What You Don’t Know About Conducting an Effective Job Search Will Hurt You

The average worker is likely to hold between ten and fifteen different jobs in his or her professional lifetime, according to a variety of experts as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, About.com and Experience.com. Add to that the number of times and employee competes for opportunities within the same organization, and it is easy to see that the average worker will need to be highly skilled in the art of job search.

Job Search Ignorance

Most job seekers do not know how to conduct an effective job search. To arrive at this conclusion, we spent four years of research (between 2010 to 2014), analyzing over 100,000 data points on what people know about the current and emerging best practices of conducting an effective job search. Using standardized, validated assessments, thousands of job-seekers were asked a series of questions to expose what they did and did not know about conducting a job search in today’s environment. Consider the following results:

• College students and recent grads average 36.6% correct
• Experienced professionals and skilled workers average 44.5% correct
• Infographic with more details of the research: What Does the Average Job Seeker Know About Conducting an Effective Job Search

Technology and technique are both driving rapid changes in job search tactics. What was a 2012 Top Ten job search best practice may be completely counterproductive in 2014. This is a huge challenge for job seekers when you consider that the brand new book on job search on the bookstore shelves most likely highlights best practices that are two or more years old.

The answer is not found in higher education. Job search education is largely driven by the individual because a majority of colleges and universities do not teach job search as part of their curriculum. Instead, students are encouraged to utilize a career services staff with a student-to-career-services-professional ratio of 2,370 students for every career search professional, up from 1,889 in 2012, and 1,554 in 2012, according to page 5 the NACE 2014 Career Services Executive Summary Report. Most students wait until graduation to begin thinking about a job search.

Job Seekers Compete Against the Averages

The good news for job seekers is that with job search best practices knowledge so low, job seekers who identify their knowledge gaps, and then educate themselves on the current and emerging job search best practices, can outperform the average job seeker and land a better job faster in their field of interest.

Candidates who clearly outperform others in their search typically command higher compensation. Since base salary is often is used to calculate merit and promotion increases, a compounding of this value will occur over the individual’s entire career.

The High Cost of Job Search Ignorance

Depending on the level of the job, the average job search takes between six to eighteen months. Here is a quick way to calculate what the value of reducing your job search time is worth:

If a job seeker cut 7 weeks off his or her job search, here is what the value would be:

• $25,000 salary = $ 4,206
• $40,000 salary = $ 6,730
• $60,000 salary = $10,096
• $80,000 salary = $13,460

That is for just one job search! Replicate the same analysis for each job change. If employed and seeking higher income, use the difference between current and prospective compensation.

Bottom line: the total value of rectifying career search ignorance over someone’s career could exceed several hundred thousand dollars!

Your Next Step in Solving Your Own Job Search Ignorance

If you are reading this article, then you are likely a job seeker who wants to better prepare yourself for your current search. Click on the link http://bit.ly/XCQgO7 for information about low cost assessments to help you get a leg up on all the people with whom you will be competing for your next job.

• College students and recent grads, use the Graduate Employment Preparedness Assessment
• Experienced professionals and skilled workers, use the Job Search Readiness Assessment

If you are contemplating a job search, this may be the wisest career investment you make this year!