Trading Places

Looking for a job? A Wall Street recruiter tells it like it is

Richelle Konian knows a thing or two about life on Wall Street, both from her experience working on it and now for it. After leaving a career in management consulting, she cofounded Manhattan-based recruiting firm Careers on the Move, which helps hundreds of job seekers find work in a seemingly impossible market. Her most recent success story? Finding a job for the poster boy of unemployment, the “Sandwich Board Guy” (aka: Joshua Persky, pictured above.)

Konian doesn’t paint any rosy pictures for 2009, but insists that jobs exist for those eager to do their homework and embrace change. “In this type of market, you have to figure out ways to set yourself apart, and you have to work that much harder to get to the place you were previously,” she says.

Here, Konian offers her tips for finding your way back into the job market.

Know what you’re up against:

“One of the things people should be aware of, particularly in financial services, is shrinkage. Sometimes I don’t think people understand the big picture. We’re now in a second wave of job losses; 9/11 was the first wave, and we’ve never recovered from it – we had some good years, but some jobs just haven’t resurfaced. Take asset management: there are far fewer jobs now than there were a few years ago. There are people who worked in equity research who have never got their jobs back, and they had excellent resumes, excellent backgrounds, and they were considered to be the upper echelon of candidates. Some of them have taken positions in other areas using the same skills. But there’s a lot of people with specific expertise who have been unemployed for years.”

Be Flexible: