It was only 7 PM, and already Kustom nightclub was packed with people milling about, drinks in hand, talking loudly to be heard over the music. But on this recent Wednesday, clubgoers weren’t discussing how the Bears fared in the draft or working up the courage to ask for a date. These people were looking for work.
Lucent Technologies moved Sharpe, his wife, and their two small children from Nashville to Chicago ten months ago. The world was different then. “I was working for BellSouth and I put my resumé on a job board,” Sharpe recalled. “Within two weeks a contracting company had arranged for me to move to Chicago, and if I hadn’t taken that job, there were plenty of others I could choose from.”
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That was about the time the high-tech business world ground to a stop on its axis and began rotating in the other direction. “My contract was canceled in February. The contracting company is helping me look, my resumé is on every job board, and I’m doing everything I can to find a job in my field so I can support my family. My wife and I used to have a list of states we wouldn’t move to. Now that list has gone away.”
At 4 PM, about an hour before the line would start forming, Shannon Bausch was racing along the tables set up at the entrance to Kustom, enlisting help from anybody who happened to pass by: to clip name tags to color-coded lanyards, stuff bags with supplies, organize the cash box. Every five minutes or so her cell phone rang.
“It was very depressing, horrible,” remembers Bausch. “Jen and I had the best team, just the greatest people. We started thinking about what we could do to help these employees who were now unemployed. We thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had an event that could introduce all the out-of-work people we knew to all the employers we knew?”
Stamberger was acting as gatekeeper at Kustom, making sure she had a few words of encouragement and instruction with each partygoer. “Nobody gets past here without talking to me,” she explained. She was quite proud this night of her vintage pink Italian wool suit. All three organizers wear pink to all the parties.
Harvey Daniels, recruiting manager for the American Medical Association and president of the Technical Recruiting Network, has been to every PinkSlip*Party. “This is very enlightened,” he said. “This is much more effective than a career fair–those are very specific, very targeted, very formal. I’m very grateful for this. It’s low cost, low risk, and it’s hardly a chore.”
