Time to Stay Put? Maybe Not

Wisdom might dictate that this is not the time to consider leaving a decent job. The economy is too volatile, the stock market too frightening and the steady toll of layoffs is increasing the number of people who are out there hunting.

But a thoroughly considered job switch is not as risky as it might seem, according to experts. Employees today remain far more willing than their predecessors to jump to a job that could offer the right mix of stability, independence and personal and professional gain.

Recruitment firms and online job boards have noticed that many people are actively looking to switch jobs. Fred Hobbs, chief of marketing for Justtechjobs.com, said that the number of resumes in his Boulder, Colo., company’s database has increased from 40,000 to just under 130,000 from January to August. Hobbs said that it isn’t primarily because of unemployed clients or his company’s marketing savvy.

“I wish I could claim credit for it, but a lot of these people still have jobs,” said Hobbs, 33, who added that people of his generation and younger weren’t raised with the idea of “just sticking things out in one place.”

Hobbs said he suspects that the motivations of those switching jobs today are far removed from the dot-com frenzy.

“This time, it may be less of a gold rush to become dot-com millionaires in two years and more like, ‘I’m not going to be a millionaire. Maybe I need to get a job at a place where I can have some stability,’ ” he said.

Steven Finder, 31, may not have had visions of dot-com millions in his head, but he was certainly right in the middle of the brief heyday. More than a year ago, he left a solid job at execu1953068645considerable portion of the new company’s work was conducting searches for a venture capital group “in the days when raising venture capital was easy. I was also there when it got ugly,” Finder said.

“We couldn’t imagine a time when [the venture capitalists] couldn’t raise $500 million to $600 million. Ultimately, they went out of business,” Finder said.

Finder’s company, Human Capital Group, gamely soldiered on, but Finder left in April, becoming a vice president in charge of new business development for the San Francisco office of Christian & Timbers. Within three months, Human Capital Group closed its doors for good.

“I left pro-actively because I thought this was better for my career. This [Christian & Timbers] was a safer place,” Finder said.

“People are continuing to change jobs for a variety of reasons, but they are being much more cautious about it,” said Madelaine Pfau, managing partner of the global professional services practice for Heidrick & Struggles’ Dallas office.

“Some are getting out of situations that are proving to be not as attractive as they might have thought,” she said. “They are looking for an alternative . . . and they are looking for st1633839468been gainfully employed and have been contacted about changing jobs. There is a third group of employees who have been loyal to their company and are now facing a possible layoff. And there are those who saw this [crash] as inevitable.”

As a result, Pfau said, those looking to switch jobs are asking a lot more questions than they might have in the recent past. Pfau said that job seekers want to know they are going to have a good career path, and they want to feel comfortable with their co-workers and supervisors.

Being comfortable with the workplace is one reason Barry Rothstein, 47, signed on in April as director of the investment properties group for the San Fernando Valley office of Charles Dunn Co.

For Rothstein, the job switch after a stint at Encino’s Marcus & Millichap Investment Real Estate Co. was practically a homecoming. In his new job, he’ll be reunited with old colleagues fro1830843496Commercial Brokerage, which merged with Dunn in 1997.

“I have a high comfort level with these people,” Rothstein said. “These are guys I respect and admire and have fun with. We’ve been on fishing trips and played poker together.”

The search for comfort is a sure sign that American workers have been far more concerned by recent economic developments than they are willing to admit, said Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist and UCLA professor of management.

“People were shaken by the sharp downturn after such a sustained period of prosperity,” Culbert said. “People had been so taken with the romantic fantasy of becoming wealthy. Taking risks then was almost the risk-less thing to do. Now, people are trying to return to something steady. People are searching for more security in their work.”

Even in difficult times, however, this is still not your grandfather’s work force.

“There is a life cycle to employment now and it’s much more accelerated than in the past,” Culbert said. “It was the post-Depression and World War II mentality that preferred staying in the same job for years and years. Now, people don’t keep their jobs open-endedly anymore. Professional workers are more like migrant workers. When they smell an opportunity to learn something new and be important, they will take that chance. It’s more about feeling empowered and turned on by where you are and what you do.”

Steven Semprivivo, for example, recently left a comfortable job to become chief executive of Futurestep, the online recruiting arm of Korn/Ferry International, a leading executive search firm. Even though Futurestep has never shown a profit in its three-year existence, Semprivivo wanted to take the risk.

Semprivivo had founded and then sold Web-based financial services company Getsmart.com to Providian Financial in San Francisco. He stayed on for two years to run it and could have remained there.

“It had the right positioning, the right branding, and the right people behind it,” Semprivivo said of Futurestep. “The impact I can have here is pretty significant.”

Simple boredom can be a motivating factor, too, according to a 48-year-old senior marketing executive who said he feels “bored and underutilized” at a California company involved in heavy-equipment sales.

“I have [switched jobs] before. There is risk. I am nervous,” said the man who asked that he not be identified for fear of the effect on his current company. “I still have 15 years of my professional career left and I want to make the most of it. This is managed risk taking.”

For Craig Smith, 36, part of the reason for leaving one of the world’s largest executive search firms for Christian & Timbers in May was the chance to be one of 39 people in the firm doing what he does, rather than one of more than 500. In other words, he gets to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Smith is now a vice president responsible for business development and client management.

“It’s a flatter, smaller organization. I have a much greater opportunity to have an impact and greater access to the CEO and COO of the firm,” Smith said.

Smith said he discussed the move with his family and others and that staying put in his old job was a strong consideration.

“In the end, you write down two columns on a sheet of paper and when one is significantly longer than the other, that’s what you do,” Smith said. “This was not a tie.”