If you’re like most job searchers, you have occasionally felt your job hunt losing steam. This is especially common around the holidays, when other time constraints may make job hunting more difficult. Here are a few New Years Resolutions to help you get your search back on track.

1. Send out your resume the same day you see the job listing.

This can be a hard one, especially if you’re nervous about rejection. It’s much easier to spend a couple of days thinking about a job listing, asking friends if they think you should apply, sprucing up your resume and generally procrastinating. What’s worse, if you let the job listing sit around long enough, you may eventually decide it’s been too long, and you may never apply to the job at all.

Also, especially if you found the job listing online, you can bet that there will be plenty of competition for the job, and after the hiring manager has looked at a hundred resumes or so, their eyes will start to glaze. For this reason, it’s a tremendous advantage to be one of the early ones so that your resume is at the top of the stack the hiring manager sees. Promising yourself that you will try to apply to jobs within 24 hours of seeing the listing is a great way to improve your chances of getting a good job offer.

2. Keep applying even after you’ve received rejections.

If one employer after another has turned you down—or worse, they failed to even respond—it’s very easy to become dejected and stop sending out applications. Of course, this is the surest way to make sure you aren’t offered any positions. Instead, try to send out one application for every rejection you receive. After all, the more resumes you have circulating, the less each one will sting if you aren’t offered the job.

3. Stay in touch with your network.

When you’ve been searching for a job for awhile, it can be difficult to get in touch with people, especially when those people are always inquiring about how well your job search is going, forcing you to explain, “Well, I haven’t found anything yet….”

However, that network that sometimes makes you roll your eyes can be the same people who introduce you to the right person, invite you to the right party, or send along your resume to the right office. Without your network, your job search will likely be slower, and it will certainly be lonelier. So pick up the phone and stay in touch with them.

If you’ve let your job search slide a little, don’t despair. New Years is the perfect time to get it back in shape again. Write out your job search resolutions, post them someplace visible, and stick with them—you’ll be back on track in no time.



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