Out-of-work banker Joshua Persky became a symbol of the financial Armageddon on Wall Street by trudging Manhattan streets wearing a pinstriped suit and cardboard sign advertising “Experienced MIT grad for hire.”
NEW YORK: Out-of-work banker Joshua Persky became a symbol of the financial Armageddon on Wall Street by trudging Manhattan streets wearing a pinstriped suit and cardboard sign advertising “Experienced MIT grad for hire.”
It seems Persky’s unorthodox job-hunting methods finally paid off last week when New York accounting firm Weiser LLP hired him as a senior manager, just a year after he was laid off by investment bank Houlihan Lokey and some six months after he started handing out his résumé to passers-by on New York’s bustling Park Avenue.
“I liked his resume. He had great business sense, great experience and great references,” Elliot Ogulnick, Persky’s new boss at the Manhattan firm Weiser LLP, told the “New York Post.”
As for Persky’s extreme job search, Ogulnick said, “I must admit, it was very innovative.”
In his weeks as a walking classified ad, Persky, 48, got several job interviews and it encouraged him to set up a blog www.oracleofny.com to document his experience. A headhunter spotted the blog and showed a director at Weiser the blog. He called Persky in for an interview and he was subsequently hired.
“My happy ending holiday story is making the rounds on TV, radio and on-line,” Persky said as he posted the news on his blog and got cheers from around the world.
Now the father of five, is looking forward to being reunited with his family. His wife and kids had moved to her parents’ home in Nebraska to save cash but they’ll be returning to New York soon.
As a business graduate from an Ivy League university in the US, Bharat Shah had every reason to expect an easy passage into a well-paid corporate career.
“But recruitment is ghoulish right now. I have applied for 30 jobs, but have not landed anything so far,” said Shah who plans to head back to Mumbai if he can’t find work at the end of the campus recruitment season.
“I have been practicing a two-minute pitch to present to potential employers describing my skills and ability to contribute to a firm in 120 seconds. I hope it works.”
It is not surprising that foreign students graduating from US universities aren’t getting enough jobs — neither are Americans.
“It is a dismal situation across the country. But the problem is that unlike Americans, who can wait it out or start companies, these (foreign) kids have no choice but to return home…And that is the same situation with the tens of thousands of workers on temporary visas who are being laid-off,” Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University adjunct professor who conducts research into the immigrant jobs market, told DNA. Wadhwa who estimated that 50,000 skilled Indian and Chinese people went back to their home country from the US over the past 20 years now predicts that 1,00,000 will do so in the next five years — double the number he expected before the economic crisis materialised.
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