How Long Should A Job Search Actually Take?

Week One of The Job Market, Decoded

Nobody asks me this one in front of other people. They ask it at the end of a session, voice a little lower, like they're confessing something: "Be honest. How long is this supposed to take? Because I feel like I'm way behind."

You are almost certainly not behind. You're just working off a number somebody made up in 1998 and repeated until it sounded like a fact.

You've heard it. One month of searching for every ten thousand dollars of salary. It's tidy, it's easy to remember, and it has almost nothing to do with the market you're standing in right now. So let's throw it out and replace it with something you can actually use, including the part where I tell you how to know whether your search is slow or genuinely stuck.

Those are two different problems and they have two different fixes.

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The real ranges

These are the ranges I see from the hiring side, in this market, for a search that's being run competently. Not best case. Not worst case. Typical.

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