Maybe you feel confident about your ability to get a job in a week, but there is a cost to your resume, cost to your work relationships, a risk of not being as successful in your search as you expect, and a limited number of buyers in your location. There are a lot of barriers that prevent the seller's market from working efficiently.
I was on the market five months ago. It took me three weeks of selectively applying directly to companies I wanted to work for (maybe 8 hours of actual work, then 10 hours of interviews, and lots of waiting) to net two solid offers. I didn't have to negotiate the offer I accepted because they didn't ask my baseline and capped out the offer for the job description. I negotiated with the other company to see if they would match, they would not. That's on par with every job hunt I've been on. The difference this time was avoiding job listing sites, which I've had very bad results with.
In my experience, the “I’ll just find a new job in a week “ meme is overstated. It takes longer than a week to get to an onsite interview in my experience. Sometimes it’s even longer.
It might just be your market? I got a job in 2 weeks after leaving my last position, and had quite literally 30+ offers on the table when i accepted this one.
All good points, but can we really afford to be picky when we're job hunting in this economy?
I do suppose a better listing leads to better applicants.
150 job applications in a week! Last time, my strategy was to send out one a day, but do a bunch of research about whether I would actually be good for that company, and also very specifically tailor the resume to the job. That worked pretty quickly for me, but as you say, it's a different market right now. Best of luck.
Thanks! Yes I am starting to understand thats how it works. Job hunting is a lot similar to selling. If I as a person (or product) is able to be 'wanted', I can be hired faster.
> Standard benefits (I'm guessing this, but if you were offering a 4-day work week or something, you'd probably mention it)
The market is extremely busy right now, overwhelming actually. If a candidate wants to get through it with any time left, they'll need to apply filters, and the busier the market is, the harsher those filters need to be. A candidate who can only apply for 3 jobs at a time will do so whether the market is offering 3 jobs or 300.
Time is a terrible metric for judging how hard a job search is. "I've been looking for a job for a year" says almost nothing. For all we know you applied to a job every other week. My first offer came in at 4 weeks of job searching. That sounds good until I add that during that time I sent out 500 applications.
2 weeks for a job is pretty tough but not unachievable. I'm not the best engineer on the planet, however I've experienced probably a month into a job search there are some solid offers on the table. I'd go insane looking for a job for 6 months, at month 2 I'd feel there was definitely something extremely wrong.
This is a really good tip! I make this too when i go apply for a new job. And, unfortunately, the market works as your describe it: "depend on a huge number of factors".
While on unemployment, people are often required to spread their search across hundreds of companies.
After being laid off, I was unemployed for several months and was required to submit at least 3 applications a week. On the face, that doesn't sound like many, and for some fields it probably isn't heard. But if you're in a specialized field, even finding 3 open positions to apply for becomes a full-time job. And each of those openings tended to require many hours of specialized work. Some of that time was moving a nicely developed resume into their proprietary applicant webpage (urgh!!!). There was one job that actually required me to develop a dummy website. Because I knew there were weeks when I wouldn't even be able to find 3 openings, when I found more than 3 I would intentionally wait until the following week to apply to the more promising openings. The idea being that I could do the minimum work on the required 3 applications, then spend the rest of the week diligently working on the more promising openings, and submit it first thing the following week.
Then there are the weeks that I couldn't even find 3 in my field and didn't have any left over from the previous week. For those I applied to complete throw-away positions. I felt sorry for whatever sap had to review my application.
All the while, I wish I had been able to focus on a handful of desirable positions and personal retraining. Instead, I spent months doing B.S. work just to be able to pay the mortgage until I was able to get a job, which ended up coming through a personal connection and would never have shown up on the radar that the unemployment office required me to use!
I've been experiencing this problem over the past few weeks.
I've been working to find jobs that meet my fit (fairly high education and experience in a specific field) but many of these position take a week or two in order to schedule a full day of interviews.
Yet, in order to get any sort of benefits (I'm in MA so, I can't drop off health insurance even for a short time) I need to send out resumes for obviously bs jobs.
Most people who respond to job ads are actively searching for jobs, they usually apply to multiple places simultaneously. If the other places responded quickly then, by the time you responded in a few days, the applicant could be far along the interviewing with several others and might not be considering your vacancy any more or prioritize it after everything else already in the pipeline. If you responded in a few weeks, the applicant might already have taken an offer.
Speaking only for myself, I've found looking for to fluctuate between quite easy and quite hard. Anytime I've really struggled to find a new job, whether I already had a job or not, it was usually because there was some factor beyond my control that I could not work around. In those hard times, I think I would have landed new employment more quickly by focusing more on making myself more marketable so I could stand out in a sea of applicants without enough to go around. Sometimes rushing to fight the wrong fight is simply not gonna work.
I personally have little confidence in job postings that I've seen available for at least three months. Similarly with apartments rentals - in a market where developers and apartments are high in demand I usually see it as a red flag if a job or apartment has been available for three or more months. It begs the questions - why didn't others take it?
I never considered that the average interview process is getting longer.
reply