How Long Will My Job Search Take?

I am often asked, “How long will my job search take?”

My answer is almost always, “It depends.”

I work, primarily, with those in the 2nd half of life—which is code for those over 50 years of age.

I tell them that a really short job search is three months. It takes almost three months for a company to decide to hire someone, post the job, interview candidates, make an offer, and then make the hire.

What factors affect how long the job search will take?

• Depth of experience and perceived salary requirements
• Your network
• Geographical demand for your skills
• Time of year
• Age discrimination

Depth of experience and perceived salary requirements

The more experience you have and the greater perceived salary requirements, the longer it will take. Notice I wrote perceived salary requirements. Yes, I know you say you will take less money but…no one will believe you!

The reality is, the higher the perceived salary requirements, the fewer and fewer jobs there will be. After you get over a 6 figure income, the number of jobs decreases in most job markets.

Please read my post Will I Ever Be Employed Again in a Job I Want? This is the story of Matt, a former CEO who went almost 3 years underemployed because of the perceived salary requirements. The more money you make the longer the job search will take.

Your Network

Your next job will likely come through a referral. That referral will come from one of three several types of relationships:

• An existing relationship
• A stale relationship that you will re-energize, which is also called a weak tie
• A new relationship you strategically create

If you follow the Target Job Search Strategy you will be strategically building a referral network.The stronger your network the shorter your job search.

Geographical demand for your skills

Are your skills valued in your local job market? For example, if you have an oil and gas background and you are looking for a position in Central Texas, where I live, well…it will be a tough and long job search. However, if you move to Houston,  you will find your skills much more valued.

If you have a certification, is it valued in your local market? The varies greatly by region!

If your skills or credentials are in overabundance or are not valued in your local region, you need to extend the length of your job search or expand your geographical search zone.

Look for people who look, taste, and smell like you to determine whether your skills are in demand. Search LinkedIn for people with your level of experience, certification, and skills to determine the demand in your region. Who employs people who look, taste and smell like you?

Time of year

Like every other business process, hiring goes through cycles. A lot of hiring occurs after annual budgets are approved. Look at financial statements of each target company on your target list and determine when the fiscal year begins. Some companies start their fiscal year in October and others start in January.

Hiring usually stops from late November through the middle of January. This is an excellent time to network and build your tribe, but little hiring occurs during this time.

Similarly, hiring slows down (but does not stop) during July and August when many people go on vacation. It only takes one person in the hiring process to go on vacation for everything to grind to a halt.

I highly recommend you follow your local business journal. If a company gets a big order, funding from a venture capital firm, investment from private equity or received a local or federal grant, this is the time pursue the target company. These kinds of investments will follow a calendar cycle and you need to track when each kind of investment tends to come in the calendar year.

Age discrimination

Age discrimination is alive and well. You need to factor this into the length of your job search. You have to be realistic and find employers who value your skills and experience and will not discriminate based on your age. I am working with a client right now who is part of the long-term unemployed cohort, and she is targeting government positions. For her, it is a numbers game, but she will be treated fairly in applying for government positions.

For those of you in the 2nd half of life, are your skills and age a barrier? I live in Austin Texas, one of the worst places to be old and unemployed as documented by the Atlantic. Austin has a general unemployment rate hovering just above 3% but the unemployment rate for those over 50 years of age exceeds 12%. Even if your skills are in high demand, being over 50 will increase the length of your job search.

So how long will my job search take?

I tell my clients to plan for a minimum of 6 months to 2 years. If you are employed, it really depends on the amount of time you can dedicate to the job search. If you follow my Target Job Search Strategy, you should plan on starting your job search 18 months after you start a new job and plan on that search taking 18 months. That means you will be prepared to changed jobs every 3 years. That does not mean you will change jobs every 3 years, BUT you will be prepared to do so.

If you follow the strategy that jobs are never permanent and you always are looking for your next position, your job search will be much shorter should you become unemployed.

How long do you expect your job search to take?

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Things You Will Never Know About the Hiring Process

The reality is when you are looking for a job at a target company you do not know anything about their hiring process. That is unless you have a contact at the target company with intimate knowledge of how hiring is done.

What we usually do is slip into making stuff up based on our past experiences. Yes, we all suffer from MSU (Make Stuff Up) Disorder at one point or another.

We think there are a set of rules that apply to hiring. The reality is there are no rules.

All of the ideas in this post come from the podcast I did with Gary O’Neal in December of 2017. I really think you should listen to this especially eye-opening podcast.

So let’s get started on what you do not know about the hiring process.

You Do Not Know When a Position Will Become Available

From the outside of a company and sometimes even when you are an employee, you will have no idea when a position will become available.

You do not know when:

• Someone is going to resign
• The hiring manager is going to fire someone
• A new contract has been signed with a client
• Funding becomes available
• The CEO gets a bee under his/her bonnet and they want to go in a new direction

All of these events can occur with few people knowing about them and all of them could kick off the hiring process.

If you are a known by the hiring manager before any of these events occur they may just reach out to you and hire you.

You Do Not Know Whether the Company Will Post a Position

The hiring process is different in just about every organization. When one of these events mentioned above occurs, the hiring process could start, and you have no idea whether they will actually post it publically or not. If this is a public institution or government – that is the only time that it is guaranteed that they will post the position.

You may be asking yourself why wouldn’t they post the position? Some small and medium-size businesses (SMB) completely rely on word of mouth or employee referrals to find candidates. If they post the position they get so many applicants that they know they cannot deal with the onslaught.

The hiring process at many SMB companies can be a bit chaotic and if you believe they have a well-defined process, you will most of the time be very disappointed and left on the outside.

What Does That Mean If They Post the Position

The company decides to post the position. That means there is a real job that you can apply for and possibly be hired! Right?

Well, maybe.

It could be:

• They already have the candidate they want and the only way for the candidate to get into the system is for them to post the position and let him/her apply. Once they have applied the position is taken down.
• There is a candidate selected and corporate rules dictate they post the position for a defined period.
• The company posts positions so they can collect resumes for the future.
• The company started to interview for the position, decided to go in another direction and never took the position down.
• Positions are entered into an applicant tracking system (ATS) which are displayed externally on the company website. There is no one responsible to look at the ATS and therefore, resumes just stack up.

I can tell you from practical experience that the last two possibilities have happened.

In my last corporate gig, the marketing department posted a position, started the interview process, decided to put it on hold and for one whole year left the position on the website collecting resumes. Yes, it was on the website for a year and they never started the interview process again. After a year someone decided it would be a good idea to take the position down.

I recently was told the story by a 3rd party recruiter about a company that used one of the cloud-based applicant tracking systems. They had 10 positions posted on the corporate website. Approximately, 1,300 resumes had been collected and … here is the kicker … no one was responsible for reviewing the resumes. When asked how they filled the last 3 positions, they said all of the applicants were filled through employee referrals.

You have no idea what posting a position on the corporate website means to the hiring process.

How Do They Select Candidates to Screen

The position is posted and candidates start to apply. The resumes start flowing into the applicant tracking system.

The next step is for someone or something to start selecting resumes that seem the most qualified.

What you do not know is:

• The keywords they enter into the ATS to screen candidates. You would think that if you used a tool like JobScan.co your resume would be keyword optimized. Well… you have no idea whether keywords were ever entered into the ATS or the person working the keyboard knew what they were doing. You can refer to this as a GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) system.
• Whether the junior recruiter who is doing the screening knows enough about the position to be able to identify a viable candidate.

Most of us will make the assumption that the hiring process is well defined and there are capable people to do the screening.

If you really believe that is true most of the time, you will be very disappointed.

Who Does the Phone Screens

I have heard a thousand times from candidates that they get a phone call from someone to do the initial phone screen. They go through a laundry list of questions where many cannot be answered without the interviewer having detailed knowledge of the position. This is often a third party recruiter (a recruiter that is not employed by the hiring company) that is often very junior and has to make hundreds of these calls a day.

What you do not know is:

• Whether the recruiter actually knows anything or is just following a script.
• Whether the recruiter has made 50 calls so far, been yelled at multiple times and does not give a crap anymore.
• Whether the recruiter is sleepy because they are 10-12 time zones away and it is in the middle of the night where they live.

You have no idea who is on the other side of the phone and whether they are capable of properly accessing whether you are a good candidate.

Hiring Managers Hire Candidates

Another way to say this is “people hire people.” Gary O’Neal talks about in the podcast episode, Gary O’Neal on Looking for a Job in the 2nd Half of Life [Podcast] that you need to do the following:

• Be clear on the problems you solve for your employer. It is not what you want but what you can do for the employer.
• Target companies that have those problems. Gary will tell you to target 100 companies, I am a little more reasonable and say 25. I refer to this a targeted job search and you can find more in the Targeted Job Search Series.
• Start an email campaign to three types of individuals: hiring managers, potential peers, and recruiters
• Be prepared for a lot of quiet from the email campaign but those that do respond will be willing to engage with you.
• Ask a lot of questions and make it about them when engaging with anyone and everyone who responds.

We have all been frustrated with the current hiring process. There are companies that know how to hire good candidates but I claim most are not very good at it. Heck, at my last corporate gig, I made a couple of pretty good hires. Does that mean I knew what I was doing? NO!

I was clueless.

Do not assume that hiring companies have well defined hiring processes. For those of us in the 2nd half of life, who have a ton of experience, we need to bypass the traditional hiring process and go straight to the hiring manager.

Are you ready to admit you know very little about the hiring process at target companies?

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Job Search	Career Pivot/Change	Career Success	Careers in the 2nd Half of Life
Social Media	Multi-Generational Workplace	Networking	Entrepreneurship