Job Seeker Time Study

StyleCareers.com recently conducted a survey of roughly 2000 fashion industry professionals on their job search habits. Whereas the previous post in this series dealt with employer branding at the job listing level, this post deals with the amount of time fashion industry job seekers allocate to job search tasks; looking for jobs, researching potential employers and professional networking.

On average, how much time do you spend each week looking for a new job?  

This chart shows the overall responses.  It does not make any differentiation between job seekers that are currently unemployed, under-employed or those candidates that have jobs.

Here’s how it breaks down when we separate the unemployed, under-employed and those that have jobs. 

As expected, job seekers who are currently employed spend the least amount of time looking for a new job.  The surprise here is the roughly 50% of fashion industry job seekers who are unemployed AND who spend less than 10 hours each week looking for a job.

How much of your job search time each week, is spent on researching companies?

About 58% of all fashion industry job seekers spend 1-2 hours each week researching potential employers and almost 25% spend 3-5 hours.

Here’s how it breaks down when we separate the unemployed, under-employed and those that have jobs. 

The expectation is that the unemployed would spend the most time researching potential employers for the simple fact that probably have the least time constraints.  Interestingly, the fully-employed are spending 1-2 hours researching the companies they’d like to work for.

How much of your job search time each week, is spent networking?

The majority of the fashion industry job seekers spend 1-2 hours networking each week.  The number that stands out is the 22% that do NO employment networking.

Here’s how it breaks down when we separate the unemployed, under-employed and those that have jobs. 

The expectation is that the unemployed would more time networking than those that have jobs.  Looking at the chart below, there really isn’t a huge difference in time spent; regardless of employment status, job seekers are all spending about the same amount of time networking.