108,159.
It’s quite a large number.
It’s also the sum of a brief scan through RCR Wireless News headlines from the past few months, headlines detailing job cuts carried out by some of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. It is by no means a total and complete tally of unemployed workers in the wireless industry-that number could be as high as 500,000-but it makes one thing clear: The job market is not good.
“Now there are no jobs,” said Bob White, president of the recruiting firm Pennington Consulting Group. “I can hear my competition saying, `We’ve got plenty of jobs’-well, they’re lying.”
Just last year at this time, RCR Wireless News’ Personnel Focus detailed the trials of companies looking for qualified applicants-and finding none. Now, the situation has been completely reversed.
“Lucent was one of the hardest companies to recruit for. They had a work force that was second to none. They were the creme de la creme of employees,” White said. “Today, I have Lucent people just inundating me.”
And former Lucent workers aren’t the only people who have been forced to take an interest in the help-wanted section of the newspaper. Thousands and thousands of people from other heavyweight wireless companies, most notably Motorola Inc., Nortel Networks Corp. and L.M. Ericsson, are also updating their resumes, getting haircuts and becoming dangerously familiar with daytime television.
As Wall Street reels and investors wince, wireless workers are the real casualties of the current economic slowdown. And it’s not just the sales or marketing force that’s taking a hit-engineers, programmers and everyone else are feeling the sting of the pink slip.
“Everybody’s being laid off,” said Al Katz, chief operating officer for the newly created career site WirelessResumes.com. “It’s across the board.”
Katz said many of the recent job cuts were made across all departments in efforts to streamline companies’ operations. In most cases, the lowest positions in the management chain in each department were simply eliminated, creating a vast pool of diverse job seekers.
“I’ve got these people all over the place, and one year ago they were impossible to find,” White said. “This is the first time my business has been affected by a lack of job orders rather than a lack of candidates.”
However, there are a few groups of people that companies seem to always need, even in strained economic times like these. Katz describes the jobs as “evergreen” positions, which include radio-frequency engineers, C++ programmers and Java engineers. These positions, recruiters say, are now simply a little easier to fill than usual.
“There will probably always been a need for certain technical people,” White said.
But in general, the growth of the last few years is quickly being shorn.
“It will be a long while before they (wireless companies) need people like they needed them in ’98,” White said.
For the past several years, companies have been hiring employees left and right. Start-ups offered huge hiring packages that included stock options and other benefits. Recruiting companies were desperate for even semi-qualified applicants.
The situation was so tight, White said, that he suggested in 1998-the height of the hiring boom-that the wireless industry would have to look toward the old, staid long-distance business in order to find a fresh cache of potential employees for wireless. White said his theory at the time was to entice these workers over to the wireless industry with higher salaries and then retrain them for the specifics of the industry.
The idea of stealing from long-distance was met with enthusiasm at the time, White said, but that enthusiasm was-to say the least-short-lived.
“Everything I said was wrong,” White said.
What in fact happened in 1999 and last year was a consolidation craze. Companies began eating each other up, making a variety of positions redundant. As consolidations continued, many carriers either finished or neared completion of the buildout of their networks, making many tower and site-acquisition jobs superfluous. Add these changes to the current economic slowdown, which is forcing manufacturers to tighten their belts and investors to recoil from once-golden start-ups, and you’ve got a full-blown employment nightmare.
“The combination of those … factors has put the industry in a position I haven’t seen since ’88,” White said.
“It’s wild,” Katz said.
There are still jobs out there, Katz said, but now companies have the applicant pool and the time to be very fastidious in whom they choose.
“They’re looking for more people that are exact fits,” he said. “They’ve tightened down their specifications. They’re trying to get the biggest bang for their buck.”
However, many of those open jobs are not in this country, Katz said. Latin America, for instance, is still in the throes of a network buildout boom, and many wireless companies are looking at other places to expand globally.
But most people don’t want to go to another country. In fact, Katz said, a large percentage of the current pool of unemployed workers is old-timers, those who had been employed at one company for numerous years. It’s taking them a while to adjust.
“Some of them are just in total disbelief,” White said.
In addition, some of the recently unemployed include company executives, those who were made redundant in a merger or who could no longer fight the tide of the economy. Some of these former executives are taking some time off before they re-enter the industry, but others have already started looking for new opportunities-and have begun contacting recruiters like White for help.
“Initially that was really rather shocking to me,” White said. “It’s like a `who’s who’ of the industry.”
But while the situation looks bleak, Katz said there’s always something happening in the wireless market that will create a need for more jobs. For example, Katz pointed out, content providers wouldn’t have been needed five years ago, but now they’re an integral part of the industry.
“There’s peripheral markets within wireless,” he said. The question is, “Who becomes wireless?”
