Last updated: Jan. 14, 2024
How long does it take to find a new job? What’s the job hunt like? The typical job hunt is best described as this:
No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No Yes
That’s 99 noes for every 1 yes. In essence, you can expect to hear 99 noes, before you get a yes! This is a simplified view of how long it takes to find a job. There are other stats, such as this from Zippia:
- The average time it takes to find a job is 7.5 weeks.
- Your chances of landing a job after one application are 8.3%.
- It takes between 21 to 80 job applications to land a job.
- 51% of job seekers receive a job offer after 3 interviews.
Did you catch that last statistic? It’s saying that you can have 3 interviews where you think you aced everything and still not receive a job offer. It’s happened to me, too. Note, too that your chances of landing a job after one application is 8.3%. This doesn’t mean that if you apply to 12 jobs that your chances are close to 100%. Unfortunately, probability is not cumulative.
Massive Layoffs in 2023
The number of layoffs in 2023 exceeded those of 2022 by 200%.
In fact, if you spoke to a recruiter from January 2023 to end of September 2023, almost every one of them will tell you the same thing: Now is a bad time to be looking for a job. When you have 262,682+ people laid off and looking for jobs in the tech industry, things get competitive. You may have heard stories, too, that the majority of techies found jobs within 6 weeks after getting let go.
While that may be true for some people, it certainly was not true for my friends and me. In fact, one friend has been unemployed for over 9 months now. Another is going into month 5 as of this writing. Remember that unemployment insurance typically pays out from 22 to 24 months. So, for my friends they are nearing the end of the state-provided security nets. That’s why it is important to have an emergency fund.
The Length of Time It Takes to Find a Job
Let’s jump into answering this question. I wish I could give you a magic number but there isn’t one. Typically, recruiters say it takes on average 6 months to find a job. Some people beat this average and find something days to weeks after losing their jobs. For others, it could be a year or more. Too much depends on your particular industry, your location, and other factors outside of your control, such as your gender and age. While employers are not supposed to discriminate, they often do. How do you know if they are discriminating?
One way is to look at their culture page and the pictures of their teams. If you only see one kind of people and you look nothing like them, then you know your chances of getting hired are low. For example, if all you see are young people in the pictures and you’re 45+, your chances of getting into that company are low. In these cases, you probably would be wasting your time filing an application.
Sometimes the hiring manager or recruiter accidentally lets slip their biases. For example, if you ask why they enjoy working there, they might say, “I love working here because everyone is so young, energetic, and full of bright ideas. Change happens on a dime rather than take years.”
I’ve highlighted the two key phrases that unintentionally show age bias. The perception is that older employers lack energy and are resistant to change. What can you do to change the perception, especially as age is outside of your control? You could convey high energy and enthusiasm for the job. This means rather applying to jobs solely for the money, you look for interesting positions. You gladly go to the job every day because it gives you a reason to get up in the mornings and a sense of purpose.
You can show adaptability to change by demonstrating an ability to learn new things all the time. This is another reason why you always need to be looking for a new job. You know what latest skillsets and knowledge are relevant to the industry and can learn those new skills. This increases your marketability. You know, too, your worth and can ask for a salary that represents your worth.
Think and Grow Rich
Put it simply, if you want to learn the Napoleon Hill school of thought on how long it takes to find a job, the time it takes for you to find a job depends on:
- Your particular skillsets.
- The need for it.
- The willingness of others to pay you for your it.
This is a short-hand way of saying in a few words the thousands of words needed to elaborate and explain these concepts in this article.
How Employers Fill Jobs
In order of most effective to least effective, this is how companies fill a position:
- Promote from within
- Internal (private) listings
- References (friends and families)
- Job postings on public side of company website
The further you go down the list, the harder it is for you, the job hunter, to fill a position. This is why looking for a job sucks. Recall the statistic that your chances of finding a job is 8.3% after submitting an application. This is why job hunting is a numbers game, too.
This means that if you don’t like your current job, then you’re better off working on getting promoted to a different position within the same company. If a promotion is outside of your reach, then your next best bet is to apply from within as an internal candidate. The competition is much less fierce.
Next is hiring through a reference. Hiring managers ask if their employees know of friends and families who want to work at the company. In most cases, the company offers a hiring bonus to the employee for bringing a new body into the fold.
Finally, the hiring manager posts a job description to the public side of the company’s website, looking for talent this way. This is what happens when you look for jobs on job boards. This, too, is where the competition can be fierce. A single job posting can create 400+ applicant in a matter of hours, as the numbers in the summer and fall of 2023 bear out.
Apply to Jobs You Don’t Want to Shorten the Time It Takes to Find a New Job
It’s a good idea to always be looking for a job. You may be loyal to your employer; unfortunately, most companies owe no such loyalties to their employees. As such, it’s a good idea to apply to jobs you don’t want so that you’ll get practice honing your skills as a job hunter. When we say “don’t want”, we mean that you’re happy at your current job and may not be looking. Yet, the opportunity that comes in front of you is interesting. You’re enthusiastic for it.
You apply to jobs in which the company’ recruiter has reached out to you, thereby increasing your chances of getting in front of the hiring manager. Or, you apply to jobs to which you’re qualified and somewhat excited for.
This excludes applying to every job under the sun, hoping that just one will bite. The reason you want to avoid doing is is that you will be less enthusiastic about the position. This means you will fail to take the position and the practice with seriousness. Deliberate seriousness and practice is what you’re after when you apply to jobs in which you do not care if you get them.
For example, a recruiter reaches out to you for a job at the Acme company. Acme is some 1+ hours away by car each way. While you are interested in what Acme does, you would prefer to keep you commute down to 30 minutes or less. You move forward with the job application process anyway, because you want to practice in front of a hiring manager and its team of employees. You do this so that if you ever find yourself in need of a job because of getting let go, then you’d already be prepared because you’ve had lot of practice. Imagine trying to find a new job after leaving the old one that you have worked at for 5 years. Anyone would be out of practice by then.
AI and Its Prevalent Use in 2023 in How Long It Takes to Find a New Job
Unfortunately, many unqualified job candidates are using AI to ply their resumes with key phrases and buzzwords. This makes it harder for companies to decipher the mess and find qualified candidates.
Interestingly, it’s not just job seekers. Recruiters are doing this, too. I’m referring to recruiters working at third-party job shops who get a cut of the commission when they submit to a job position on your behalf. This one recruiter I worked with falsified my resume without my consent, just to get me in front of the hiring managers. As I was driving up to the interview, some 1 hour away he calls me and drops the bombshell. He said that he had updated my resume just a little bit and that I should talk about my qualifications per the resume. I arrived on site about 20 minutes early and looked at his version of my resume. He had increased it by about 3 pages, with 75% of it being false experience. He did this with the help of AI.
To say the least, I was livid. I realized, too, that I would not get this job because the recruiter had started my relationship with the hiring managers on a lie. This is another reason why I will never work with recruiters in a foreign country who claims to have offices in the United States. Too many just don’t care about you as a candidate. They just care about their commissions and meeting their daily quotas of contacts. For example, many start the phone screen by asking your rate, which is the wrong question to ask. I now ignore all their phone calls.
So what did I do at the job interview? I told the hiring managers that I do not know why this third-party recruiter they used decided to submit a resume that was different than the one I submitted. The hiring managers saw the resume that I had originally submitted for the position. And, no, I did not get the job.
Use AI to Get Past the Applicant Tracking System
This is not to say that you should avoid using AI altogether in your job hunt. You have to get your resume past the applicant tracking system (ATS), in front of the recruiter’s eyes. This means You have to proofread and double-check that what the AI produces is in fact true.
I’ve used AI such as ChatGPT many times to craft resumes. It does think of ways to say things that helps promotes your skillsets that you would otherwise not think of. For example, I may write, “Worked with customer to solve technical issues.” The AI suggests better wording: “Collaborated with customers to successfully overcome technical issues.” AI is good at looking at the buzzwords and key phrases in a job description to make sure they appear on your resume. After all, the main point of a resume is to get past the application tracking system, in front of the recruiter’s eyes.
AI is useful, too, for creating cover letters. I used it to create several cover letters that would have taken me 3 to 4 hours each to produce. AI created a well-written cover letter in just a few seconds. Again, be sure to proofread and verify what the AI produces to ensure it is truthful. It cannot know truths about you. Only you do.
Soft and Hard Skills Matter
Ultimately, these are just skills you need to master to get past all the gates and the sentinels guarding the gates. It’s still up to you as a candidate to wow the hiring managers and team members, convincing them that you’re the best candidate for the job. This means honing your interviewing skills.
Once again, this is why you should always be looking for a job. It gives you practice that is otherwise hard to obtain in a simulated environment with friends and family.
Confidence, aplomb, assertiveness, good communications and social skills, along with demonstrating good technical knowledge are all needed to convey that you’re the best candidate. It takes an increased awareness and deliberate practice to hone these skills. I am still learning new things some 20 years in as an engineer and a job candidate. I am still realizing that I have done some things wrong. For instance, I was asked this question:
Your resume shows you have no leadership experience. We’re wondering if you would like to be in a leadership position.
From the beginning, this was a trick question. I just did not know it. They are really looking for examples of leadership, if not in job title, then in day-to-day interactions with your fellow coworkers. Instead, I concurred with them that I do not have any leadership experience. I said that if given the right training and guidance, I would be willing to learn and take up leadership positions. *Smack* That was the wrong answer.
On their end, they are likely thinking, “What kind of engineer are you, to have worked in the industry for 20+ years, and not have any leadership experience?” There are good examples that are buried in your daily interactions. For example, you may have become the de facto lead, driving a project and deciding how and where it goes. You may be mentoring junior engineers in the company’s workflow and processes. In high-visibility projects where the customer has brought up a valid and significant concern about the company’s product, you’re the one managers want as they know you’ll get it done, even if it’s never been done in the past.
Conclusion
It’s tempting to look for a median or an average on how long it takes to find a new job. In general, recruiters say it takes about 6 months to find a new job. All you can really control is make sure you have an emergency fund to weather the storm. Always be looking so that your interview skills are perfectly honed, like a chef’s knife. By always looking, you know what skillsets are needed so that you can work on improving them and being the best candidate. You know what salary to ask as this is a perfect time to ask for an absurdly high salary, just to see what the prospective employer says.
Use this time to ask yourself introspective questions, too. After all, one day you’ll be retired and not working. Or life has other plans for you and makes working not possible. So much of our identities, especially as men, are wrapped up in our jobs. Once that job is gone, we lose our sense of purpose and mission.
I suggest that you look at the values that matter to you and work on them outside of your day job. This keeps you going and gives you a sense of purpose. This matters more than any job.