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Many techies fall shy in their hunt for jobs: They must learn to interact, experts say

To most job seekers, a group of people wearing suits, carrying portfolios and handing out business cards is a typical job fair.

By Shirleen Holt
Seattle Times business reporter

For Deja Hanson, a quiet computer graphic artist, it’s an exercise in misery:

"It means putting on my most uncomfortable business attire, going into a room full of strangers and trying to think of a way to start up conversations."

Asked to elaborate, the 26-year-old pauses, then groans softly. "Eeehhh. I just have a hard time being comfortable with that. When I try to communicate with people I don’t know, it’s like the wall goes up."

Hanson hasn’t had a permanent job since September 2000, when she was laid off from the Bellevue software company Stellar One. There are lots of reasons she’s still unemployed — there’s too much competition, too few jobs.

But one looms larger than the others: She’s shy.

If psychologists’ assumptions are right, Hanson is among thousands of laid-off tech workers whose hearts race and palms sweat at the thought of trying to persuade strangers to hire them. When it comes to action, whether it’s following up on a résumé or cold-calling a manager, many shy job seekers find themselves paralyzed.

They’re hardly alone. Half of all American adults consider themselves shy, according to the Shyness Institute in Palo Alto, which sits in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

A shy nation

The number of people who consider themselves shy varies by nation, according to researchers. Here is how the United States compares with its neighbors and the two countries at either end of the shy spectrum.

Japan: 57%

United States: 50%

Canada, Mexico: 40%

Israel: 31%

Source: Encyclopedia of Psychology
In computer fields, that percentage is probably higher, experts say, prompting counselors to begin offering job-networking workshops specifically for shy people, and researchers to wonder if the trend has something to do with technology.

"A large proportion of people who come to the Shyness Clinic are from the technology industry," said Lynne Henderson, a Stanford University professor. Henderson runs both the clinic and the institute, which has begun to study the link between shyness and technology.

"They’re often used to working in a solitary way, which they do very well," she said. "But they do have more difficulty networking."

Shyness wasn’t much of a problem in the boom years when programmers, engineers or Web designers could easily get work through friends and colleagues. Today, however, many of those friends are also jobless. And for perhaps the first time in their careers, techies are looking outside the industry and competing in a job market that requires a hefty dose of self-promotion.

"When you say to them, ‘You’ve got to network,’ that just sends them in a tailspin," said Tom Washington, a Bellevue career counselor who coaches people on how to find work. "They say, ‘I can’t do that.’ "

No face time, please

Glen Warner, a technical writer, science-fiction buff and self-proclaimed shy guy, stopped going to job fairs six months ago.

There weren’t enough tech companies hiring, he explained. The few that were hiring had a line of candidates that snaked around the room.

And something else.

"I’m rather reluctant to get in someone’s face and ask them questions."

A former U.S. Navy electronics technician, Warner has spent the last four years trying to build a career writing manuals for aviation and software companies, but he hasn’t had a job for a year. At 42, he lives with his grandmother in Seattle, his unemployment benefits exhausted.

Although Warner knows that most people get jobs through in-person networking, he prefers using the Internet, a method with a success rate of between 4 and 16 percent, depending on who’s conducting the study.

"I can do e-mail all day, and I have sometimes," he said. "There’s none of this intimidation meeting people face to face."

It’s a fear that many shy people have dragged along since childhood. As a fourth-grader, Hanson, the computer graphic artist, once hid in the bathroom until recess to avoid facing the stares of her classmates if she walked in late.

"Talking to strangers over the phone just totally freaks me out," she said. "I think it’s partially fear of rejection, appearing like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I hate looking stupid."

Nearly everyone suffers from some sort of shyness, whether it’s getting tongued-tied in a job interview or weak-kneed while speaking before a group.

And while many technology workers are introverts, that doesn’t mean they’re shy.

"Introverts like their solitude," said Henderson of the Shyness Institute. "Shyness is a mixture of fear and interest. It’s a concern about being evaluated that’s strong enough so that they don’t play, they don’t participate."

Henderson believes the solitary nature of computer work attracts introverts. After years gazing into a computer screen with little practice at socializing, that natural introversion can evolve into chronic shyness.

Marcus Courtney, director of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, has never had a problem with shyness, but he can see how it develops.

"This is an industry that’s really isolating for workers," he said. "When I worked at Microsoft, I didn’t talk to my office mate, we would just e-mail questions. We were, like, 2 feet away."

In-person meetings were so rare in his department, he said, that workers had a name for them: face mail.

Aid for shy people

It’s not yet the movement Garrison Keillor called for in his essay, "Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?" but the concerns of shy people are becoming more visible.

Psychologist Renee Gilbert, who calls herself a "recovering shy person," teaches courses such as "Shake Your Shyness" and "Schmoozing for Introverts" at Bellevue Community College.

The Center for Life Decisions, a career-counseling firm in Seattle, has a free job-search support group. It’s open to all, but aimed at people needing emotional encouragement.

There’s even an Internet news group that allows shy people to exchange advice via e-mail.

Lynn McManus figured only a handful of people would come to her free presentation to the local chapter of the Society for Technical Communication earlier in the summer. The Seattle technical writer and occasional motivational speaker titled her talk, "Self-Marketing for Shy People: How to Sell Yourself Without Feeling Like a Used-Car Salesman."

Nearly 100 people showed up.

The experts’ advice to shy job seekers is usually the same: Practice interacting with people. The Shyness Institute calls it "social fitness."

"We encourage them to practice job interviews, or to interview for jobs they don’t care so much about," Henderson said.

It’s a method that worked for McManus, whose teenage shyness was nearly debilitating. She dreaded getting on the school bus because she’d have to greet the driver. In one week she watched a pushy classmate take credit for her project and another girl steal her boyfriend.

At 18, she’d had enough.

She put together a step-by-step plan for improvement: Every day she’d force herself to do something outgoing, starting with saying hello to the bus driver and eventually joining social clubs.

"Instead of focusing on myself, I focused on my steps," she said. "It took me about two years, but it became very natural to me."

She shared some of those techniques with the technical-writers group. But she stopped short of asking for audience participation.

She also cut the typical question-and-answer period, substituting it with something her audience would find more comfortable. She gave out her e-mail address.

Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or [email protected]

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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