How to Keep a Job Search Going Through the Holidays | Hacker News Reader

How to Keep a Job Search Going Through the Holidays

blog.smartbear.com

13 pointsohjeez6 comments

I never understood the logic around "no one hires during holidays". My own brother spouts this crap and I got him hired to a job in December.

In more than 80% of my jobs over ~15 years, I was hired in November/December/January. Each time I started the process in November/December.

Their loss is my gain.

Edit: A couple of jobs back, my first day on the job was also the day of the company Christmas party. Nobody really told me about dress code and I wore a suit, which made me stick out for being overdressed. This was fantastically to my advantage and I met a ton of people on my first day and made very good impressions. Food for thought.

My guess -- without any data behind it -- is that the belief is a function of the understandable depression about job hunting (read: desperation) when everybody around you is enjoying holidays and spending money.

I was once fired on December 15th, _after_ I had bought all the holiday gifts of course. At that point (30 years ago! and in a non-tech field, back then) it was impossible to get anyone to look at a resume. I started a new job on January 15, but boy was that a lousy Christmas.

As the article points out, however, the "nobody's hiring now" assumptions are out of whack. Maybe this news will cheer up _someone_.

>>I never understood the logic around "no one hires during holidays".

Anecdotal: I just got a phone call from a recruiter less than 3 hrs ago. :p If anyone here wants to work in Walnut Creek California, 6 months contract to hire, management position & writing shell scripts to extract csv files and send them to an Oracle DB ...let me know? Yeah, not the most exciting/challenging work. I think this recruiter got my info back when I was just starting out.

Another anecdotal: It's my experience that companies(at least start-ups) seem to have all the important HR/Payroll people taking sporadic vacations during holiday season so the hiring-paperwork can't be done. I once was "offered" a job in December, but they couldn't officially bring me on board because the CEO(who liked to meet all new hires before approval) and key HR/Payroll people were on vacation in Switzerland or something until late January.

Not just vacations, I think. On a few occasions I "had the job" before the end of the year, but it started in January because that's when the budget started.

OTOH going into Christmas knowing you have a gig is a lot better than it might be.

This is nice to hear, I suppose. I just separated from a company due to failure to pay/contract term violations and been thinking the odds of me finding gainful employment would be pretty low or non-existent until late Jan.

Still seems like its going to be an upward climb as my normal places to look for python and or backend dev are somewhat sparse right now.

My experience from the other side matches the article -- we're hiring (Software Engineers, Edinburgh, UK, I'm sure you can work out a suitable email address by looking at my profile) but there don't seem to be as many people looking for employment at this time of year.

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