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This is perhaps one of my more contraversial posts, not because of what I wrote but where the comments went. I lost sleep over this one, yet I remain passionate about the message. The post is titled The 10 Hour Job Search – Seriously (Jan 19, 2009)
Towards the beginning of the post I said:
What are they smoking???
I ended the post with:
I can’t believe people can justify a 10 hour a week job search, can you?
What do you think – is 10 hours a week enough for a serious job search?
No.
There is no ideal hour count for job search except “how many can you put in?” Setting arbitrary limits like this is ridiculous. Until you have that job, you put in as much time as possible, period.
If you’re employed, 10 hours may be all you can reasonably put in. But if you’re unemployed, why, oh why, would you not put all the time you can into your job search? Is this a vacation? Are you not in a hurry to get back to full employment? When I was unemployed from May to August 2008, I put much more than 40 hours a week in my job search. As a result, I generated lots of interviews and multiple job offers. Of course I was darn lucky to search when the economy was merely sluggish and not completely crashed, but that only means it would be more effort if I started over right now.
No one’s job is truly safe right now. (Is it ever?) I’m staying current with my career plans: learning, networking, keeping informed about the evolving technologies, trends and markets in my professional field. Should I need to, I want to be able to react quickly — even if it takes 80 hours a week!