December is a Hot Hiring Month
By Colleen Clarke, Career Specialist and Corporate Trainer

Start your engines, ready, set go! December may be a holiday month but it is also the highest hiring month of the year. New budgets, projects and contracts come out in January, so December is when employees are hired to fill those availabilities. Don’t tell anyone though, as most work seekers love to use Christmas as an excuse to slacken their search pace.

To make sure you are one of the interviewed in December, speed up your number of Advice Calls or Informational Interviews. Some businesses do actually slow down a tad a couple of weeks before the holiday so it could be fairly easy to set up an appointment to pick a brain, so to speak. Put together a list of companies you would like to work for or that you would like more information about. Call up the most senior person in your area of expertise, possibly a hiring manager, not the human resources department, and set up a 20 to 30 minute networking meeting.

In this meeting you should present yourself as professionally as possible. You need a concise, succinct, 90 second to 3 minute presentation about yourself which includes your accomplishments and skill competencies. Be careful, if you are meeting for advice, ask for advice. If you are meeting because you would like to actually work for the company be upfront about your goals and desires. You should make sure the person you are meeting knows exactly why you are asking for their time.

Another tactic is to ask everyone you know whom they know that may be able to move you forward with getting you where you want to be in your career development. You never know who knows who. Each one of us knows approximately 100 to 1000 people so get asking. DO NOT ASK FOR A JOB per say. Ask for advice, information, opinions, data, expertise or help. Tell people you are doing research and whatever you do keep the conversation on that level.

Be sensitive to industries that are overwhelmed at Christmas, like retailers and restaurants. It is best that you wait until January to set up appointments with them.

Keep your momentum up as December 25th looms closer. Employers may well respect and admire someone who is still slogging away until the final hour. Once upon a time I had an advice call in the morning of my flight home for Christmas, December 23. I got called in late January for an interview for a newly created position that didn’t exist when I did the Advice Call. I started work 10 days later!

Have a hopeful and peace loving holiday season.

Colleen Clarke, Career Specialist and Corporate Trainer - Author of Networking How to Build Relationships That Count and How to Get a Job and Keep It - www.colleenclarke.com - 416-686-3079

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