your job search a month from now

There goes another job vacancy

Let's say you've been made redundant.  It's a dashed grim time to be made redundant.  And let's say you've been made redundant from a company situated only two miles from where you live.  It was ideal, until they started culling staff.

But there's hope!  Let's say that an agency rings you up to tell you about a great opportunity with a friendly, financially solid company that's twenty miles from where you live - a twenty-five minute direct motorway commute, but a whole eighteen miles further than you're going at the moment.

Which of the following do you think? -

1. Twenty miles versus two miles?  Now that doesn't compare favourably.  I'll say no, wait a month, and review my situation.

2. Twenty miles versus... being unemployed during an economic recession?  Give me some of that.

The guy on the phone this morning was adamant that he wouldn't consider anything beyond a short commute for the next month.  We're not a hard-sell kind of agency, so we stopped short of hectoring him, threatening to abduct his family, etc.  His plan, he said, was to look for wish-list jobs now, and broaden his search later if that didn't work.  Sounds like a reasonable strategy, no? 

Trouble is, this opportunity won't be around in a month, and we don't get vacancies like this too often.  In a month's time, comparable opportunities, if they exist, might be forty miles away - and this guy will be asking for jobs within a twenty mile radius.  At which point he might consider reflecting that, had he been a little more prudent, he might already have an offer for a job a mere twenty miles away.

True, he (or we) might find something within walking distance from his house over the next month.  In which case, all he would have had to do was withdraw the application to the twenty-miler.  Submitting his CV to our client today wouldn't have bound him to anything; it would merely have broadened his range of possibilities, at a time when plenty of people would happily commute much further than twenty miles in order to have a secure job. 

My advice to people being made redundant?  Put yourself in your own future shoes, as it were.  Be as flexible now as you think you will be in a month's time.  If you think you'd look at a twenty mile commute in a month, don't rule it out now.  If you'd look at jobs forty miles from where you live in a month's time, don't close doors on opportunities now.  If you will be facing a life on the street, sleeping in skips and trapping cats for food, and would happily accept any job, then don't rule anything out now.  Remember, an application doesn't bind you to accept a job - you'd have to be shortlisted, interviewed and given an offer first, and even then start-dates are negotiatiable. 

Of course, if you definitely wouldn't consider a twenty mile commute in a month's time - for whatever reason - you've no reason to consider it now.  But bear in mind that opportunities aren't raining down from the heavens at the moment; in tough times, flexibility is strength.

 cee eff:

jobhunting for nomads