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Serial job hunters – Is there such a thing as job hunt addiction?

Written by: Charlotte Rogers
Published on: 11 Nov 2020

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Sometimes when you really care about something or you are determined to reach your goals, it can be very easy to over-do it. There is a very fine line between not spending enough time and spending too much time searching for a new job. It’s important to try and find a good balance, just like you would with work and your personal life.

You might even keep job seeking after you have already found and accepted a job. This is fine if you feel like you have already achieved all you can at that particular job, but if you’re constantly trying to find something better after you have accepted a job, you might be too invested in the goal, but not the steps it takes to get you there. So, what exactly is too much?

 How often do you find yourself looking at job sites?

The amount of time you spend on job boards, job sites and other job seeking platforms can really tell you if you need a break. Are you updating sites every hour to see if there are any updates? Or are you even looking on job boards at silly hours of the morning, when you KNOW that no new jobs would have been posted? At this point it might be getting more of an obsession that a necessity.

If you’ve had a think and this sounds a little bit like your current experience, then it might be good to have another look at how long you should be spending everyday job seeking. This is where a schedule would come in handy. A schedule should be personalised to you. Take all elements of your life into consideration before scheduling time slots for your job seeking. If you have a full-time job, it might be a good idea to limit yourself to 1-2 hours daily and take one day a week to use as a break.  

If job seeking is currently substituted as your 9-5, make sure you are sticking to a certain time. Start as if you were going to work and finish at a scheduled time. After that is finished, take the evening off and use it to make plans or use the time to make sure you are keeping up with other life errands.


Are you always looking for something better?

You aren’t job seeking just for the sake of it, your job search should have an end goal. Usually, it’s to find and accept a job that fits in with your career goals and you can see yourself enjoying. Once you get that job, your next step shouldn’t be to one up yourself and try to find something new and better. Not only will this become exhausting, but it can get in the way of your professional progress. Job hopping can be a good thing and can show that you are determined to learn and experience different things, but you need to give yourself time to learn these things.

There will always be something better, but it’s important to understand if you’re ready for that step or not. Is it worth wasting the opportunity you’ve just been given to see if the new one is any better?

Do you have time for other things?

An easy way of knowing if you’ve been spending too much time on your job search is to look back and see what else you have accomplished over the last week. Have you done anything else in your spare time? Are you going out, exercising and eating well enough? If you have no time for anything else, you should try and cut down the hours you spend job seeking, simple. It should be worked around your life, not become your life.

Your job search might be important but spending too much time looking for a job and always striving for something better can become an unhealthy way of looking for a job. If you’ve been spending a lot of time, continuously, it can be a hard habit to break. But the more unnecessary time you spend on something, the higher the risk of burnout. You don’t want to be behind on other parts of your life and your job search should bring something positive to your day, not bring constant stress and worry. It is possible to take your job search too far, so if you find yourself doing this, do your best to try and take a step back for a while.