NEW YORK (MONEY Magazine) -
After a frustrating two-year search, technology journalist Connie Guglielmo finally found a job in December -- with a little help from seven of her friends.
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Eric Fulmer - He credits his new job to his energy and enthusiasm -- and his networking.
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Brenda Carter - Though unemployed, she stayed current in her field and learned new skills.
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Connie Guglielmo - A job-hunting and support Web site helped her impress the man who hired her.
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Eric Green - He cinched the new job by moving 700 miles in three weeks.
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Rebecca O'Mara - Volunteering for a Hispanic group led to her meeting executives.
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Gilbert Wilson - He used his technical skills to get his foot in the door.
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Laid off in November 2001 from her job as an editor-at-large for a technology journal, Guglielmo was a media casualty of the Bay Area dotcom bubble.
"If you don't have an industry, you don't need media to cover it," she says. Her unemployment benefits exhausted, Guglielmo turned up some freelance work, but full-time employment eluded her.
It was during some of her most difficult days that Guglielmo decided to band together with seven other writers around the country to take their plight to the Web.
"We all had done everything right -- updated our résumés and contacted our networks, but the economy is so bad that nothing was working," explains Guglielmo. So she rallied the troops to network, commiserate and do what they loved the most: write.
The result was 8GoodPeople.com, an experiment in reality programming and guerrilla job-hunting. They sent press releases about the Web site to every news organization they could think of and alerted all their journalist friends.
The Web site serves partly as an opportunity for the writers to attract and impress potential employers by posting a biography and pieces that they might have produced if they'd been employed.
| THE JOB OUTLOOK
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"Who better to document this jobless recovery? We're journalists," says Guglielmo. But the site quickly became something else just as important: an emotional release. Many of the essays offer personal testimony to the challenges of extended unemployment in a way that helped the writers cope.
Guglielmo credits the site for getting her through. "It was an outlet for all of us," she says. "The long-term despair, the hopelessness of unemployment -- it's been a way to relieve that."
More important, the site helped all eight good people find leads and freelance, contract or consulting jobs. So far, three of the eight have found full-time work.
Guglielmo got her current job, working for a major news organization as a technology reporter, through a referral from a friend.
"But the guy who was interviewing me for my current job saw the site and was impressed with it. It certainly helped," she says, adding, "Five good people are still looking for work. We're not giving up until that number is down to zero."
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