The Tuesday after Labor Day is the second busiest day each year for job hunters.
In the job hunting world, there are two peak seasons yearly in which most disenchanted workers set their marks and get set to go. The first is in early January, on the heels of New Year's resolutions by bored workers across the land promising themselves they'll find more inspiring work that year.
The second is the day after Labor Day, when the sight of kids going off to college and school starting anew reminds workers in a state of job ennui of when they, too, used to be enthused about learning new things.
But recruiters urge that if you think you could be in the former camp by the year's end, you might want to think about jumping in now, and ERE, a community of recruiters around the world, is offering job seekers tips to land their next job.
1. Don't Quit Your Day Job
No matter how loathsome your job is, and how frustrated you are with the amount of time you've been on the job hunt, recruiters discourage job seekers from quitting their current jobs before having found a new one.
Though many will tell you that it's because you really don't know how long it will take until you find your next job, and if it is a long time it will do your resume a disservice, the real truth is that an unemployed job hunter reeks of more desperation than one who knows where their next paycheck is coming from.
"You don't want to seem like a job-hopper," said Elaine Rigoli, business writer for ERE. "From a recruiter's perspective, if you're unemployed and hanging out on job boards all day, you might seem desperate. They want the people who are hard workers and may not even know that they are looking. They're called the passive candidates, or passive majority."
2. See and Be Seen
Increasing one's visibility is key when looking for a new job, and the good news is that the Internet has made it even easier to network without leaving your desk. Posting on blogs, starting your own and keeping your social networking profiles up-to-date are widely used ways to increase one's professional network. Speaking at conferences, writing for magazines and Web sites, and networking with professional organizations ensure that when it's time to move the job hunt forward, you've got lots of resources to tap into.
"Don't just sit there. Get out there and meet people. This goes along with not just quitting your job and expecting the next one to come along. If you're involved in IT organizations and active on technology boards, recruiters may already know who you are," said Rigoli.
3. Reinvent Yourself
More than any other line of work, technology requires that its professionals stay on the ball, working constantly to keep their skills sharp and relevant. Recruiters suggest that job seekers go one step further and learn complementary skills to the IT skills they may already have, and find new uses for your talent.
"Keep your skills sharp. Stay aware of the ways you can take advantage of your knowledge by networking. Find new places that people are looking for your skills," said Rigoli.
4. Don't Discount Smaller Job Boards
It would be naïve to ignore the market share of Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs when launching your IT job hunt, but it would be risky to limit your job seeking to only the big sharks. Within the IT profession, there are dozens of job boards for technology professionals alone, all of which boast a lower signal-to-noise ratio for workers who don't want to wade through irrelevant job ads.
In the IT profession, the more options can be the merrier. IT pros know that IT jobs aren't just in computer and technology professions, but any company in the world with computers at their employees' desks.
"There are so many niche job boards from itjobs.com to jobs.slashdot.org and computerwork.com, not to mention dice.com, which according to one poll was where a full 17 percent of computer professionals went to find jobs," said Rigoli.
"But if you're willing to look into the health care industry, or higher education IT, there are boards for all of these employers as well. Whatever you do, don't limit your search unnecessarily."
5. Consider Smaller Companies
If Microsoft wants to hire two, or 2,000, new IT professionals, it barely has to market itself before it is flooded with so many applications that it would impossible to read every one. But the technology profession is flooded with small IT shops and partner companies who need people with hands-on IT knowledge. They just may not have the overhead or able bodies to go out and find them, and even if they can find them, they cannot afford to train them.
"They can't take raw talent out of the university and train them for a year," Celia Harper-Guerra, director of talent at Cisco Systems, in San Jose, Calif., told eWEEK in June. "A Microsoft can have a one-year training program to become a systems administrator or an engineer. But a small company cannot afford to have a person out of work for a year,"
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