Should You Seek Temporary Or Contractual Employment While Searching?Written by David Richter
According to US Department of Labor statistics, average time to find employment is roughly six months. It could take as little as four to six weeks, or as long as ten to twelve months, or longer. Several factors determine your time to placement: • Degrees • Current state of employment • Age • Level of experience • Level of salary • Type of position you're seeking • Level of position being sought • Desired salary level • Location • Industry • Your resume • Your interview skills • Networking effort • Degree of career transition No one knows how long they will be unemployed. Even a person with sufficient funds to last their entire period of unemployment may still want to consider a temporary or contractual assignment as an interim solution. The loss in income can have an unforeseeable psychological impact. Other concerns that need to be addressed include: • Loss of confidence • Losing familiarity with day-to-day responsibilities • Boredom • Creating employment gaps in resume • More expensive health benefits • Minimal professional interactions • No opportunity to convert a temporary position into a permanent one The rule of thumb is: if you have been searching unsuccessfully for two months and find yourself no further ahead than when you became unemployed, I would encourage you to seek temporary employment or a contractual assignment. More and more people are engaging in this type of activity, including former CEO's. In fact, there has been a twenty percent increase in number of people working part-time since 2001.
| | Using Recruiters: How To Get A Step Ahead Of The CrowdWritten by David Richter
When there is an opening to fill, a company has four basic approaches at their disposal:• Advertise position on Internet job sites • Network • Probe Internet for viable candidates • Use recruiters When a company advertises an opening on an Internet job site, they receive hundreds of resumes. It simply is too long of a process and financially prohibitive to review every resume and move through each step of interviewing and selection process to fill opening. Since decision-makers know other decision-makers, a hiring manager’s network can be quite extensive. In time, good candidates can be located. The problem with this approach is that hiring manager may simply be too busy to engage in time and human interaction required to make this happen. Employers and recruiters utilizing keyword searches scour job sites in search of candidates to fill job openings. A major segment of these openings are unadvertised. When you post your resumes to a job site, you gain visibility, indirectly, into hidden job market, and have access to a greater number of jobs. On downside, since most people searching will post their resume to a number of different sites, number of potentially viable candidates for any one particular position is huge. Employers have also frequently found major discrepancies between candidates and their resumes. The fine line between reality and realm of imagination becomes razor-thin for creative resume writers. Screening and reviewing hundreds of resumes for accuracy and position viability, is time-consuming. If job also requires a certain type of personality which doesn’t materialize at interview, more time is wasted. For this reason, more and more employers turn to recruiters for a more efficient hiring process. A recruiter will conduct exhaustive screening procedures as part of their candidate search process. They will charge a fee to employer for this service, but it is worth it in terms of time and effort.
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