For full-time employees, work occupies about half the day. Here’s how a typical day looks for somebody who works full-time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Working: 50%
- Commuting: 6%
- Socializing: 5%
- Household activities: 9%
- Personal care: 6%
- Watching TV: 13%
- Meals: 6%
- Other: 5%
When you enter a transition — lose your job, say — the time spent working can quickly be replaced by a lot of things unrelated to your job search. You watch TV more during the day. Spend more time tending to household duties. That’s a mistake.
We believe when you’re looking for a job, that’s your job. In those same statistics from the Labor Bureau, take the 50 percent of your day you spent working and use that amount of time on your job search. Here’s what we recommend you spend your time doing, depending on your job level.
For staff and managers, for example, the combination of job board and company career page applications should take up about 40 percent of your time. Networking should take about 26 percent of your time.
At the director and VP level, half of all interviews will come from networking.
For senior execs, direct contact and networking play a very significant role in getting meetings.
Here’s how it shakes out by level:
Networking
- Average participant: 36%
- Staff and managers: 26%
- Directors and VPs: 50%
- Senior execs: 36%
Direct contact interviews
- Average participant: 14%
- Staff and managers: 15%
- Directors and VPs: 10%
- Senior execs: 25%
Internal recruiter, search firm, staffing agency
- Average participant: 17%
- Staff and managers: 19%
- Directors and VPs: 14%
- Senior execs: 25%
Online applications
- Average participant: 33%
- Staff and managers: 40%
- Directors and VPs: 26%
- Senior execs: 14%
The importance of LinkedIn
How up-to-date and robust is your LinkedIn profile? If you had to think about that for a minute, hop on to the site and start working on it. LinkedIn is vital to today’s job search at all levels, less so for top execs, but it’s still key.
Bottom line, when you’re out of work, looking for a job is your job. At GetFive, we can help you structure your time and use it to the fullest to get you back in the game as quickly as possible.
