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Her job hunters’ website is full-time job

Getting laid off in 1994 was the best thing that could have happened to Susan Joyce.

But losing their jobs had tragic consequences for some of her colleagues.

“I knew one man who killed his wife, then committed suicide, when we were let go,” said Joyce, who lives in Marlborough. “People think that the world comes to an end when they lose their job.”

She was among the tens of thousands of employees cut loose by Maynard-based Digital Equipment Corp., which was at one time the world’s second-largest computer manufacturer.

In the years since, Joyce has gone from helping co-workers find new jobs to providing a career clearinghouse for people across the world. Her website, job-hunt.org, was named one of the top three for finding work by US News and World Report last year, and has regularly been included among the “best in the Web” for job hunting by Forbes since 2002. Last month, she said, it had a half-million visitors.

From a small office above an antique s shop in Marlborough, Joyce hopscotches around the globe helping jobseekers make virtual connections, like the man in Hawaii who landed his dream job in Manhattan.

The free site has over 7,000 links to employers in Canada, Europe, and Asia. It also offers career resources, with advice for online job hunting and local networking. But it wasn’t until Dow Jones called Joyce in 2005 to buy ad space that she said she realized her website had become much more than a hobby.

What makes Joyce and her site so special?

Forbes singles it out for “advice on cyber-job searching — like converting your resume from Word to plain text; adding keywords for searchability, and protecting your privacy online.”

But there’s also a more personal touch: having witnessed the emotional toll of layoffs, Joyce includes support groups, organized by state, that aim to bolster confidence along with job-hunting skills.

Companies that distribute resumes and “work at home/make big bucks” outfits often ask Joyce about advertising on her site, but she said she always turns them down.

“There are bogus sites out there that just collect information for marketing,” Joyce said. “Someone registers their resume, then suddenly they get offers to sign up for credit cards and to buy insurance.”

Joyce is not competing with online classified-type sites like BostonWorks and monster.com, where companies advertise positions and job-seekers post their resumes. Rather, job-hunt is an employment “portal” — a directory of resources organized by industry and location.

Until recently, it’s been a one-woman show.

“Now I have someone helping me with ‘link rot’ since there are so many links to maintain,” said Joyce, adding that several “go bad” each week.

Joyce says she doesn’t receive many personal thank-you notes — perhaps because the site appears to be run by a large corporation — but she did receive a rush of e-mail after 9/11 when she posted a big section on disaster recovery and employment opportunities for New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.

“I got a lot of ‘God bless you’ messages, which was both wonderful and sad,” Joyce said.

At Digital, Joyce sold software and consulting services to the US government. For 18 months after she was let go, she worked as a volunteer helping distraught colleagues look for work via the Internet, stationing herself at the Digital outplacement support center in Marlborough. Since Joyce’s husband had a well-paying job, she wasn’t as frantic as many of her former co-workers and just wanted to help.

“One guy I worked with from Wellesley got up every morning and went there to job hunt,” said Joyce. “There were phones, computers, counselors. His wife didn’t even know he’d been laid off.”

Joyce also volunteered once a month at the Boston Computer Society, doing free daylong workshops at its Waltham office. When word of her lectures got out, recruiters began showing up to learn the cyber ropes — and Joyce expanded her network of employment sources.

About the time the computer society folded, in 1995, Joyce launched Netability , an Internet development and training company that she still runs.

“I started teaching companies how to put their businesses online — then I started putting their businesses online,” said Joyce. She also taught computer classes in adult-ed programs in Marlborough and other communities.

Job-hunt.org came about serendipitously in 1998. Joyce was surfing the Web in preparation for a class when she noticed the domain name was for sale. Started by a Stanford University graduate student, it had 12 pages with 1,400 links.

Though the price was $3,000, she offered $6,000, even though it meant borrowing against her credit cards.

“I couldn’t understand why $3,000 was the highest bid,” Joyce said. “It made no sense to me. It earns more than $6,000 a month right now.”

The first subcategory she added was “supersites,” such as monster.com and careerbuilder.com.

Now there are over 250 pages with 7,000 links. She has only a half-dozen advertisers, but “when one of them is Dow Jones,” she said, that’s enough to make money.

Among the Massachusetts support groups included on her site are WIND (Wednesday Is Networking Day) and Face to Face, which offers help in handling stress as well as practical advice on such things as ramping up resumes.

Joyce’s own resume reveals some surprises, including a tour of duty with the Marines during the Vietnam War.

“This is going to sound really hokey, but I thought the country needed me,” she said.

After graduating from high school in Sioux City, Iowa, she attended the University of Nebraska. A brief stint as a student-teacher proved that a career in education was not for her. With the war in full gear, Joyce decided to enlist in the Marine Corps.

It’s not surprising when you consider her father spent his career in the Air Force, and her mother served in the Army as an occupational therapist during World War II.

The Marines put Joyce through a battery of tests that showed her strength was in pattern analysis. She was made an intelligence officer and stationed in Norfolk, Va., where she pored over aerial photographs.

“Our imagery was of places where the US felt threatened — and, at that time, we felt very threatened by the Soviet Navy and their activities in Cuba and other similar places,” said Joyce.

“We worried a lot about Soviet Yankee-class nuclear submarines, which had nuclear warheads on missiles capable of reaching D.C.”

Joyce laughed as she recalled the day her tour of duty ended in 1973: “You get out of the Marine Corps having been an intelligence officer and the civilian world doesn’t know what the hell to do with you. ‘Does anybody need me to identify any Russian tanks?’ ”

After leaving the Marines she went to a temp agency and was told: “All the women take a typing test.”

Joyce declined. She went on to work on computers at Harvard University, obtained an MBA at Boston University in 1981, then went to work for Digital.

But when it comes to her own job satisfaction, she says that only her years in the service match what she’s doing now.

“Before job-hunt.org, the Marines was the last job that I had where I felt I made a difference in the world.”