Read This If You Have Not Landed a Job This Month

Let’s face it: job seeking is anything but fun. It is often an exhausting, long, and soul-crushing ordeal that many talents have to go through. Reading motivational tips and tricks alone is not enough to mend the pain of not landing a job yet. You may have in-demand skill sets with proven experience. You may have an ATS-friendly resume and top it off with a decent portfolio. You may be ready to take any sort of technical test or presentation if your potential employer ever asks you to. You may have done all the things needed to secure a job offer, but you keep wondering: why have I not landed a job this month? 

Maybe, It Is Not Your Fault

It is understandable that you blame yourself for being in a state of unemployment for quite a while. Not having enough marketable skills, lack of relevant experience, unorthodox style of portfolio are just a few among many factors you typically blame for not getting any job yet. While those aspects may be the reason, those can actually be not true as well.

Maybe, This Month is to Blame

For a while, try to stop blaming yourself for not landing a job and let this fact sink in: December is one of the worst months to apply for a job. According to a report by Indeed, December is the least effective month for hiring, historically. This is because many companies would want to postpone employment selections until they have finalized their budgets for the coming year. Moreover, many employees and managers, including in the HR department, take many leave days this month, making it difficult to finalize a decision. Needless to say, many businesses halt recruiting in December and wait until the new year to make these decisions.

Read Also: What to Do If You Feel Unhappy with Your Current Job

Maybe, The Whole Pandemic is to Blame

The pandemic has also made the prospect of in-person employment less appealing, if not also unsafe. Many individuals are now seeking positions that allow them to work from home. A great majority of workers, regardless of industry, say they wish to work from home at least part of the time. While the number of remote positions has increased, they still account for just 16% of job postings on LinkedIn, while receiving twice as many applications as non-remote jobs.

Maybe, Technology is to Blame

Employers are frequently not looking in the proper locations or in the right methods, no matter how hard they claim to be seeking for employees. Hiring software and the development of Applicant Tracking System (ATS) have made it extremely simple for employers to publish a lot of opportunities and for job seekers to submit resumes. The concern is that they have also made it quite simple for actually-good resumes to go unnoticed. No matter how perfect an HR software is, a human touch is unbeatable by technology. Even if you are qualified for a certain position, you may lose a job opportunity just because your resume is filtered out by the system. Of course, there are ways to overcome this and make your resume pass the tracking software, but sometimes, even if you have done this, technology can still do you wrong. 

Maybe, This Is What You Need to Do

Some things are within your control and some are just not, no matter how hard you probably have tried. For instance, if the demand for a journalist job is low and you have a bachelor’s degree in Journalism, it cannot be easy to land that job for you during the season. However, there is no use regretting years you spent studying. Moreover, starting over or acquiring new skills, which are in-demand and more marketable in the job market, take quite a long time, yet the clock is ticking. Maybe, you need a little bit of luck on top of your relentlessness, and this is not something you can magically get. 

So, what does this desperation leave you with?

This is not a pep talk to tell you that you need to remain positive 24/7, because actually, you have the right to be sad and even mad. Yes, the world feels unfair at times. Embrace everything you feel about not landing a job yet, even these feelings may not be all that pretty.

Take some time off job seeking for a few days, especially this week where everyone seems to be taking a holiday leave. When the time comes, it will come, and retracting yourself from job seeking for a few days may not make you miss job opportunities. In fact, it may actually make you feel better, to detach for a while from something that has bugged you for quite some time.

Happy holiday.

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