Paul Wax looked at himself in the short cable TV news profile of
his effort to find a job and came to an unsettling epiphany.
HACKENSACK, N.J.
Paul Wax looked at himself in the short cable TV news profile of his effort to find a job and came to an unsettling epiphany.
“I look pretty old,” Wax, 61, recalls thinking to himself.
The three-minute spot focused on Wax’s upbeat attitude as he tried to replace the job he lost in December earning a six-figure salary as head of IT security at a national construction supplies company.
Yet his appearance reminded Wax, of Teaneck, N.J., of the obstacles older job hunters face in the worst job market in a generation.
“It was a wake-up call,” he said, recalling his cruise through two recent phone interviews only to see the applications fizzle after a face-to-face interview.
“When they see me, I could sense there is an undercurrent: ‘This guy is older!'” he said.
It’s a problem faced by many in his position. Federal statistics show that the unemployment rate for workers age 55 and over – 6.2 percent in March – is lower than the general rate of 8.5 percent. That’s because they have seniority and experience, and companies are often reluctant to discard workers they have invested in.
But once they lose their jobs, older workers have a far tougher time getting back into the workforce, experts say.
Federal job figures for March show that 78.6 percent of unemployed workers age 55 or older nationally had spent 15 or more weeks without a job, compared to 65.3 percent of workers ages 20 to 24.
“After you get past the age of 55, it gets much more difficult to find a job,” said Carl Van Horn, head of John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. “Older workers that are laid off experience a more severe economic crisis than younger workers.”
Wax, who has clear blue eyes and a shock of gray hair, knows the job-search routine well. He spent four months hunting at the start of 2008 after being laid off from his position as senior manager in the information security practice at UHY-US Advisors Inc. a New York-based tax and business consulting firm.
He was hired there in February 2007 to help create a new IT risk consulting practice, but the work never materialized and the company eventually gave up the effort, he said.
He got his most recent job when recruiters at the company, Bradco Supply Corp., saw his resume on an online bulletin board. Bradco hired him to create a companywide IT security program in preparation for a planned initial public offering some time in the future, he said.
“I was very fortunate,” he said. “Usually there is a rule of thumb for every $10,000 of salary you make a year it takes one month to find a job. The last time it only took me four months to find a job that paid me $110,000 a year.”
But his luck ran out after an investment firm bought Bradco, and sales of building materials plummeted with the worsening economy, he said. In December, as Wax vacationed with his wife in Argentina, Bradco’s new owner concluded that he wasn’t needed after all, he said.
“I came back and they said ‘Your job has been eliminated,'” he said.
As a result, he has spent the four or five hours a day for the last four months scouring Internet job boards, posting his resume online, applying for jobs and networking with other job hunters, former colleagues and employers. He goes to the gym three or four times a week to relieve the stress of joblessness. And in March, prompted by his concern about the impact of his age on his job hunt, Wax began planning his own business.
“I felt that I can’t rely on the market. I can’t rely on the economy. I can only rely on myself,” he said.
The Web-based company, Wax said, would help clients recognize their information security needs and teach employees how to resolve them. It’s designed to draw on different aspects of his career, which has included a stint as a code specialist for the U.S. Army signal corps during the Vietnam War, extensive IT experience – especially for financial institutions – and teaching online and in person for The New School and New York University.
Wax said his drive to find a job stems in equal parts from his Type-A personality and a desire to be active, and financial need.
He figures that he and his wife, Risa, 59, a psychotherapist and social worker who works part time for Columbia University, need about $8,000-a-month to retire comfortably – a goal that at present is far out of reach.
“My 401k has been decimated,” and is now less than $100,000, he said. He figures he would have 30 percent of his target income if he retired now, but 70 percent if he can work until he is 66.
So he keeps up a vigorous search, brushing off setbacks – such as when a friend of a friend was recently hired to the same high level IT position at a computer games company that he had applied for.
“I don’t let it get me down,” he said. “But it does indicate to me that, hey, here’s another person who’s younger than me who’s getting a position. It puts more fuel into the fire to justify me having my own business.”
