Falling Down the Career Ladder

Pop quiz: You’re out of work, you can afford to keep looking and you just got a job offer that can best be described as, eh. What do you do?

The question of whether to accept an offer that’s only so-so or, worse, beneath one’s pay grade is a growing source of angst for the 14 million Americans who remain unemployed.

Peter Dazeley | Photographer's Choice | Getty Images

Some maintain that a lengthy gap on your resume renders you less desirable to prospective employers, suggesting it makes the most sense to take the mediocre job, collect the paycheck and continue your search for a better fit.

But taking a position that you don’t really want can do just as much damage to your resume cred, not to mention your future earnings potential, warns Ken Schmitt, president of Turning Point Executive Search firm in Carlsbad, Calif.

“In fairness to your employer and yourself, you should never accept any job unless you’re willing to commit for at least a year,” he says. “What happens is you’ll be unhappy and end up leaving in three months. Then your resume starts to look very unstable, which makes it harder to get employed.”

When It Pays to Step Down

There are times, of course, when it makes good sense to settle for less.

If you’re strapped for cash, for example, it’s a no-brainer. You do what it takes to pay the bills, says Lynn Berger, a New York-based career coach.

Likewise, if you’re in an industry that’s shedding jobs such as manufacturing, financial services, or publishing, it might also pay to take a lesser position outside your field for the sake of job security.

“If you’re in a career that’s on the decline and you feel that your job is threatened you have to create a different situation for yourself,” says Berger. “You have to think about opportunities in your own field.”

That's all the more incentive to live on less, she notes, if the new employer is willing to help pay for retraining or continuing education that will leave you more marketable in the modern job market.

The decision of whether to take a job with diminished pay or prestige also hinges on how long you’ve been unemployed.

According to Schmitt, job hunters at the senior executive level should take the first reasonable opportunity that comes along if they’ve been pounding the pavement for more than a year. The threshold is six to nine months for lower-level professionals.

As of the fourth quarter of 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nearly 11 percent of those on the unemployment roll had been looking for work for two years or more.

“If you’re doing all the right things, like spending 80 percent of your time networking, setting up informational interviews and coffee meetings, using online job postings and reaching out to your alumni network and you still haven’t found something within a year, it probably makes sense to take a lower-level position,” Schmitt says. “Skill sets become stagnant much more quickly than they did 10 or 15 years ago, so employers start to worry if you’ve been out of work for too long.”

Erika Safran, a certified financial advisor with Safran Wealth Advisors in New York, agrees.

“You hold out for the brass ring only if you know that the career you are in is viable and if you have the resources to support your quest for the desired position. But not everyone has that luxury so at some point reality and expectations have to meet,” she says.

Your age, she notes, is also relevant.

“People in their 50s who are unemployed are going to be long-term unemployed because companies are looking to pay less for younger people and get more bang for their buck,” says Safran, noting those at the top of the salary scale may have to be more flexible than their lesser-paid peers.

Don’t forget about benefits either, she cautions.

With the rising cost of medical care, even a short-term lapse in health insurance can expose your family to significant financial risk—especially if one of you is managing a chronic condition.

As such, and depending on your family’s health care needs, you might decide that the insurance benefits alone make up for the loss in pay.