Advance your career

Simple Steps to Ease Job Search Stress

Looking for a new job can create some stress, we get it. In fact, nearly 2 in 5 job seekers say the expectation of stress is exactly why they hesitate with starting their job hunt in the first place.

Whether you’re feeling too busy to look, it’s been awhile since you reached out to your network, or perhaps you’re just feeling like your skills need some sharpening so you can be more competitive — it’s important to remember two things: 1) You’re way more capable of overcoming all of these challenges than you may realize (you’ve got this!); and 2) We’re here to help.

Here are 3 of our favorite stress-busting suggestions for job seekers:

1. The 15-minute mindset.

Job searching requires time, yet more than a quarter of professionals say they have no time to search for new opportunities. We think the trick here is to stop thinking about job searching in terms of hours spent per day, but rather as minutes invested — 15 minutes to be exact. Use your 15 minutes to do 3 things to help LinkedIn do some of the work for you:

  • Update your LinkedIn profile. This provides other LinkedIn members with a better understanding of the unique skills, interests, and experience that make you — you.
  • As you explore jobs, use advanced search filters to quickly narrow down opportunities by industry, location, experience level and much more. Now here’s where the big time saving magic happens: once your filtered search is set, you can create an alert so that any updates will be emailed to you or shared with you on LinkedIn. That’s all there is to it — job listings will start automatically coming to you.
  • Let job recruiters know you’re looking. Open Candidates is a feature you can turn on that privately signals to recruiters you’re open to new opportunities. You can also indicate the types of jobs, companies and locations you care about.

2. Skill building. One course at a time.

More than one-third of job seekers have expressed concern that they don’t have the necessary skills to be competitive in the job market. If this is you, don’t stress — professional learning is much (much) easier today than it used to be.

For example, with LinkedIn Learning, you can now access a gigantic database of online courses on topics from coding and graphic design, to speech writing and public speaking. And here’s the best part: each course is typically sliced up into very manageable 5-10 minute learning chunks. You can watch a course on SEO during lunch or listen to best practices in project management on your commute home. Learning a new skill over the course of a week quickly becomes very achievable.

Additionally, remember that hard skills don’t always make you the best candidate. There may be an opportunity for you to play up your soft skills too, like communication, organization and time management. In fact, employers often say they have difficulty filling their over half of their open positions because they can’t find candidates who have the right soft skills.  Looking to brush up on some of these skills? Courses on soft skills are also available on LinkedIn Learning

3. “Phone” a friend (or a LinkedIn connection).

Professional relationships are among the most valuable tool you can leverage when you are searching for a new opportunity. 70% of new hires found a role at a company where they had a LinkedIn connection.

The next time you run across an interesting job opportunity, check LinkedIn to see if you already know someone who works there and message them to learn more about the company and the role. You never know where the conversation will lead, but it will give you the opportunity to ask more about the company culture and the types of candidates that succeed, bringing you one step closer to finding your way in.

Finding your next job doesn’t have to be stressful, especially if you can approach it as a series of progressive steps. If you land the interview, check out our tips for nailing your first impression. The right job for you is out there, we’ll help you find your way in.

**LinkedIn partnered with Censuswide Research to carry out an online survey of 1,025 professionals in the US between May 4, 2017 and May 9, 2017.