A lot of what it takes to get a job is common sense, but sometimes job loss is so devastating that common sense flies out the window on a pink slip. Yesterday, the Inquirer ran a question and answer interview with Gloria Leidel, a job counselor with Goodwill Industries in Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia. When I say the Inquirer, I mean me. In the next few days, I will tell you some of the tips from our interview that didn't get into the newspaper. We also had an online chat at noon. Click here for the transcript.

Here's the first tip: It pays to be organized. Gloria advises that you should keep some kind of log of your job search. Here's one way of organizing it (this is my idea). Get a notebook and write each day's date on a page. Write down the places you've applied each day, taking note of any follow-up and when that has to occur. Then skip ahead and write it down as a to-do item on the right page. 

Here's an example. Suppose you go online to a store's website and it says that they keep applications for 60 days. Well, then you know that in 60 days, if God forbid, you don't have a job, you need to re-apply. That's the kind of thing you need to write down.   

Maybe some "lucky" unemployed people get outplacement services when they get booted from their jobs. But a lot of people have to handle their job search on the cheap. And not everybody's looking for work as a director or manager where the pathway is networking coffees and meeting with other laid off executives. Lots of people want to find positions supermarkets or customer service facilities or factories where the first go-round happens via computer. So how do you get a job in that scenario? I interviewed longtime job counselor Gloria Leidel about that very topic in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Also check back at www.philly.com at noon today for an online chat with Gloria. She runs a free job club for unemployed people at  Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia in their Maple Shade facility.

Today's news from the U.S. Labor Department is heartening, but no reason to pop the champagne bottles. Imagine celebrating because only 247,000 jobs are gone! Still 247,000 is better than 645,000, which was the monthly average from November until April. It's important not to get excited about the minuscule decline in the unemployment rate. Remember, the unemployment rate is merely fraction. The denominator is the number of people in the labor force. That dropped from June to July. Why are there fewer people in labor force? Probably because some have given up and gotten out. The number of unemployed people also declined. Whatever the numbers, you put the number of unemployed above the labor force and you have the unemployment rate.

This is what I'm looking for: An increase in work hours. It's thrilling that manufacturing hours are creeping up. In May, the average work week was 39.4 hours. Now it's 39.8 hours. Twenty-four minutes isn't much, but it's going the right way, especially since, in my opinion, manufacturing is the bedrock of our economy.

I'm also looking for an increase in overtime. Nothing there yet. It alarms me that we've lost 13,500 jobs in architecture and engineering. That means there is still no serious investment in the economy. If these guys aren't working, no one's going to be working down the line. It is also alarming that temporary help services continue to lose jobs. It was down 9,800 from June to July. We can expect a change in  the labor market when that trend shifts. Companies are increasingly offsetting risk by turning to temporary employees. Permanent hiring will follow temp hiring. Also alarming is the dearth of hiring in construction. But, it makes sense. If the engineers and architects aren't working, then the construction people are certainly not working! They've long ago finished up whatever projects still had funding behind them.    

After a month or two of optimism, executive recruiters are again worried about the strength of the job market, according to a small survey by ExecuNet, a network of executive recruiters. In a survey taken in July, only 46 percent expressed confidence that the market for executive recruiting would pick up in the next six months. In May, closer to 60 percent were confident. In June, it was exactly half-and-half.

This group believes that the hiring of executives is a leading indicator for the strength of the employment market in general. But, of course, employment is a lagging indicator for the the economy. Recruiter confidence hit its lowest point in November and had climbed steadily until May.

Philadelphia's CDI Corp. is a great barometer for the economy and, no surprise to anyone, it (meaning the economy) is still in the tank. CDI Corp. is a staffing company that specializes in dispatching engineers in three major segments, process and industrial, government services, and aerospace. It also has a recruiting and temporary staffing division known as Management Recruiters International, an IT staffing arm and a foreign organization, AndersElite, which specializes in construction hiring in England. (By the way, it's really bad there, if AndersElite revenues are any guide -- down from $60.2 million to $25.5 million)

It's the engineering division that I like to watch. Here's why. Engineers come in on the forefront of big capital heavy projects. When companies are confident enough to launch big projects or big revamps, they'll hire engineers in the very early phases. Hiring engineers means that money's moving into the economy. But that's not happening, based on CDI's stats included in its second quarter filing to the SEC.

In June 2008, CDI had six-month revenues in its engineering division of $309.3 million. This June's six month stats? $247 million. For the three months ending on June 30, 2009, engineering revenues were at $118.5 million, down from $153.1 the prior year. Not good.

Government and aerospace work was still moving ahead slightly, but CDI's biggest engineering clients, those in process and industrial companies, cut back assignments drastically. For the three months ended on June 30, revenues in that vertical line of business were down to $81.1 million, from $118.6 million the prior year. Revenues were also down from the previous quarter, showing a downward trend.

It's been a disaster at the bottom line for CDI, even though it has managed to keep its profit margins fairly steady. For the three months ending on June 30 in 2008, CDI came close to a profit of nearly $7 million, or 34 cents a diluted share. This year, it is a paltry $59,000, which comes to bupkis per share. It is so pathetic that in the press release, CDI rounds net earnings up to $0.1 million, which is legitimate, if not completely informative. 

In an SEC filing, CEO Roger Ballou bravely sounded an optimistic note, saying that project bid activity and staffing service revenues in engineering had increased each month in the quarter, although, obviously not enough to reverse the dismal showing. However, if he's right, that may be a slight sign of an improving economy.

Certainly, if this stimulus-infrastructure money is a reality, there should be some reflection of it as it trickles into engineering projects for factories. Perhaps the slight increase in CDI's engineering revenues from government services can be attributable to that growth.  

Wow, people are really riled up about these health care changes proposed by President Obama. Today I'm turning over my blog to Bill Love who attended a similar town hall meeting on health care to the story I reported in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer. I attended a raucous sesssion at the U.S. Constitution Center hosted by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter. In attendance were lots of people upset about President Obama's proposed health care system. Boos, jeers, cheers and a lot of passion.

In my blog yesterday, I wrote about how similar protestors showed up at an event run by U.S. Congressman Joe Sestak at Interboro High School in the suburbs on Saturday. Love describes the same scenario in Medford. (Please excuse any font weirdness when I copy and paste from my email.)

Below Bill's comments, I'll add a report from one of the people I interviewed for the story in Monday's paper. John O'Brien and his wife are Republican officials in Northeast Philadelphia and they do not like President Obama's plan one bit, as you will see.

Now here's Bill's missive:

Today I read your story re Sebelius/Specter Health Care meeting. Below is my recap of a similar meeting Saturday. It was a Congressional Town meeting in Medford NJ hosted by NJ 3rd district Congressman John Adler.  It was not pretty.  Below is a brief summary .

Sunday's health reform confab with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter at the U.S. Constitution Center was right out of the 700 level of Veteran's Stadium. Booing, shouting, cheering. I didn't hear too many expletives, but it was nasty. If anything, it shows that changes to the health care system have many people concerned, to put it mildly. Potential Specter rival, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak had his taste of it on Saturday. 

Tomorrow, Sestak, who has not officially declared a run against Specter, promises a major campaign announcement. Hmmm. Wonder what that will be. On Saturday, he assembled a plethora of panelists who could offer assistance to the many unemployed and struggling families in his district, which includes parts of Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties.

Sestak said he thinks he and his fellow Democrats haven't done a good enough job selling health care changes to the protesters who showed up at his event at Interboro High School on Saturday.

The way he sees it, health insurance, as it is, has just become too big a burden. Workers lose their coverage when they lose their jobs. That shouldn't happen. Workers take jobs that they don't want so they can get health insurance. That means that they may be not utilizing their talents fully. Small businesses lose talented employees to competitors who offer health insurance. Meanwhile, taxpayers are paying the price when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms. Whether Sestak can help Obama sell the plan remains to be seen.

But there is no doubt that health care coverage is a huge issue for the unemployed.

It's easy to gripe about insurance companies and how much money their executives are making, especially when there are so many people without coverage and so many businesses struggling to pay premiums for their workers. Of course, it all depends on the benchmarks you use to judge. Whatever benchmark you use, it would be nice to earn $2.7 million a year, like Independence Blue Cross's Joe Frick did, in 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Insurance Department. 

Today, the Pennsylvania Insurance Department released a report on the executive compensation of the state's two largest "Blue" plans, Independence Blue Cross here in Philly and Pittsburgh's Highmark Inc. Essentially the department found that Joe Frick from Independence and Ken Melani from Highmark are reasonably compensated within the milieu of other Blue plans nationally and in comparison with what is paid to top executives in nonprofit hospital systems. 

That's essentially what my fellow Inquirer reporter Craig McCoy and I found when we analyzed their pay as part of our look at  the then-proposed merger between the two health plans. 

If you automatically assume that a nonprofit executive earns little to nothing working in a tiny storefront with battered file cabinets, then you aren't in the same league as these guys. If you think that no one working with sick people should be earning this kind of cash, you are also going to have a problem with the $3.6 million that Melani earned. And you are going to have an even bigger problem when you learn that Melani's compensation doubled in five years and Frick's tripled, from $916,406 to $2,781,275. 

"Our focus was on comparability because that is the legal standard and also what drives competition for executive talent," Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario said in a statement announcing the report. The report uses material gathered during the merger process. That merger ended in January when the two companies withdrew.

 "Whether the compensation scale is fair in a broader public policy sense, or whether new regulations are needed, are questions that are appropriately left to the legislative branch," Ario said.  

Executive pay is a deeper discussion than this, obviously. When you have an  organization, nonprofit or for-profit, with billions in assets and thousands of employees, the executives should be well-compensated.  And certainly, Melani and Frick's for-profit CEO compadres are making a lot more than they are. Another certainty -- these men have a lot of responsibilities, responsibilities that never, ever go away. There is no such thing as a vacation, a night off, or a weekend off. They get their time off in several-hour stints, stints that can be and are interrupted at any time.

Even so, when executive compensation in total, with bonuses and salary and perks, moves close to $2 million -- that seems too high to me, especially in the case when the executives have no capital of their own at risk. I don't care what they are running and I also don't care what they "give back" to charity, although we are grateful for anyone's largesse. Heck, we'd all like to "give back" to our favorite charities. 

Even if you don't include legitimate expenses, like a driver, home security systems, and a reasonable amount of wining and dining in nice places, a $2 million compensation package comes to $220 an hour, assuming that the executive works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm willing to make that assumption, given their level of responsibility. I'm sure they spend many sleepless nights. But after a certain point, that exec money needs to go elsewhere -- into research and development to grow the company, into better pay for employees, into investment in new machinery and upkeep of old machines. That's how businesses sustain themselves and grow. It helps if the employees earn enough to afford the good or service they produce.

A growing business is an employing business, and that's what we need now. Frick and Melani's pay may be reasonable against benchmarks of other CEO pay, but there are other benchmarks -- benchmarks that can and should be applied to many other CEOs besides Frick and Melani.