 406,806 layoffs in the first quarter, up dramatically from 141,853 in the same period a year ago.

No wonder the angst is thicker than Frisbees on college campuses throughout the country, where the spring crop of graduates is poised to dive into a chilly job pool, then swim against the tide of a turbulent economy.

Corporate recruiters and college placement officers confirm just how tight the entry-level job market is, even as they insist there's ample opportunities to launch a career.

After all, average starting salaries are higher than last year. What has disappeared is the stampede by companies to recruit graduates, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Lucent remains a high-profile recruiter on campus, even though the Murray Hill-based telecommunications equipment firm expects to hire fewer engineering graduates than last year, according to Devon Prutzman, manager of recruitment marketing and events.

"Graduates aren't getting as many job offers as they used to," she said. "In years past, it wasn’t uncommon to get seven or eight offers. Now it’s more like two or three."

When it comes to beating the hiring odds, student internships are a proven formula. An intern who works summers or part-time can receive a permanent job offer as early as a full year before graduation day. The NJIT job fair attracted plenty of sophomores and juniors hoping to line up summer internships to pave their way into the work force later on.

The consulting firm Accenture recruits interns as early as their sophomore year and will hire about 3,500 graduates this year, about the same as last year, according to Bill Ziegler, global director of recruiting.

"These days, it's very likely that 50 percent of the senior class will be committed to an employer by the start of their senior year," said Ziegler. "We have to work very hard to bring the best students on board, because the top talent will always have more than one alternative."

IBM expects to hire about 3,000 new employees this year, and has been hiring consistently for the past six years, according to Kevin Barnes, of IBM, an NJIT alumnus who was collecting hundreds of résumés at his alma mater's job fair.

"We did some very aggressive hiring in the 1970s and 1980s, and then we hit a significant downturn and stopped hiring," said Barnes. "But we're expecting to see a huge number of retirements in the next 10 to 15 years, so we're hiring on campus to level out the demographics of our population."

But IBM is a very selective employer, one that hires only about 10 percent of applicants. At NJIT's last job fair in the fall, the company collected hundreds of résumés and did one-on-one interviews with 14 students. Only one was actually hired.

Unlike the hiring-as-usual stance at IBM, Hewlett-Packard expects spring campus recruiting to decline by a whopping 70 percent from last year, according to marketing manager Jack Greene.

His advice?

"Graduates need to be a lot more aggressive," he said. "Don't expect companies to come looking for you the way they did last year. The environment has changed dramatically."

Campus recruiting is flat this year at AT&T, which will hire several hundred graduates. The company's 100 or so interns are a key part of the hiring pool.

"Your chance of being hired is about twice as good if you were a summer intern at AT&T," said Burke Stinson, company spokesman. "And the attractiveness of established companies like AT&T is back in style, much more so than during the brief flicker of flames of the dot.coms."

For More, Click: http://www.njit.edu/CDS/careerfair/fair.htm

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