NORM ELROD: “You send your resume out and it goes into a void and one person will get in touch with you for every one hundred to two hundred resumes you send out. And it's not because you're not qualified. It's because they get so many, and oftentimes they're looking for just a certain thing and there's no way to know what that is.”

His advice to people looking for a job is to learn new skills and meet new people.

NORM ELROD: “It's very easy to sit at home and send out your resume by clicking buttons on your computer at your dining room table and feel like maybe you're being productive. But it's much harder to actually get out there and meet the people who may know things or can point you towards things or make that face to face contact. I feel like that is where any job seeker is going to get more traction.”

His wife’s full-time job helped the couple pay their bills. They also used savings, payments from state unemployment insurance and money from projects he worked on while job hunting.

It was nearly three years until a contact he met through one of those projects led him to his current job. Norm Elrod works full time creating content for the website of a major media company.

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DOUG JOHNSON: The Great Recession was the worst downturn since the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties. Don Peck says the long-term unemployment that many workers have experienced can have lasting effects, and not just on them.