I have been on the other side. Some said it wouldn't affect me, that my role was indispensable, others said no one was safe, no position sacrosanct. The clouds of doom were gathering all around and no one knew what to expect. Then the restructuring happened. My boss calmly delivered the news that he was no longer our boss. His icy calm was frightening. We asked him where he was going and he told us that he didn't have a job to go to.

For a month we were all assigned to a new boss. Then Black Friday hit and the new boss visited each office, along with her own boss. The hallways crackled with electric tension. We were trying to guess who was delivering the good news and who was delivering the bad news, the good cop-bad cop routine. They visited each office one by one and after several minutes the occupants of the office would emerge and declare whether they had made the cut or not. Some of us were offered a step down the corporate ladder, others were pushed off the ladder and some were simply moved to an equivalent rung on a parallel ladder. I was amongst those who were pushed off the ladder. My entire department was dismantled, my boss being the first one to get axed. We were given our exit packages and asked to discuss the details of our lay offs with HR representatives.

After fourteen successful years of employment I held a pink slip in my hand and I couldn't believe it. Although for several months I had been following the news and reading about pink slip parties and about Harvard MBA's out on Times Square saying they'd 'manage'� for food, I had never imagined it would happen to me. I had nowhere to turn and everywhere I looked I felt people didn't want to look me straight in the eyes. I felt them turn away, I felt their pitying glances cut through every shred of self-respect I had, a total annihilation of all my confidence and self-worth. I had never felt so low.

The severance package was generous and I wasn't hurting financially but something inside had most certainly died. The depression settled into the bones and was threatening to take over completely. I waffled between extreme self-pity and anger for the rodent-faced woman who had delivered the bad news to me. I kept blaming her and asking God or anyone else who cared to listen why she had a job and I didn't, what gave her the right?

I spent entire days calling head-hunters and apparently this brand of hunters didn't want to hunt for decapitated heads. I felt my old contacts avoiding my calls and the comfort of the severance package did nothing to comfort the soul.

Eventually things looked up and I was hired back by the same company after six horrifying weeks that showed me how much my self-esteem, identity and sense of worth was tied to the curse of ten hour long automaton days. I was thrilled to become an automaton once again. Hallelujah!Some wise career decisions since that dark phase have put me in a position where I am someone who is making hiring decisions.

I have been to countless job interviews. Many interviews have felt good. An instant camaraderie established with the interviewer, jokes shared, mutual contacts discussed, books or movies discussed and then I never heard back from them. I left their offices thinking to myself ' 'Wow! Looks like this one's in the bag'� ' and then never heard from them for days. If I called to check the status of my candidacy I was often told that they were still interviewing or they had chosen someone else due to my lack of specific experience. The words that ran through my mind were ' 'What specific experience? The job description didn't say anything about requiring knowledge of rocket science!'� or 'I have an MBA, they taught me all this in school, you are a damn English Lit major, how dare you!'� or else a pathetic plea for feedback, 'Could you tell me why I didn't make your cut?'�

Now I sit on the other side. I am trying to fill two open positions, trying to hire two people to report to me. I have two jobs and 30 resumes. I only have 20 minutes in my day to cursorily scan these documents that people agonize over creating. When I was working on creating my own resume I remember being conscious about each active verb I used, the so-called power words. Sometime later the words of choice became strong nouns or 'searchable keywords'� that could help ones resume get harvested during a random scan. The resume was built with tremendous care, a labor of love. The hope was that the recruiter would be hooked and would hang on to each phrase, would marvel at the percentage increases in productivity for which one claimed credit in previous jobs, or how one increased sales or how one made logistical improvements to the supply chain. Now I click open a link forwarded to me by a human resource manager. I quickly scan the names of the companies for which a person has worked and the dates. I scroll down to the educational achievements and look for evidence of an analytical mindset'�in all of five minutes! Then I make a lightning speed decision about who to call and who to reject. Those wonderful 'active verbs'� or 'searchable nouns'� not giving me any pause.

Then come the interviews. Firm handshake? I haven't received any firm handshakes from the last batch of interviewees. Have I checked this off as a negative, no! I haven't given it a second thought. I ask them if I can get them water and encourage them to talk about themselves. I observe them while they talk and ask questions where I need to. I then tell them about the company and try to stress that a logical, analytical mind is what's most important to me. Then I inquire about their salary expectations and see them off after telling them that I still have many interviews to get through.

My own experiences as an interviewee run through my mind as I realize how irrelevant all the things that career coaches teach us or résumé services stress are, how inconsequential! Sloppiness would certainly rule one out but the care is hardly obvious. What matters to me as a recruiter is clear evidence of ability and experience and how candidates present themselves. Nothing else, all other considerations are time wasters.

Having said that, however, my level on the corporate totem pole still leaves much to be desired. I am given free rein with the hiring decision but only to a certain extent. I can invest precious hours of my time interviewing candidates and keeping up with other work that needs to get done while I am short-staffed and the ultimate decision is supposedly mine but only to a certain extent. A person I think is perfect and would be an asset to the company can be torpedoed within the blink of an eye.

Why just last week, after searching long and hard I thought I had found my perfect candidate. I asked my immediate boss to interview him, just to get a second opinion. He liked him as well. My boss and I then told our big boss that we had found our candidate and that we were ready to make an offer. This is when he asked that we let our candidate speak to him on the phone and a phone interview happened.

Our boss then gave me feedback that our candidate was very interesting, emphasizing the 'interesting'� with several nods of his head, and that he had had a very tough life. He said it was interesting and extremely admirable that he had absolutely nothing handed to him on a platter, he had to fight for it all. That he had put himself through undergraduate and graduate school on his own steam and that he was heavily indebted as a result. During the course of this interview an article in a major weekly news publication in which our candidate was quoted also became a topic of discussion. This article was about the rising costs of education and the debt that thirtysomethings today are forced to accumulate. Our candidate had laid bare his financially strait-jacketed soul in this article. The reporter added her own slant to it about the sense of entitlement to hyper-consumerism that this particular generation feels and how they need to have the best of everything. The best computer system, state of the art gadgetry and all the trimmings.

Our boss, a frugal New Englander with conservative values saw this article in an extremely negative light. He thought about this candidate (who had appeared interesting and admirable to him during the course of the interview) during his commute back home and before going to bed, juxtaposing his answers against the newsmagazine article and, by the next morning, came to the conclusion that we would be making a very wrong decision by hiring someone whose financial and personal history was laced with such rash and impulsive decisions. He labeled him over-eager, anxious, aggressive, rough around the edges, all in one go and over the course of one night!

I had already checked this candidate's references and they were all stellar. I was ready to make him an offer when I was told that I didn't have the green signal to make him an offer! I was flabbergasted. I still am. I don't understand it.

I feel more than just sorry for this clearly deserving candidate. I don't feel his handling of his personal life should get in the way of his finding a job. I cannot rationalize my boss' decision no matter how hard I try and I cannot come to terms with it. So he spoke to a reporter, what is the big deal? How does it reflect on his ability to do a good job? The young man needs a job, he needs a start in his life, one I thought I could provide but my hands are tied and I am helpless!

As interviewees we aren't even aware of the littlest things that could jeopardize our candidacy with any prospective employer, it is shocking, to say the least. One false move, one off-key remark from anyone and ones entire future gets determined. I myself was a victim of someone with a grudge telling someone else that I showed belligerence in the workplace. People who knew me had a good guffaw at that but the ones that didn't wouldn't rather hire me.

Should the moral of the story be to watch what you say to anyone, watch what you do, walk the straight and narrow, eliminate any signs of being anything but conservative because the past always comes back to haunt? Should we be a society of 'Stepford People'� with absolutely no degrees of freedom in how we lead our lives? Shouldn't there be a separation between our work and personal lives? I ponder these questions and find no answers that could comfort me as I sit here frightened beyond belief at the tenuousness of our livelihoods and the hurdles in our paths.

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