Credit: Zach Wolfe and Jonathan Sprague / Redux for Time

Today, I was reading Time Magazine’s article, “Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay?” and kept thinking about the issues that America faces – that sound reminiscent to the world that the Japanese population faced in the Nineties (their “Lost Decade”).

One of the reasons why we have been building Cultivate New York is to combat this issue – to ensure that double-digit employment is not here to stay. Instead of bemoaning the fact that there are no jobs available – we are talking about the hidden opportunities that people are not seeing – because of internal business issues. Issues like:

• Fourth quarter budget constraints
• Unfamiliar with the staffer you might meet
• Lack of confidence in the return on investment in the staffer

And then consider the professional. Why should he/she want to work with you – without getting a chance to see what working with you is like? And vice versa?

The Cost of Interning versus The Cost of Waiting

One of the comments we hear a lot if the time is the comment:

“Wow. 10 hours a week for 10 weeks? That’s a lot of time!”

But, lets do some basic calculations. If we make a base calculation of $40 per hour, and note that we are discussing 100 hours of work – the value of your time is $4000.

Even if we grow the hourly rate to $100 per, we are now talking about $10K for 10 weeks. This is the investment that you (the professional) is putting into the business relationship and should generate on the order of 4x to 10x return for the business.

The business is putting time into working with the professional, which also has a cost – which can be considered similar or greater in some way. But, since they are expecting a return, the cost of investing – even in a small fashion – is much lower than the potential return.

And now, come back to the point-of-view of the professional. You are spending your days either hunting down job opportunities on online job sites, company sites, networking events and so on – doing this almost with no understanding of the potential return you might get. The 100 hours out of the 1680 found in the ten weeks is not even 10 percent of the total time of those ten weeks. And, if we only focus on work hours (and freelancers know that is a fallacy), that is 25% of your time that you are investing in a new business relationship.

So many people are frustrated with trying to find a job that pays even half of their salary (see the ancillary article in the Time mag, “Out of Work in America“), so why not invest some of your time into another relationship and build toward something you can succeed with?

Money on the Table

This is a favorite refrain – how much money could I be making if I found a job opportunity? Well, what is the likelihood that you will either complete an interview cycle successfully or close a freelancer opportunity in the last months of the year? If you have a high likelihood – then maybe this is not for you. But, in hiring situations, one of the things employers look for are your efforts in keeping relevant and participative in the industry – or keeping your skills sharp.

How better to do it – than to be working with a firm that could expand your experiences? Extend your market reach?