Byline: Jay Rey
May 13--Lunch is at noon each Tuesday for these bright Buffalo business minds who meet to talk shop.
They're an assorted bunch -- company officers, project directors, managers, computer gurus, you name it. But these days, they share a common bond: Once making somewhere from $45,000 to more than $100,000 a year at local companies, they're now out of work.
"When you are looking for a job, you have to network everywhere," Jill Benker-Beck, the group's leader and motivator, tells them on a recent Tuesday. "Think about your church, your schools, your car mechanic, your hair dresser, anyone you talk to. It's out there. You just have to shake a lot of trees to get the fruit."
Meet the POD people -- Professional Opportunity Developers, that is.
Each Tuesday since January, this group -- a few dozen people and growing -- meets for a brown-bag lunch at the Buffalo Employment and Training Center on Goodell Street. Think: Networking club meets support group for unemployed bosses.
Members dispense job-hunting advice, swap war stories, offer some solace in Buffalo's tough job market and, most importantly, tip others in the group to job openings out of their personal expertise. They also take part because they want to stay in Western New York.
"There was a business analyst position in the paper over the weekend, did you see it?" one member asked a group newcomer.
He had, but thanks anyway.
"Have you talked to Mattel?" someone else asked another newcomer looking for a job in the information technology field.
He rummages through a stack of business cards, finds one and passes over the fresh job lead.
POD is the brainchild of Beck, career resource center manager at the Buffalo Employment and Training Center.
She went to a luncheon a while back to welcome a new company officer recruited to the area, but with so many quality professionals out of work in Western New York, she wondered why the position couldn't have been filled by a local.
POD was born.
The group, Beck said, is geared toward out-of-work executives and managers who earned at least $45,000. Those jobs are hard to come by in this region, she said, but pulling together unemployed professionals from a variety of fields each week has helped expand their contacts and open doors.
And it's showing local companies the available pool of local talent. Since January, about 53 have joined the Tuesday lunches; 20 of them now have jobs.
"They've become like a little family in a way, looking out for each other," said James Finamore, director of the Buffalo and Erie County Workforce Investment Board. "And boy, it seems to be working."
The lunches are informal, but organized, taking on an almost boardroom feel.
On one recent Tuesday, a group of 18 -- 13 men, five women -- filed into a large basement room in the Goodell Street building carrying their sandwiches and salads, some toting brief cases or laptops. They took seats behind long tables arranged in a rectangle, name cards -- Paula, Ted, Mary, Gary -- in front of them.
Lunch opened with good news: One of the group members just got a job.
"He would be here telling you today, but he got a call on Thursday," Beck said. "His start day was yesterday. He's really excited. Yea, Dan."
Most here are in their mid-30s to early 50s. Some are wearing business suits, or shirt and tie. They're marketers and accountants, engineers and human resources managers with 10, 20 even 30 years experience in their fields. Most of their jobs were eliminated during a corporate downsizing.
"Who's had an interview this week?" Beck asks.
One woman raises her hand and shares her experience.
"I'm not sure it was the right position for me," she concluded. "But it feels good someone was interested."
For many, job searching these days is a brave new world. The Internet has become a job-hunter's best friend; voice mail many times the enemy. And carrying a cell phone could mean the difference between getting a job and not.
So, the group dispenses nuggets of job-hunting wisdom, like getting an employer's attention by sending resumes in oversize envelopes via Federal Express.
Some pass on little mottos to bolster moral.
"It's a full-time job getting a job," they say.
"You have to network to get work," the group is reminded.
While the fledgling group has had success, two-thirds of those who have latched onto a local job have had to settle for less than what they wanted or had been making, Beck said.
"Right now, employers really have you because people really want to stay in the area and are willing to come down in salary to stay here," said Andy Levine, who's been with the group two months.
Levine didn't want to come here when he took a job as a packinging engineer with Fisher-Price in 1978. Now, he doesn't want to leave. They're all in POD because they hate to leave.
"It's a real challenge," said Levine, 55, of Williamsville, who lost his job of six years at Carborundum Co. last November. "A majority of times no one's going to call you back. You try to keep a positive attitude. You try not to look behind you. You try not to look too far forward in the future. You're going by blind faith."
It's humbling.
"It's a feeling of not belonging, not having a foundation," Levine said. "You're probably not sleeping. Whenever the phone rings you hope it's about a job. It hurts your savings. Sometimes you'll have friends avoiding you."
But one of the benefits of the Tuesday lunches is commiserating with people who know what you're going through.
"We all kind of keep each other up," said Francine Shea, 34, from Hamburg, who lost her job as human resource manager after a company downsizing. "It's encouraging to hear people share their success stories."
Beck likes to tell the story of a recent POD alumnus who came into a meeting one week dejected about her employment prospects. The group lifted her spirits a bit. But the good news came when her cell phone rang during the meeting -- a job offer from a local bank.
She started work days later.
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(c) 2002, The Buffalo News, N.Y. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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