An issue that grows in importance every day in the media, in certain literature and in people's daily lives, is that of knowing how to look for a job.
It is understood by this expression that set of knowledge and practical skills that a person must possess to carry out a systematic job search.
Naturally, knowing how to look for a job is not the same as finding it immediately or whenever you want. It specifically means that the person is capable of using the most convenient means and channels to advertise and offer himself as a professional in search of occupation.
When we speak of "employability" it is a current trend of business administration or "management." Conferences are given on it, articles are written and there are even consulting companies specialized in "outplacement" or relocation of dismissed or unemployed personnel.
Indeed, "employability" or how to become "employable" are not new. Perhaps the oldest studies on the subject were born back in the 1930s during the economic depression and closely linked to works mainly aimed at understanding unemployment as a psychological experience.
The most recent bibliography responds to current times, a time of intense global competition, technological and business change. Today the loyalty between company and worker is something relative.
From the organizational side, factors such as deindustrialization and the rise of small businesses appear to have disrupted the link. In an era in which companies mutate with great ease, huge contingents of employees are no longer a constant. From the side of the workers, today it would be professionally and psychologically damaging to want to remain in the same job for many years. At the rate at which knowledge multiplies and technology evolves, a prolonged stay without changes in a position would mean lag and expiration.
Some authors point out the following characteristics as distinctive of people with greater possibilities to get a job:
- They know how to equip themselves with a special psychological disposition. They
appreciate unemployment or the transition from one position to another as an opportunity for personal and professional fulfillment. They have learned to master their moods and conditions, including depression and frustration. They try to know themselves in depth
They see this stage of transit as a pretext for their own examination of achievements, qualities and deficiencies to overcome. They strive to stay current
They do not neglect the acquisition of new knowledge or the cultivation of new technologies. They maintain contact with their environment
They remain constant in pursuit of their goal, a job, and take every opportunity to cultivate new social relationships that expand their range of opportunities. Expression media and search tools dominate
They care about improving their personal presentation, their oral and gestural communication. They continually analyze and restructure your resume, resume, or resume. They make extensive use of the telephone, newspapers, the Internet, e-mails, etc.
These authors want, in short, to induce the unemployed or job-willing reader to be aggressive, ambitious, self-confident, versatile, profoundly aware of their strengths and weaknesses, persistent and always ready for change.
But beyond suggestive insights and advice from successful book authors, it is convenient to pay attention to the findings of psychological research. The intensity with which a person seeks employment has been shown to be a reliable tool for predicting their success in finding it. Several studies show that the importance that the subject gives to the fact of having a job, as well as her greater or lesser confidence that she will get it, affect the effort she will deploy to find it. This is how Alvaro, Garrido and Torregrosa discovered it (Applied Social Psychology, 1996): “… low expectations of finding a job, a negative attitude towards looking for a job and lower levels of involvement in work were associated with a lower intensity in the search of employment (p. 139) ”.
Finally, other investigations concluded that the longer the period without employment, the expectations of finding it decrease, negative attitudes appear towards the search and the intensity of the latter declines. And all this immersed in a psychological decay (Alvaro, Garrido and Torregrosa, 1996). In the following graphic I try to represent this process.
This means that the longer a person remains out of work, they will tend to become discouraged, which will lower their hopes of getting it, generate negative thoughts and emotions, and, most obviously, affect effective search behavior, actually decreasing it.
Of course, it must be borne in mind that unemployment does not affect all people equally. Here are involved what psychologists call individual differences. That is, unemployment will affect us in a somewhat peculiar way depending on, for example, our age, our marital status, our socio-economic level, the stage of our career, our personality, our lifestyle, the way we take care of our health, etc. Moreover, we could even add that some people will even develop physical or psychosomatic symptoms as a result of the stress caused by unemployment.
