A California Venture Capitalist Addresses the Job Market

Mr. Reid Hoffman
is one of  California’s leading venture
capitalists. Based at Greylock Partners in Silicon Valley, Mr. Hoffman is a
co-founder of LinkedIn and has been a major participant in PayPal, Zynga, and
Flickr-as well as an early Facebook investor.  

California’s
venture capitalists, along with the state’s staffing industry and local
Workforce Investment Boards, know California’s job markets. That’s why it was
good news last week to read in a column by Mr. Thomas Friedman that Mr. Hoffman
has a new book coming out early next year, "The Start Up of You". The book builds
on ideas of entrepreneurship within firms, among firms and throughout the
economy that Mr. Hoffman has been putting forward for some time.

The New UI Debit Card and the Role of Technology in California Government

This past week, the Employment Development Department (EDD)
announced the replacement of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) check system with
a system utilizing debit cards. The replacement is noteworthy in itself, in improved
service delivery for  California workers
and employers. It is also noteworthy for what it reveals about technology’s
role in California government.

Currently, EDD provides unemployment checks to 1.2 million
unemployed Californians. The 1.2 million number represents around 57% of the
2.1 million Californians counted as unemployed-adding "discouraged workers" and
workers involuntarily working part-time the number climbs to 2.6 million.

For some years, EDD has paid unemployment , which ranges up
to $450 per week, through a series of checks. The check system is subject to
the vagaries of the postal system: checks are delayed or delivered to the wrong
address or stolen. The new debit system requires the claimant to go through the
same processes of eligibility and regular certification. It transfers UI
payments electronically, enables claimants to monitor the balances, and  provides an option of direct deposit.

The Distance Running Subculture of Southern California in the 1960s

(Few readers know that our publisher, Mr. Joel  Fox, was a distance runner in the 1960s, and ran
the Boston Marathon in 1969, 1970 and 1971. So I knew he wouldn’t object if I
slipped in as this week’s "California Employment" posting a note on the
distance running subculture of Southern California. A version of this posting
first appeared last week in
Zocalo Public
Square.)

Before
distance running entered the mainstream culture in the 1970s, before marathons and
road races attracted thousands of runners, before Nike and Reebok, there was a
distance running subculture in Southern California.

You
wouldn’t have known it existed from the Los
Angeles Times
or local television and radio. But a vibrant distance running
community was out there in the 1960s, under the radar. The community was linked
by a network of  all-comers races, weekly
road races and the recently-established marathon races. Most consequential,
among this community new ways of thinking were emerging  about long distance running as a lifestyle,
as well as about workout regimens, diet, lifelong training, and the inclusion
of women.  

My
older brother Jim, then a senior at Fairfax High, introduced me to long
distance running in the summer of 1967, a few months before I was to enter the
school. My first run was from our house in the Fairfax district to the top of
Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Though I ran only the first two miles and
walked the rest, I was soon hooked.

The Counterlife in California Employment

The Counterlife, published in 1986, is the fourth in
the series of Philip Roth’s novels that focus on the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
The book includes a number of the familiar Roth themes: midlife doubts and
reconsiderations, marital fidelity and infidelity, Jewish identity in America
and Israel. It differs from other Zuckerman books (and most novels) in its use
of counter-narratives; sections of the book jump across time, across
characters, across chronologies, across facts, so that by the end of the book
there are no clear storylines.

We’ve reached that point of multiple, sometimes
contradictory, storylines in the matter of California’s job creation and
structure. The most recent California monthly employment numbers, released last
Friday, show an economy that continues to struggle to generate jobs. The state
unemployment rate fell from 11.8% to 11.7%, but as most commentators pointed
out, this was due to a drop in the civilian labor force, from 18,028,000 in
April to 17,993,000 in May. The state lost a net of 29,200 payroll jobs.

California’s Glengarry Glen Ross

The Secret Knowledge is a book by playwright David
Mamet that was published last week and that is highly relevant to our job
training system and employment world in California.

The
book has nothing in it about WIA funding in California, or individual training
accounts, or management information systems. Its relevancy is how it addresses
the broader meanings of economic  growth
and individual freedom in our evolving global economy.

Several
of Mamet’s plays,  particularly American Buffalo  and Glengarry
Glen Ross
depict the harshness of capitalism in America, and particularly
the harshness for individuals at the margins of the market economy.  In Glengarry
Glen Ross
, Shelley Lavene and George Aaronow  are aging men who have no place in the
economy, whose skills have become obsolete, who are portrayed as being
discarded by capitalism.

Good Advice for California Job Seekers

Recently, as research for my newest book on the emerging job market, I had the opportunity to explore job placement strategies with Ms. Alyssa Gruber, Executive Director at Green Key Resources, LLC, a New York City headquartered full service professional recruitment and temporary staffing firm.

Ms. Gruber heads the executive support/office support division of the company. She deals primarily in the very rarified world of hiring for hedge funds/venture capital funds and high level corporate offices–the executive assistant who earns over $100,000 a year, the administrative assistant with college degree who starts at $50,000 or the receptionist paid over $40,000. Though her niche is office support, the job advice she gives is relevant to job placement at nearly all levels.

1. Internet Job
Boards
: Job seekers should register with major job boards (Monster, Career
Builder, craigslist), and make job applications through them. There is no cost
to the job seeker, and the job seeker  is
able to identify a large number of job openings in a short period of time. However,
the flip side is that the job seeker rarely knows the review process.
Additionally, as application is so easy, the board listings usually attract a large
number of applicants.

California Transit Villages: Wrong and Right

I first became involved in the transit oriented development
movement in California in the late 1980s, when I was on the BART  board of directors. At the time it was a
minor planning movement, with a small number of theorists, including Bob
Cervero and Peter Hall at UC Berkeley and Marlon Boarnet at UC Irvine, and
architects Peter Calthorpe, Dan Solomon, Robin Chiang, and Marc Futterman.

Over the next two decades, transit oriented development
entered the mainstream of planning  theory
in California, with its own  literature
and an array of  federal, state and local
funding sources. The number of built projects always lagged behind the theory,
but a number slowly emerged.

McDonald’s Hiring in Northern California

On April 19, McDonald’s franchises across the nation held a
National Hiring Day with the goal of hiring 50,000 workers nationwide,
including around 2000 in Northern California. Scott Rodrick is the owner of 10
McDonald’s in San Francisco. His experience on this Day sheds light  on the current state of the  economy in California, and on the role of
McDonald’s jobs in the state’s labor market.

Rodrick  grew up in a
McDonald’s family ("I have ketchup in my blood"). His father  purchased a McDonald’s franchise in Florida in
1965. Scott’s first job was in a McDonald’s. After attending Dartmouth as a
undergraduate and working for a time in finance, Scott purchased his first
McDonald’s store in 1989. At present he owns 10 of the 19 McDonald’s in San
Francisco.

Rodrick estimates that each of his McDonald’s employs an
average of 50 workers.  Roughly, 35 of
these workers are full-time, 15 part-time. Each store has 5-6 management staff,
with the bulk  of the line workers
cross-trained to handle kitchen duties, cash register, and maintenance.

Jobs for Autistics in California: A Call for Strategies

This week’s F&H employment posting is a call for ideas
from California’s workforce  and
employment community. It arises from a long-running discussion with  Dr. Lou Vismara.

Dr. Lou is described by more than a few Sacramento
residents, following the well-known Dos Equis beer ad,  as the most interesting man in Sacramento,
due to his wide range of scientific, business and social endeavors  (see "Stay
thirsty my friends
").  A prominent
cardiologist, graduate of Stanford with an MD from Baylor College of Medicine, Dr.
Lou changed careers in 2000, a few years after his son Mark was diagnosed with
autism. Dr. Lou retired from interventional cardiology to work full-time on
child development and autism issues with the Office of the President of the
California Senate, where he continues today.

What Leads to a Recovery in California Employment

The monthly state job numbers released last Friday showed
a dramatic increase in payroll jobs in California. Payroll employment jumped by
96,500 jobs. This increase amounted to more than half of all jobs created
nationwide.

How real is this increase? What caused it? What have been
the causes of previous recoveries in California employment following major
recessions?