Job Opportunities Are Just a Phone Call Away : Employment: Telephone hot lines that list available positions are a growing method for employers and job seekers to find each other.

When Sara Taylor found herself out of work, she let her fingers do the job searching.

Taylor, who landed a job as the assistant to the director of the Ad Club of San Diego after being unemployed for three weeks, used a telephone job line, one of about 130 in operation in San Diego County.

“I’m a believer,” she said.

Although job hot lines have been around for a while, business leaders say they have recently caught on as another weapon in the job seeking arsenal of the ‘90s.

“The technology is there,” said Earl Parker, spokesman for the San Diego Consortium and Private Industry Council, which retrains the unemployed and helps them find work elsewhere.

The council distributes a list of job lines to those taking its part in its job-search assistance workshop.

Job lines are recorded lists of available jobs that can be reached by telephone. In some cases, they consist of answering machines on the desks of busy personnel officers--or, in at least one case, in a supply closet. In other cases, they are elaborate menu-driven systems that guide the caller through a maze of job titles.

For job seekers, job lines are another tool in the often laborious and frustrating effort to get a new job. Those who have used them say the job lines provide a greater sense of immediacy than jobs listed in the classified columns. A few job hunters said the job lines offer leads about jobs not advertised in the help-wanted columns or listed with search firms, making them an attractive alternative to more traditional approaches.

“Most of the job lines I called changed their listings every week or so,” Taylor said, “so you weren’t listening to stale ads--jobs already filled.”

For companies with employment opportunities, job hot lines are a way to put out the word without being bombarded with resumes, many of which may come from unsuitable job candidates.

Diane Gage, president of the San Diego chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, describes the job hot lines as the key to unlocking a “hidden job market in San Diego.”

The society’s job line is almost 10 years old and includes both free-lance and full-time job openings for public relations positions. Jobs are kept on the line for a maximum of three weeks. Each listing includes a description of the job, a summary of the experience and skill level required to fill it and an address of where to apply. The job line also lists upcoming industry meetings, which provide networking opportunities.

From a company’s perspective, says hot-line coordinator Valerie Lemke, the biggest advantage of using a job hot line is it stops the flood of inappropriate applicants.

Setting up a job line is a relatively simple matter for a company, she said. The Public Relations Society’s job line is a telephone answering machine housed in a supply closet.

Lemke said that while her organization doesn’t keep track of how many calls the job line receives each day, she knows it is a great deal.

“The machine makes this clicking noise whenever it is receiving a call. And every time I’m in the supply closet, it’s clicking,” she said. On a few occasions, something has gone awry with the machine and the society’s telephones start ringing with callers to report the malfunction, she said.

Some job lines are industry-specific, like the Public Relations Society’s. Others list openings within a single large company, such as Hewlett-Packard.

Some job lines charge fees to employers. The Ad Club’s job line carries an average of eight to 10 openings in the fields of marketing, graphics design and advertising sales. The line gets 30 to 50 calls a day from job seekers. The job line has become so popular that it now charges employers who are members $15 to place a job. It is free to callers.

Amy De Groot learned about the job she now holds--media relations coordinator for Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside counties--from calling Planned Parenthood’s job line. “I was working for another company in an industry that didn’t appeal to me quite as much,” she said. She targeted Planned Parenthood as a company for which she’d like to work. Once she learned about its jobs hot line, she took to calling it regularly.

“I applied for this job as soon as it listed on the job line,” she said.

Jeanette Freeman, a conference planner for UC San Diego, got her job through the university’s job line.

Freeman said she has a notebook binder from her job-hunting days filled with job leads and sources. Prominent among them: job hot lines.

“They were really useful,” she said. “I knew which day of the week they updated the listings and that’s when I’d call.”

The San Diego Community College District has a job line that lists every position open at City, Mesa and Miramar colleges, in addition to 10 continuing education centers.