Discouraged Job Seekers / They tend to blame themselves

America’s jobless tend to blame themselves rather than ‘the system,’ leading them to stop looking.

The author interviewed more than 170 white-collar job seekers in the U.S. and Israel between 2004-2006 and between 2011-2012 for my new book, Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences, and the author was surprised by how many of the unemployed Americans confided that, in the course of their job searches, they had come to feel “flawed.”  Israelis who had gone just as long without finding a job didn’t tend to blame themselves that way; they were convinced it was a flawed system that kept them unemployed.  It did’t seem likely to me that Americans were inherently more self-blaming than Israelis.  Instead, the research revealed how the particular and peculiar process of American white-collar job searching—a process the author call the “chemistry game”—renders the players vulnerable to a debilitating self-blame.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at It’s not just the economy: Why U.S. job seekers get discouraged – The Term Sheet: Fortune’s deals blogTerm Sheet.

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