May 23, 2016 ● Kate Lopaze
How to Speed Up Your Job Search and Find a Job Fast
Sometimes you have the luxury of spending months and months looking for your next job: plenty of time to fine-tune your resume and your interview handshake, lots of time to pick over jobs that don’t really feel right for you. Other times, you need a job now. Maybe you’ve just lost your current job, or things are so miserable at work that the thought of staying there six more months makes you want to curl into a ball under your desk and wait until everyone else goes home. Whatever the reason, you can take steps to accelerate your job search. It doesn’t guarantee a new job tomorrow, but if you’re willing to use every tool at your disposal, you can get an edge.
According to a 2014 survey by Jobvite, 71% of Americans are either actively looking for a job, or open to switching jobs. That’s a lot of people on the market. Add that to the conventional wisdom that one should expect to spend a month for every $10,000 you earn in salary. ($60,000 = six months of sometimes-soul-sucking job search). With factors like that, the prospect of finding a new job quickly can be awfully daunting. So to help speed things along, you should be prepared to put all your energy into prepping yourself fast, and using a number of different tools to get to your outcome faster.
1. Use Job Boards Wisely [mks_icon icon="fa-check-circle" color="#81d742" type="fa"]
2. Your Social Network [mks_icon icon="fa-check-circle" color="#81d742" type="fa"]
3. Self-Makeover [mks_icon icon="fa-check-circle" color="#81d742" type="fa"]
[mks_separator style="solid" height="10"]Use Job Boards Wisely [mks_icon icon="fa-binoculars" color="#1e73be" type="fa"]
Online job boards can be extremely useful as a starting point. Jobs! Industry-specific jobs! At your fingertips! However, they can also complicate matters, so use them with savvy. Relying on job boards can take away from the urgency of your hunt…if you fall into a habit of waiting for the right job to pop up, you could be waiting a long time indeed. The Muse has some great tips on how to refine your job board search to keep your search active and hopping, including:-
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- Find industry-specific job boards, so you’re not slogging through truck driving jobs when you’re really looking for medical assistant jobs.
- Double-check the dates on job postings. Found the perfect job opening? Well, crap…it was posted and filled six months ago. Be wary of job postings older than a month, because they might be out of date.
- Use very specific keywords when searching job boards. Use filters to really drill down into what you want—and if possible experience level. You don’t want to have your heart set on a posting, only to find out that it’s out of bounds for your experience.
- Put robots to work for you. More specifically, set up saved searches and email alerts to let you know when postings come up that meet particular criteria.
- Do more than search for jobs on the sites. This applies especially if you’re using a niche job board, but general career sites also have a lot of useful content beyond the job posts. Whether that means specific company profiles or tips for your job hunt, maximize your time on the sites by pulling as much info as you can during your daily checks.
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