You see it every year. Students are right on track with their job search, but then they go home for the holidays. They’re torn between family events, shopping, and catching up with their old friends. Then your job seekers return to school stressed out because they’ve fallen behind in their plan to land a job after graduation.

While it’s important for students to enjoy the holidays, if they don’t make time for the job search, they will miss out on great career opportunities. Luckily, with a little bit of forethought, they can find ways to incorporate their job search into the holidays. All it takes is a little guidance from a career services professional, like you.

Help your job seekers make the most of their break by showing them how they can participate in the holiday revelry while focusing on their careers. Here are three tips to keep your job seekers on track during this busy time of year:

Healthcare. Technology. Startups, in general. There are some industries where the competition to be the top company is insanely high. These organizations move at an exciting pace and are at the forefront of trends that are changing the world. Because of this, working for these companies is invigorating.

It’s also more difficult for job seekers to break into these industries. Employers are more selective when assessing job seekers because employees in these fields need to work twice as effectively and efficiently. If you want to transition into a highly-competitive industry, you cannot simply approach the job search the traditional way.  

Here are three tips to help you stand out as a job seeker in a competitive industry:

Every year, the hiring process evolves. Organizations prioritize finding different traits and skills in candidates. There are new technologies that job seekers need to be familiar with to stand out. Changes in the economy and workforce shift how much power job seekers have in their job search.

As a career service professional, you need to be on top of the latest hiring trends. By educating yourself, you can filter out what information is relevant to your students and better prepare them for their job search. But given all the information that is out there, this can become overwhelming.

Luckily, most of this year’s hiring trends are playing out in favor of job seekers. Help your students make the most of the hiring landscape. Here are three hiring trends you need to focus on to give your job seekers unique advantages:

Let’s be honest: this is not a good time for employee retention. In fact, a report from the Labor Department found that 3.3 million people willingly left their job in May of this year. That’s the highest percentage of employees to quit since April 2001.

For companies that are already having a hard time filling open positions, this is terrible news. Now you need to double down on both talent acquisition and employee retention. Otherwise, given all the great employment opportunities that are currently out there, even passive job seekers will start to leave your organization.

To keep your team members happy, you need to understand what they’re currently missing from their job. By making these changes, employees will be less likely to say yes when another job offer comes their way.

Here are three ways to keep passive job seekers from leaving:

It’s an exciting time to be a job seeker. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the unemployment rate stands at just 3.9 percent. This means employers who are looking for great talent don’t have as many options.

If you’ve been thinking about changing jobs, now is the time.

But you need to be a smart job seeker. It’s important to understand where your power lies. Then you can better position yourself and land your dream job.

Here are three things job seekers need to keep in mind when unemployment is low:

Within three years of initial enrollment, about 30 percent of undergraduates in associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs who declared a major had changed it at least once, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education. The same study found about 1 in 10 students changed college majors more than once: 10 percent of associate’s degree students and 9 percent of bachelor’s degree students.

Many current college students can relate to the desire to change-up their major. Whether you’re bored, it’s overwhelming, or it’s just not what you were expecting, it’s perfectly reasonable to graduate with a degree different from your initial major.

Changing your major for the better will decrease your stress levels and increase your motivation to excel in school. However, if you don’t consider every factor before making the switch, the results can negatively impact your career success years down the road.

Search for the perfect job, write application materials, attach resume, network, and repeat.

The job search process is long and tedious. To do it well, one application can take hours from start to finish — and that’s after you’ve found the perfect listing. It truly is a full-time job all by itself.

When you mix in an actual full-time job and impending unemployment, the stress is overwhelming. Unfortunately, even though you’re in a hurry to secure a new position, the hiring process is dragging for many companies.

In fact, according to a 2017 Glassdoor survey, the average hiring time is higher than ever at 23.8 days. That number is up almost a full day more compared with 2014’s average of 22.9 days — and depending on the industry, that number only gets longer.  

Even if your employer offers a fair amount of termination notice, most job seekers struggle to find a new job before their final days of employment. To have an effective and efficient job search, employees being terminated or laid off must face the job search with a strategic plan.

Here are three tips that will put you on the fast-track to finding a new career — even when you have a full-time job:

Recruiters don’t type keywords into a job search engine and cross their fingers hoping top candidates pop up. In today’s recruiting world, social media, effective job boards, and an emphasis on company culture allow recruiters to look deeper into potential candidates and their whole person.

While this is a pro for both job seekers and employers, it means students entering the application process need a whole new set of skills and better career advice. And with recruiters maintaining that employee referrals remain the top source of high-quality hires, those skills must include networking, understanding hiring pros, and building meaningful relationships.

Students will be entering a workforce that’s at an all-time unemployment low. To help them stand out above the crowd, it’s critical career counselors teach them how to be self-marketing experts — no matter their field of study.

Here’s the career advice you need to give your students to turn them into self-marketers:

This post was updated in September 2022

We have some bad news for female job seekers: letters of recommendation could be biased against you.

Research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology found that recommendations written about women were more likely to contain “doubt-raising” language that called her skills into question. As a result, women with these types of letters were rated less qualified than their male counterparts.

The study qualified “doubt-raisers” in four categories: direct negativity, indirect criticism, hedging, and irrelevant information. For example, a letter might say “she might make a good leader one day.” At first glance, this statement seems positive, but it implies doubt that the woman has what it takes to lead.

This information might be disheartening for women. After all, you can’t control what someone writes in a letter of recommendation. But you can take steps to counteract this bias during your job search.