"I feel like a loser, I'm 25 and still live with mommy and daddy," says Leah Salomoni of Shelton, Conn. She is one of the 3.8 million unemployed Americans who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, and her sentiment is probably a common one.
"The trend is, over time, in the American case, to think 'something is wrong with me,'" says Ofer Sharone, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who recently authored the book Flawed System, Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences. For his book, Sharone interviewed and compared job seekers in both America and Israel. Americans, he found, tended to heavily blame themselves.
The social game
Networking often plays a crucial role in finding a job in the United States. Since creating a good social chemistry between the interviewer and the applicant is a high priority, failing to do so can be seen as a personality flaw. "When you're networking and trying to have people like you, and in a job interview you get rejected, it's understood as being evaluated and rejected. Many job seekers might compare it to dating," says Sharone.
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