Karyn Wilson, district manager of North American Mortgage Company in Fairfax, Va., said her firm has brought in masseuses and organized ice cream socials and Easter egg hunts in efforts to attract and keep employees. The most valuable tool, however, has been money. Mortgage bankers' compensation includes a percentage of the loan amount, and the greater the volume of loans, the more they can make. Wilson noted that many recent college graduates who might have gone into mortgage banking chose Internet companies instead. The current softness in the tech sector may end up helping mortgage companies if employees from failed dot-coms come looking for work, Wilson said.
Economists attribute the tech-sector layoffs to the industry's bursting bubble.
Technology would be going through a shakeout even without a general slowdown, because tech stocks have been so overvalued, they say. That belief has dimmed as company after company failed, ending the constant scramble for workers. Still, you're not likely to see many Web developers and former dot-com executives lining up at the unemployment office. It marked the shortest median job-search time recorded in the 15 years that Challenger has been tracking such searches. The firm attributed the quick turnaround to the economy creating new jobs almost as quickly as old ones disappear.