Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Job Search/Salary Rule Of Thumb

I heard this one recently, and with today's news and the fact that many of the affected employees follow this blog, now seems like an obvious time to mention it:

Expect one month of job searching for every $10K in salary you're pursuing.

Now, that's only a rule of thumb! But it's probably a good estimate for people to keep in mind, even if it's more of a worst case scenario in some instances. Anyone looking to replace a $80k/yr salary, for example, should brace himself or herself for eight months of sending in applications, going to interviews and generally networking like crazy.

Of course, you might get lucky and find work right away. Bonus!! To be safe, though: hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

[Update later that same day: I should mention that, when I was looking for a new career while still employed by the bank, it took me at least six months to find one. And I was making about $70K at the time, so the rule of thumb was fairly accurate in my case.]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that still true if you are looking to start your own company? :)

I wonder if it's a "1 month per $10K of funding" (to a point) for that sort of thing.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Re: start ups...

I suspect the parameters are different for that situation, and probably dependent upon what sort of organization you're creating. If you need external funding, that's one scenario; if you can start small and only add people as the demand grows, that's a different kettle of fish.

Someone looking to start up a hi-tech software company in this neck of the woods right now will certainly have a wealth of top-notch talent to draw from. And that talent will be a whole lot more motivated to pursue such an endeavour than they likely would have been a month ago.