Liz Ryan has a great article over on the Forbes website entitled, “How Long Should A Job Search Take?”.
Liz writes:
“I hate to think about the number of times I’ve sat on a panel and heard a fellow panelist say “As a job-seeker, you have to prepare for the long haul. It could take months and months to find the right job.”
Every time I heard that I kept the fake plastic smile pasted on my face, because I’m an actress. I was raging inside.
I am sick and tired of hearing standard brainless job-search advice repeated like it was gospel, including the line ‘Expect to spend months looking for your next job.’ “
She goes on to say:
“When you teach people to be passive and wait patiently for a broken system to grind its way along, you disempower them.”
Liz is absolutely right.
It’s funny how we routinely defer to the advice of the so-called ‘experts’ – and often to our own determent.
I learned early in my career not to listen to the ‘experts’.
At the first Recruiting Firm I worked at, I remember returning to the office after the long Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. I was surprised that the office lacked its usual buzz. It seemed like no one was on the phones. The office was quiet.
I walked over to Dan, one of the Sr. Recruiters and asked him what was going on. Dan looked up from the newspaper he was reading and said to me, “Kid, it’s the Holiday Season. No one is going to be hiring between now and New Year’s Day. Everything is going to be quiet. You’ll just have to sit tight and wait for hiring to pick up again after the Holidays.”
Unfortunately, at that time I was broke and had a young family to support. I did not have the luxury to sit around and wait. So I did the only thing I knew how to do – I got on the phone and just “smiled & dialed”. And you know what – that December was my best month billing as a Recruiter.
And – going forward – for every year thereafter – I found that December is always one of my strongest months for the year.
After that experience, I decided that I would ignore the advice of the so-called experts. I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for business to pick up. I was always going to go out and make something happen.
And my experience as a Recruiter mirrors Liz Ryan’s advice to job seekers.
In the article, Liz advises job seekers that they should not just sit around and expect their job search to last a certain predetermined amount of months because some so-called expert claims that is the case.
As Liz writes:
“You have way more influence on your marketability, your job search and your career than you think you have.“