Your 2020 Job Search Needs a 1930s Boost

When the economy’s good, you have several employment options. When it’s bad, your options shrink so dramatically that your playbook has to change. Your 2020 job search badly needs a boost, and lessons learned from the Great Depression will get you there. Here’s my top four pieces of advice that, together, make your situation a lot better.

Meet More People and Grow Your Network

It really is about who you know, and my current company displays this perfectly. It’s a fantastic place to work, but the employee pool is extremely homogeneous. Reason being? Most roles are filled by referral, and my fellow office-mates simply don’t venture that often outside their familiar socioeconomic circles. Less than 25% of the people in my office are women, myself included. There’s even less nonwhite people, i.e. less than a handful.

The Great Depression disproportionately saw this as well. We all know the unemployment rate peaked at 25%, with so many people out of work that no one was sure how we could dig ourselves out again. And for that 75% of people that were still employed? Records show they found those jobs through personal connections. When the scarce job ad would suddenly appear, hundreds of applications would come flooding in; for the employer, it was a lot less costly and time-consuming to simply hire someone on referral.

Which rings true today as well. Up to 85% of open positions are never advertised in the 21^st century. Your high-paying dream job is definitely out there, but almost certainly not advertised. Unless you’re connected to the right people, you’ll never know about it. So use this time to rev up your LinkedIn profile to draw recruiters into your network. Growing your network is the Depression-proven method to bypass becoming a statistic.

Make Inroads in Other Industries; Hedge Your Bets

Another way to recession-proof yourself is to have the experience to pivot into another industry. Your past work might be more relevant than you think, as long as you frame it that way.

This turned out to be the case in the 1930s, and hitting an unexpected demographic. By the time 1930 rolled around women could be part of the workforce, if not encouraged. They were also widely limited to gendered careers like teaching and domestic help. But because those careers are not as tied to the stock market as the more male-dominated industries, women’s employment actually grew in that decade by 24%. This wasn’t quite a win as these gains largely excluded women of color; these jobs were also grossly underpaid, making it a constant struggle towards fair compensation. But the lesson it handed down rings true: make sure you can find work in a less-affected industry if the going gets tough.

I did this by bouncing around industries in my career. I started working in real estate, then leveraged that to working in luxury goods. And then leveraged that into working in healthtech, which is exactly the industry that stays afloat during an international health crisis. If I needed to, I could further leverage my expertise to enter a different industry, as I have a proven track record of successful transitions. The big caveat to this is, as Depression-era women warn, you need to ensure you’re being paid fairly for your work. Hedging your bets won’t be quite the lifesaver if it’s not enough income to cover your expenses.

Accept that Feeling Shame or Dread is Natural

When you meet someone new for the first time, your second question (besides “What’s your name?”) is almost always “What do you do for a living?” In America our careers encompass a huge swath of our identity; to the point that it’s sometimes someone’s entire identity. Suddenly losing your job leaves a gaping absence in defining who you are as a person, especially when your job is the only thing giving you structure, value, and a sense of accomplishment.

Everyone from the Depression-era commiserates. They, too, were taught that “if you just work hard, you’ll have a good life!” only to see that assurance evaporate when came the bread lines and Hoovervilles. Men were often the sole financial providers, and they were suddenly left unable to keep food on the table or afford other basics for their children. Their skills and prior experience suddenly didn’t matter, not when everyone else was vying for the most menial tasks. They often had to rely on charity to get by, and it was just as humiliating for them as it is for us today… if not more so.

Losing their jobs didn’t just mean loss of income.

It also meant losing their stability, their identity, and their beliefs about how the world operated in one fell swoop.

I’m sure you get the picture so I’ll stop describing those times here, and instead let you know it’s okay to feel bad. Worrying about the future, what you’re going to do, how you’re going to make this work are all what anyone would feel and think about. You have permission to feel all of that. These are scary times, your feelings are there to acknowledge reality! Let them! Keeping in touch with your emotions is key to maintaining your mental health. There’s no shame or judgment here for being human.

Once you accept these feelings and let yourself feel them, you can then properly process them. Processing them means you can regain the mental bandwidth needed to take focused action. Don’t worry yourself to exhaustion because you didn’t want to confront your trepidation.

VOTE. For the love of God, V O T E. Your livelihood depends on it.

Everything on this list is specific and actionable advice. You actually participating in the democracy you live in is the most important part, bar none. If you do not vote, you’re rolling over and denying your chance to make the world a better place.

I am really not joking about this; it’s voting that directly relieved millions in the Great Depression, but not without bumps in the road. Herbert Hoover took office in 1929, right before the stock market crashed and burned like it never had before. Hoover’s bumbling reactions to it ranged from “Oh, this really isn’t that bad guys! Promise!” to “Yeah, economists are begging me not to raise tariffs but I’m going to anyway” to “Welfare will permanently weaken America so the states and local communities are on their own. I’m washing my hands of this altogether.” So this may come as a surprise, but this made a bad situation exponentially worse.

It wasn’t just Americans that suffered either. America’s Depression reverberated worldwide, which influenced many a democratic government to flounder and gave rise to the Nazi Party in Germany. Amazing what hindsight tells you.

Voting generated new jobs and stabilized industry, all leading back to FDR.

Once America wised up to Hoover’s poor leadership, they voted in Franklin D. Roosevelt in one of the biggest voter landslides in history. FDR did not share the collectivist views of his predecessor and jumped right in to stimulating the economy and giving citizens their power back. FDR’s New Deal programs were so popular that he was reelected three times to the presidency, where he continued to relieve more and more of our population from the Depression. If the Twenty-second Amendment stays in place, he’ll be the only president to ever serve more than two terms. Thanks to his policies, America managed to retain its democratic principles and limp back to solid ground, which it needed during World War Two.

Your vote is literally a matter of life and death. Vote in every election you can to get people in power that will actually help you out. Federal, state, and local level officials all need your input to best work towards your ideal life on a systemic level. Believing your vote “won’t count” or that it’s “not worth it” is placing your well-being directly into someone else’s hands. I trust your judgment enough to decide who’s best for these crucial roles; why wouldn’t you?

Give me more advice I can pass on to others. What’s your biggest tip for finding good work in 2020?