When the job search becomes a blame game

MIT professor's book explores how white-collar job hunters in the U.S. blame themselves unnecessarily - and suffer as a result - when they cannot find work. Searching for a job is tough - and the nature of the hiring process in the United States makes matters far tougher, and more emotionally fraught for workers, than it needs to be. That is the central assertion of MIT's Ofer Sharone in a new book based on his in-depth study of the American and Israeli white-collar labor markets, which operate very differently. In the U.S. Sharone says, job hunts emphasize the presentation of personal characteristics; job seekers play, in his terms, a "chemistry game" with prospective employers. In Israel, by contrast, the job-placement process is more formally structured and places greater emphasis on objective skills. As a result, white-collar workers in the U.S. are more likely to take their job-market struggles personally, and find it harder to sustain searches.  "It's very painful to keep getting rejected," says Sharone, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Moreover, widespread self-help advice for job seekers, he believes, "unintentionally exacerbates this problem" by encouraging unemployed workers to believe they entirely control their job-search outcomes.