Be Proactive and Realistic in your jobsearch!

One of my favorite things about the career community is the collaboration, learning, and training. I collaborate and learn from my colleagues ever day. My colleague, Melissa Cooley, was up from Madison for her third annual Design Resumes visit this week. We wrote this post: How do you answer, You’re Overqualified? Melissa, like myself, is a content marketing writer who gives guidance about job search from The Job Quest.

How long will it take?

Yesterday, I woke up to another fascinating perspective from another esteemed colleague, Hannah Morgan, aka The Career Sherpa. She answered a question that many people avoid in their job search, “How long will it take to find a job?”

She begins:

Within the last month, I’ve run across more than a handful of job seekers who have told me they plan to have a job by the end of summer (that’s August in my mind). We’re almost in July. Using my lame math skills, that’s about 30 days. Shoot, it can take that long for some companies to review resumes.

You can read the rest here.

Her perspective of being realistic in your job search is critical. A job seeker who thinks even using services like mine, Melissa’s, or Hannah’s will cut your search as short as a month or less is not being realistic. Your search will usually take even longer without our expert help but you cannot think that hiring a career pro will get you hired tomorrow. You need to be prepared to be in transition for a period of time.

Do your homework on hiring the right career pro to help you in your job search. There are many options and you need to be a good fit for your pro and vice versa. A typical career pro works with 10-20 new clients a month and some work with considerably less clients because of the level of services so make sure you contact early to make sure you get the pro of your choice.

Proactive Career Search

The other piece that Hannah mentioned is being proactive. I write about this very frequently because it breaks my heart when I see people doing it the wrong way and getting in trouble with their job search.

Don’t use the point & click strategy… that means sitting home, applying online with no follow-up, no networking, no hidden job market strategies. You need to be proactive. Get out and network. Learn what companies are growing and find a back door strategy to get in the front door to a new role. Career pros constantly research new ways to get you hired.

With the wrong job search strategy, you will languish.

On the flip side, if you do it right, you will find yourself singing the “I gotta job” song like this client left on my voicemail yesterday. Click to listen: I gotta job song Note: despite experimenting with options, the song link replaces this window, so after you listen, please click the back button to return here.

This job seeker transitioned out of a stressful 96 hour per week job on April 30 and starts her new position on July 2. Two months of very proactive, targeted job search with interviews with several companies and using additional resources like staffing agencies, netted her a new position.

Julie Walraven can help you achieve results through using a personalized job search and resume writing  strategy to take the mystery out of the process. To find out how, simply click here!

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