With the number of jobless Americans growing every month – 663,000 workers lost their jobs in March alone – unemployed workers are facing stiffer competition for a limited number of open positions.

This tightened job market is prompting some Massachusetts jobseekers to try self-promoting themselves on TV in an effort to snag the attention of potential employers (“Jobless Make TV Ads Pitching Themselves for Work,” CBS News, March 3, 2009).

“The New England Job Show,” created by laid-off community banker Ken Masson, features 30-second commercials starring local jobseekers and offers tips for the unemployed on job hunting, personal finances, and health care options.

“Everyone talks about being cutting edge,” Masson said. “Well this is cutting edge.”

With the help of his friends from a networking group and $100 from a local rotary club, Masson launched the Massachusetts-area public cable access show last month. The show itself is a testament to the unemployed: It’s hosted by a former CNN reporter who was recently laid off, it’s directed by a former Fidelity Investments worker, and it relies on the manpower of unemployed volunteers to produce the show’s half-hour episodes.

The job show, which reaches five public access stations twice a month, isn’t the first public access program to cater to the unemployed. The state of Michigan has run a cable access show centered on employment trends for the past 20 years, and a public access station in California produces a show on job hunting for Bay-area viewers, but the Massachusetts show is the first such show to include personal job pitches from the unemployed.

“So many Americans are now comfortable with making a short video. It seems like a natural progression,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. “And TV, in spite of all the technology, is still the dominant medium.”

To date, none of the 12 jobseekers whose commercials have aired on “The New England Job Show” have landed a job, but jobseeker Jayna Dinsmore – who hopes her recently acquired master’s degree in marketing will help her end a five-month stretch of unemployment – says she’s just hoping to “get lucky.”

An experienced marketing manager and analyst, Dinsmore said that in this job market, “any exposure I can get is a great thing.”

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