During more than 25 years of coaching clients through their job hunts, one thing has become clear: job hunting has changed forever.
The Sunday paper used to be the end-all, be-all of finding published openings; now we have the pleasure of scouting for leads in thousands of online job boards. Back in the day, if you wanted to network you had to actually get out of the house and (gasp!) meet people. There was no LinkedIn or Facebook to help you build relationships while you sat at home in your jammies.
Let’s look at a few examples of maxims that have outlived their usefulness — and how knowing the difference between fact and fiction can jump-start your next job hunt.
FICTION: Looking for a job is a full-time job
FACT: Focus on quality, not quantity
Since time immemorial (or at least 1970, when “What Color is Your Parachute?” was published), experts have told people that looking for a job is a full-time job.
Now don’t get me wrong. The spirit of this advice is absolutely on target: job searching is often harder than people anticipate, and the more seriously a person takes the process and the more time they put into it, the better the likely outcome.
But this approach is not universally effective and can actually be counterproductive. For starters, this overly simplified rule of thumb doesn’t account for several important factors, including that how you invest your job search time is far more important than the amount of time spent.
In other words, I’d bet the farm on a job hunter who spends two hours a day searching for work but successfully sends out 10 to 15 resumes or plants a dozen new networking seeds over somebody who sits at the computer futzing with their resume and surfing job boards for eight hours a day. Quality trumps quantity.
Additionally, following this advice and channeling every bit of your disposable time into your career quest can easily transform you into a “job search zombie.” Sure, you want to put a solid effort into this process. But if you stop having fun, living your life, and doing interesting things, you’ll not only make yourself miserable but may prolong your job search unnecessarily.
FICTION: "Follow your passion" is always the best career advice
FACT: Passion is just one of many factors to consider
I know, I know: This one makes me sound like a grinch. But let’s face facts: the majority of people don’t end up in careers related to their hobbies and passions. In fact, I don’t think that this even should be the goal for most people.
While “follow your dreams” is expressed stridently in most career books and makes perfect sense for some people, it ignores several practical realities. First, as we all know, many passion-fueled career fields — photography, music, art, ski instruction, fantasy football — simply don’t pay enough to support you and your family, especially in a market like Seattle.
On top of this, everybody doesn’t necessarily have a passion in the true sense of the word — something beyond a hobby that they care so deeply about they’d gladly volunteer thousands of hours to master it (and make major sacrifices in support of it).
No need to panic, however. Many people do end up in careers that they find enjoyable and fulfilling, but this isn’t because they chased their passion or engaged in a ton of advanced forethought.
In reality many (most?) professionals fall into whatever field they can get a job in initially, then improve their skills in that particular field over time — at which point they become passionate as they climb the ladder and increase their mastery of the subject matter.
FICTION: You can pay somebody to find you a job
FACT: Only celebrities have agents; the rest of us go it alone
The next common job search notion that just won’t die is the belief that you can buy your way out of the challenge of finding work. No, job hunting isn’t a bowl of laughs; we’d all love to outsource this process, but the marketplace just doesn’t work that way. Yet I continue to see this wishful thinking persist.
For starters, many professionals still don’t grasp that you can’t actually “hire a headhunter” to get you a job. As any experienced recruiter will confirm, recruiters don’t work for job hunters. They work for the companies that hire them to fill opportunities. So, while back in the pre-online days it might have felt like a recruiter was your agent, that model is now ancient history.
You should reach out to suitable recruiters and staffing firms for assistance, but understand that they don’t work on your behalf. If they have been hired to run a search that matches your credentials, you might be able to snag an interview — but it’s largely luck of the draw.
And aside from headhunters? If you come across any other career services implying that they can place you in a job or make “exclusive connections” for the right price, be very cautious. The career industry is completely unregulated and scams abound.
FICTION: It takes one month to find work for each $10k you make
FACT: Ignore the stat; every job search is unique and unpredictable
Frankly, this old chestnut has always been downright silly. Obviously job hunters wish they could forecast how long their job search will last, but the actual process defies reliable prediction. There are just far too many variables — location, education, age, salary history, a job hunter’s degree of pickiness — to accurately forecast how long it might take to find the next assignment.
Sure, it generally takes senior executives longer to find work than somebody at the entry-to-mid-level of the corporate hierarchy, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Job search length usually ends up as more of a bell curve: Even at the six-figure salary levels, some people land multiple offers within the first week, and others can go a year or more without success.
As tempting as it may be, try not to make any assumptions about how long your job search will take. Just focus on controlling what you can, each day, and manage your expectations and finances accordingly along the way.
These four well-worn myths may have once been true, but make sure you can tell fact from fiction. The job market is changing rapidly, and so too should your philosophies.