Business recruiters focusing on `trailing spouses'
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When Lee Steventon's husband took a job at Microsoft two years ago, Steventon quit her sales-management job in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to a new country where she knew no one and had to drive on the opposite side of the road.
"It was something really big for me to leave behind," said Steventon, 29, who worked for a technology company. "My independence was left behind because I'm dependent on my husband."
Steventon is one of the thousands of "trailing spouses" who are uprooted each year when their significant others take new jobs across the country or around the world. Although such spouses have always existed, today they are becoming more important to companies that try to accommodate their needs in order to land the top recruits they seek in a competitive job market.
Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks are among businesses throughout the country that take spouses into account when recruiting employees or transferring people already on staff.
"They have to offer services to the member of the couple that's losing the job," said John Challenger, chief executive officer of the international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago. "You don't want a great move for one to be an awful, devastating career move for the other."
Susan Seitel of Minnetonka, Minn., head of the Work & Family Connection, a Web site highlighting work trends, describes a growing movement toward helping spouses find jobs and become comfortable in new locations.
"It is so expensive to relocate somebody, especially overseas, that it's very important for companies that relocations be a success," Seitel said. "There are a percentage of relocations that fail because family members are unhappy. It's clearly dollars and cents."
According to a 2000 work-practices study by Seitel's organization, companies report that more employees are declining transfers for family reasons. As a result, employers are responding in various ways.
For example, AT&T invites trailing spouses to use the company's outplacement facilities, including computerized job banks, secretarial support and a reference library.
Marriott installed a computerized job-posting system that tracks openings nationwide, and both employees and trailing spouses can apply for openings.
Eli Lilly has several people responsible for helping employees understand the relocation process. The company works with a relocation firm that helps find such necessities and luxuries as housing, child care, Little League and dance schools.
In addition, nearly 10 percent of employers now say they're willing to send elderly relatives along when employees relocate, the report said. Bank of America, for example, pays to move elderly relatives when employees transfer locations.
Companies based around Puget Sound offer services ranging from immigration assistance to job-placement help and career counseling.
Starbucks will pay up to $5,000 to help a spouse of a transferred or recruited employee find a job, said Maggie Ricketts, Starbucks' director of staffing.
The company works with a national outplacement agency that offers a variety of services, including résumé writing, marketing, networking contacts, and career and skill assessment.
Although only a handful of recruits have used the service in the past 18 months, Ricketts said Starbucks "considers it to be a tool in our kit that we can (use to) help attract high-caliber candidates."
Boeing offers assistance to the spouses of highly sought-after technical professionals, engineers and executives, and to all Boeing employees who are asked by the company to make a transfer.
Like Starbucks, Boeing contracts with an outside company that offers similar career-support services. In addition, Boeing will pay recertification fees for a spouse who needs a new license or certificate, such as for teaching or law practice. If a spouse is self-employed, Boeing will help him re-establish the business by paying for marketing materials.
"There are a lot of two-income families, and we feel it's important to help that spouse establish their career in the new area," said Boeing relocation specialist Debi Dopps.
Although Boeing encourages the spouse to check out its own openings, the company does not guarantee a job for the spouse.
"We provide support services to help people find jobs, but we do not find them jobs," spokeswoman Anne Gose said.
Microsoft has one of the most liberal policies, with no limit on the amount it will spend to accommodate a spouse's needs.
"It's very customized - whatever the candidate or his or her spouse want," said Microsoft recruiting strategist Kelsey Berg. "If we have a candidate we want, we're going to do everything possible, whatever their situation is."
For Steventon, that meant setting up her and her husband, Lindsay, in temporary housing, renting them a car and applying for work visas.
Lindsay Steventon, whom Microsoft recruited from South Africa, had little trouble obtaining his H1-B visa for high-tech workers. But Lee, who does not have a technical degree, has waited more than two years to get her visa. In that time she has worked with Microsoft and an outplacement agency to rewrite her résumé and research potential jobs.
"I didn't think there would be so many details. I never thought that I would not be working for three years," she said.
Once Steventon gets her visa, which she expects to receive early this year, she will apply at Microsoft and other companies, she said.
Microsoft is also working with Emily Honig, who left a human-resources job at Janus in Denver. Her husband, Mike Honig, took a job in October as a Microsoft training specialist.
Mike Honig said that before he left Denver, Microsoft sent his wife's résumé around internally and sent it to a human-resources recruiting firm in Seattle.
Emily Honig interviewed with one company that appeared interested in hiring her, but she had to reject the position as the couple waited to find child care for their two children.
Once their 8-month-old son enters day care next month, Emily Honig will again look for a job, her husband said.
Mike Honig said he would have taken the Microsoft job with or without the career assistance for his wife.
"But it was ease of mind, so we know that when the end of January rolls around and Emily starts to look for a position, we won't be searching through the paper and cold-calling companies. We'll have a place to start with Microsoft and have some support," he said.
Linda Braley, vice president of client relations for the Seattle office of career-management firm Lee Hecht Harrison, said it's important for employers to make sure that everyone in the family is satisfied with the move.
"The (goal) is to get the family unit operating as quickly as possible because if you hire an employee, that person is not going to concentrate on his or her job fully until the family is settled. And the family won't be settled until the partner, if they are a working partner, has a job," Braley said.
Cynthia Flash, a free-lance writer based in Bellevue, can be reached at cynthia@flashmediaservices.com.