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The Count

Finding a Job by Starting a Business

Last year, more laid-off managers and executives grew tired of waiting for human resources departments to call them back. They took matters into their own hands by starting companies.

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Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm, regularly keeps track of 3,000 high-level job seekers in a range of industries. Last year, 8.6 percent of these decided to take the start-up route, compared with 5.1 percent in 2008.

The biggest surge was in the third quarter. The hope is that this momentum “will carry into 2010, since new business development is considered critical to a sustainable recovery,” Challenger stated.

After seven years, only about a third of start-ups are still in business, according to a study in the Monthly Labor Review. Most of these companies fail within in the first few years. So in four years or so, it would be interesting to see how many of these entrepreneurs wish they had waited for that H.R. person to call back.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding a Job By Starting A Business. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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