I’m a standstill with my career and having received my latest job by pure luck, I am wondering what is the turn around time for submitting a resume and getting a job.
I have very basic credentials: BA focused on economics, 2-3 years of experience in total (day trader, fx sales, pricing support), a small gap at the end as I took off to travel.
I got lucky with my last job because someone went on maternal leave and I got a call back a year later (yes a year) while I was day trading. How long should I expect my turn over period to be?
I should add that I am seeking jobs like ‘credit analyst’ or ‘fund accountant’ because it’s really hard to narrow down other job titles and honestly I’m still at entry level at jobs like 40k+. These are the positions I am applying to.
Lower entry-level jobs tend to come faster. There’s no set time and they can vary dramatically but probably four to six months I would say from proactive job hunting to actually landing something
It really depends, I’d say based mostly on how motivated the company is to fill the position. A former job of mine, it took only 12 calendar days from online application to offer letter. After working there I realized that I was an oddity since that company couldn’t do anything quickly. You never know, as it all depends on them. My current job, I applied mid/late August, had the phone interview with HR late August, and it was radio silent until the in person interview in mid October and I had an offer a week after that. YMMV.
My sample of finance job offers: 1 day, 2 months, 3 days, and 1 month. The smaller companies responded much faster. The larger the company, the longer. All were for entry level or a level above. Oops, those were interview to offer. 1 week, 3 months, 1-2 weeks and 2 months, if I remember right.
My positions seem to be around 6 months. But it has always been larger organizations with structured interviews and likely lots of applicants. My current job was quicker, because I was recruited by them so they just had to make sure I wasn’t a serial killer.
This aggregate distribution (a distribution for which no one possesses the metadata, by the way), would be so skewed that the average would be meaningless. I’ve known people who are very skilled at working connections that the resume submission is a “check the box” activity after the fact, and other sad sacks who are still plugging away on the Monsters and Career Builders of the world like it was 1999, telling themselves stories that “it’s a numbers game.”
Most recent job took about 3 months but that was over the holidays and I work at a bulge bracket. Though as Destroyer of Worlds said, the resume submission was just a formality based on some connections I had through a previous manager.
^ My strategy? I’m a bit older and farther along my career path than most here, probably. There hasn’t necessarily been any overarching strategy, just keeping in mind the following things:
Nobody cares how creative and original you are. You may be those things, but what matters is how good you can make your team, and especially your boss, look to his or her boss in turn. That is ALL that matters…experience, credentials, etc. is just icing on the cake. If you don’t get this and accept this fact, you will likely have problems getting promoted over time. If you do understand this, it changes the type of language and bullet points you tend to put on your resume naturally.
Don’t burn any bridges, no matter how much you don’t get along with someone. Some of the people I initially hated turned out to be pretty awesome, and some of them even turned out to be solid references. I got every one of my positions except one through calling people I knew and people I used to work for and with. This is not a simple strategy – it takes YEARS to build this kind of network. Start today.
Related to the last point, patience is a virtue. Many young guns in their 20’s and early 30’s expect overnight success. When it doesn’t come, some give up and blame the system. Don’t do that. Hang in there.
Many in the same age group also like to fart around and “have fun.” For different people, this takes the shape of different poisons (too much drinking, smoking weed, frittering away time on social media, wasting entire weekends watching sports, etc.). Of course you have to have some fun, but the most successful people I know don’t have time for bulls**t. They are spending down time learning new work skills off-the-clock, studying for a new credential, or engaging in activities that are somehow useful for their current or desired position. Frankly, most people don’t have what it takes to do this because they see this as a chore. I don’t. I seriously enjoy doing this – that is my leisure time. You have to commit. This will also show up in how you present yourself and come up with resume language that is effective.
None of this is necessarily a strategy to jump the recruiting line, but my point is that you have to commit to the lifestyle so that the conversations you do have are more productive. It is hard to fool hiring managers. You have to know what you’re talking about, and that takes effort that most just don’t have. There are no shortcuts, and it takes time.