(MONEY Magazine) – "Job security is a thing of the past. People are going to have to get used to the idea of involuntary separations -- sometimes four, five or six times during a career." Those cold-sounding words come not from a hardhearted, cost- cutting CEO like GE's Jack "the Knife" Welch or Procter & Gamble's Edwin "Prince of Darkness" Artzt, but from no less an authority than Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who recently met with MONEY editors. Reich's message is not exactly what you wanted to hear, given that your nerves are probably already jangled from continued reports of mass firings, early-retirement offers and "voluntary severance" deals. The latest companies to add to the legions of laid-off workers: telecommunications giant GTE, which plans to shed 17,000 jobs over the next three years; Nynex, another phone company (16,800 jobs over two years); and Aetna Life & Casualty (4,000 jobs by year-end). But don't despair. If you are unemployed now or fear that you soon will be, your career is not over unless you want it to be. Finding a new job may take some time -- as a rule, expect to spend about one month job hunting for every $10,000 that you earned. And it may be tough, especially if you are over age 50, despite age discrimination laws (for job-hunting strategies for those of you over 50, see the box on page 80). But if you're a manager or professional, odds are that you can find a comparable new position. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly two-thirds of college graduates who lost jobs during the 1980s -- which included the severe 1981-82 recession -- found new positions that paid at least 95% of their old ones (no figures are yet available for the '90s). In this story, you'll meet four people who rebounded in very different ways after losing their jobs, including Mary Dean Keyes, 47, of St. Louis (pictured on the previous page), who survived two layoffs and ended up with better-paying posts both times. Their stories contain important lessons that can help you reduce the time you're out of work and land a great job in the end. The first thing you should know is that even though big corporations continue to announce layoffs, other companies are adding workers -- and not just in menial positions. Despite the firings, the economy produced far more jobs than it destroyed in 1993. "Two million additional jobs were created in the United States," said Reich. "Most of the new jobs were in managerial, professional and technical occupations." At the same time, the unemployment rate fell to 6.4% from 7.3%. And here's another encouraging fact: Many Fortune 500 companies offering topnotch pay and benefits are still hiring, even as they carry out downsizings. For example, Sara Lee trimmed its headquarters staff last year but increased its total work force by 10,000 to 138,000 between June 1992 and June 1993. Indeed, the head count at the nation's 50 largest employers has increased by nearly 460,000 over the past six years, according to a survey by Human Resource Executive magazine. "Companies that push employees out the front door in a restructuring are usually hiring people with different skills through the back door," says Robert A. Mayers, a vice president at Manchester Inc., a King of Prussia, Pa.-based outplacement firm. Julio "Rob" Davila, 40 (pictured on page 79), vividly illustrates this paradoxical trend. Davila volunteered to quit his $53,000-a-year job as a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle last October when the paper offered generous severance packages of six weeks' pay for each year of service, with a maximum of two years' pay. As a 20-year veteran, he pocketed a pleasant $106,000. And he was confident he would find a new job. He had solid references, knew how to use the latest computer technology and was of Mexican descent. (He felt the latter characteristic might aid his job search because many big-city newspapers are trying to hire more minority workers.) Within two months, Davila found a $49,000-a-year copy editing position the old-fashioned way -- through an advertisement in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher -- at the Seattle Times. Curiously, the newspaper had offered early-retirement packages to its staff late last year. Nevertheless, it needed another copy editor to cover for vacationing employees, particularly one like Davila who understood new page-layout technologies. "The severance package was just too good to pass up, since I believed I could get another job," says Davila. "Now I've got a good job in a city where the cost of living is lower ! than in San Francisco, plus more than $100,000 put away for my retirement." You may not recover as quickly as Davila did, but you can help your cause by approaching your job search as if it were a full-time job. Where do you begin? First take advantage of any outplacement counseling your former employer may provide. Such counselors can help you write your resume, identify potential employers and polish your interviewing skills. They can't find a job for you, however, so spin your Rolodex for names of anyone who might give you a lead. Career counselors estimate that 70% of job seekers find work through contacts. Even if your associates don't know of any openings, you should at least ask them for two or three names to add to your phone list. And you should expand your network by joining a low- or no-cost support group for the unemployed, which can also help to bolster your spirits if you're feeling demoralized. To find one in your area, call your state employment office, local colleges, social service agencies or churches and synagogues. A strong web of personal and professional contacts has twice provided a safety net for Mary Dean Keyes. When Keyes was laid off from a real estate sales job in the early 1980s, she quickly found work as an account manager at an advertising and public relations firm owned by a neighbor. She had gotten to know the neighbor when they both worked with Lafayette Square Restoration Committee, a community improvement group. Keyes tapped her extensive network again in November of 1990, when she lost a $53,000-a-year post as vice president of community investments for Citicorp in a downsizing. Keyes quickly landed consulting jobs at smaller banks that needed to comply with the federal Community Reinvestment Act, which is her specialty. One of her clients, Mercantile Bank, hired her for a full-time position eight months after she was laid off; she now earns 19% more than she did at Citicorp, plus bonus. "It's easy for me to keep up my network because my job is very public," says Keyes. In addition to pumping your friends for job leads, try turning to the pros. An estimated 20% of displaced managers and professionals find new jobs through executive recruiting firms, so don't be shy about sending your resume to headhunters. (The popular perception that recruiters court only gainfully employed hotshots simply isn't true.) Your best bets are so-called contingency search firms, which earn their fee (paid by the employer, not you) only when they fill a slot. Retainer firms, on the other hand, are paid by employers whether or not one of the candidates they present is hired. To identify the search firms that specialize in your industry, type of job or region and learn whether they work on a contingency or retainer basis, consult The Directory of Executive Recruiters (Kennedy Publications, $39.95) in your library. You should also answer want ads, even though fewer than one in 10 job seekers finds work this way. You can increase your odds of success by checking trade publications -- as Rob Davila did -- in addition to general-circulation newspapers, and by putting extra effort into your written replies. Tailor your resume and cover letter each time to emphasize the ways in which you meet the ad's specific job requirements. Also, ask people in your network whether they know anyone who works for the company hiring. If they do, call the employee to learn about the organization, its corporate culture and its business plans. You may be able to use the information you gain to craft a cover letter and resume that make a special impression on the person who's doing the hiring. Though no statistics are available to judge the effectiveness of the burgeoning electronic job market, you have nothing to lose by plugging into it. There are firms that will file your resume on an electronic database for three to 12 months at a cost to you of $10 to $50. For descriptions of such services, read Electronic Job Search Revolution: Win With the New Technology That's Reshaping Today's Job Market (John Wiley & Sons, $12.95). Many employers and headhunters scan these databases when seeking candidates. If you've looked hard for a full-time job using all of the methods described above for at least two months without success, try to find a part-time job for two or three days a week, preferably at a professional level in your old field. "Part-time consulting assignments will not only provide additional income, they will give you access to completely new contact networks," says Christopher Kirkwood, author of Your Services Are No Longer Required: The Complete Job-Loss Recovery Book (Plume, $9). For a directory of 120 search firms that place executives temporarily, call Executive Recruiter News ($19; 800-531-0007). A part-time position certainly proved to be a valuable stepping-stone for George Coburn, 48 (pictured on page 77). In September 1990, Coburn, a certified public accountant, lost his post as chief financial officer of the Forum Corp., a Boston-based consulting and training firm, where he had earned as much as $200,000, including bonus, in his best year. He next worked as a consultant, first as an independent and then for a Boston-area firm serving small businesses. But he still longed to work as a CFO again and made a point of setting up interviews with local executives to ferret out job opportunities. In February 1991 he met with the president of Innovation Associates, a management consulting firm in Framingham, Mass. Nearly two years later, in November 1992, that contact paid off when Innovation offered him a three-day- a-week job as its CFO. He took it. Last April, Innovation finally hired Coburn full time, paying him a $107,000 base salary plus a $30,000 bonus. His compensation has since risen to $148,000, and he's setting up an employee stock- ownership plan (ESOP) that will benefit him and his colleagues in the future. "Over the long term," he says, "I expect I'll do as well here as I would have done at Forum." Another option that makes sense for highly paid executives who have exhausted the traditional job-search strategies is a mass resume mailing. You can manageably send resumes to a few hundred employers on your own, but if that doesn't work, senior-level managers should seriously consider hiring a firm that specializes in mailing job seekers' resumes and cover letters to the chief executives of thousands of corporations. (A service such as this can cost $2 to $4 a letter, so you should consider one only if you have savings to spare and are searching for a job that pays $100,000 or more.) Before you hire a mass mailer, though, check references and ask how the company handles letters that are returned as undeliverable. A reputable firm will call the corporations in question, correct any errors in their addresses and resend the letters. Harvard M.B.A. John Buckingham Jr., 40, who lost his job as president of a Kansas City-based manufacturer of fuel truck tanks in mid-1992, searched for a new position for four months before hiring WSA Corp., a Shawnee, Kans. firm, to do a mass mailing for him. For a typical client, WSA mails 4,000 to 6,000 resumes, charging $2 each, plus postage. But after hearing Buckingham's requirements -- he wanted to head a manufacturing company with less than $100 million in annual sales anywhere in the U.S. or Canada -- WSA advised him to mail 12,000 resumes. Buckingham did -- and received 17 responses. He decided to interview at four companies and ended up weighing three job offers. In February 1993, seven months after he lost his job, he started work as president of Intoximeters, a St. Louis-based manufacturer of devices used by police and employers to measure alcohol levels in drivers. Buckingham says the result justified the cost: "I got back more than $24,000 in compensation during the first month I was re-employed." It may be small comfort, but one benefit of the wave of layoffs that has devastated many large corporations is that no one need be ashamed anymore of being out of work. "Losing a job should not be thought of as a failure," said Secretary Reich, "because more often than not it has nothing to do with the quality of work that someone did." As the four people in this story demonstrate, finding a new job is hard work, but you can bounce back.