A long time ago in a workplace far, far away, I had a boss who was as hard-line as they come when it came to the notion of taking a new job with less pay. “I have never, ever taken a job for less money,” she told me on more than one occasion, “and I never will.”

Her point was simple: You should never undersell yourself, no matter what. You never take a job for less money even if it’s temporary, or good for your career in the long term, or perhaps even because it’s something you always wanted to do. You never do it, she reasoned, because you devalue yourself and because your salary arc should always be moving up, not down. That’s how she always did it, she said, and she shook her head in amazement the day I walked in and told her I was leaving to take a better position with a smaller organization—for about 30 percent less pay.

That was the first time I took a new job with a cut in pay, but it wasn’t the last. Don’t get me wrong: I never took less money because I really wanted to. It was always because I thought there was some short-term upside to doing so, or because I really, really needed a job and was willing to take less salary to get it.

I was thinking about this today while reading a blog post by Chicago Tribune business writer Greg Burns on how “many job-seekers balk when the moment comes to accept a lower salary than they were earning at their previous post, according to the LaSalle Network, a Chicago-area recruiting firm.”

Burns adds this: “According to the survey of 500 [Chicago-area] job-seekers, 85 percent expressed a willingness to accept a pay cut of up to one-fifth. Considering that 4.4 million Americans have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, the firm says, it’s obvious that many are not acting on their professed willingness to work for less.”

Should we be surprised that “only” 85 percent of job seekers are pragmatic enough to recognize that there is a glut of talent on the market during this big, bad recession, and that taking less pay may be what’s needed if you really want a job? I’ve been around long enough to recognize that getting 85 percent of people to agree on anything is virtually impossible, so getting eight out of 10 unemployed workers to admit that they would take less to get back and working is pretty amazing in my book.

The bigger issue, as I pointed out in my latest Last Word column, is this: Many organizations, according to The Wall Street Journal, are ignoring people who are out of work and are still going after “passive” candidates (i.e., people with jobs) when they have a job to fill, “reasoning that these survivors are the top performers.”

And although the Journal’s evidence of this practice was largely anecdotal, it is par for what I read and hear from all too many recruiters. In their minds, finding that great passive candidate is the Holy Grail, regardless of much it might cost, how futile it might be to actually lure a candidate away from a solid job, and despite how many other eminently hirable unemployed candidates might be eligible.

Tom Gimbel, chief executive of the LaSalle Network, told the Tribune that part of the problem in the recruiting market now is that salaries were over-inflated in pre-recession days and that “job seekers must acknowledge the fact that they have been overpaid, and once they do that, they will secure a job that meets these new expectations.”

It’s true that a lot of people were overpaid during the last few years, and many still are (take, for example, some of the Wall Street folks who are “earning” unfathomable bonuses. But I don’t agree completely with Tom Gimbel that the problem is simply due to unrealistic pay expectations by those who are out of work.

Sure, some unrealistic people have priced themselves out of the market. But when an overwhelming 85 percent of the unemployed say that they’d take a job for 20 percent less than they made before, then maybe it’s time to stop blaming the out-of-work people for their predicament and focus on the real issue: a shattered economy that looks like it’s going to stay shattered (at least in terms of job growth) for a long time.

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