The Truth About Job Searching During the Holidays: Why It’s the Best Time for Your Ministry-to-Marketplace Transition

♟️ STRATEGY SHIFT: 3 considerations for your pastor career change during this season.

Let’s talk about these trends and what you should do about them.

When the most hires happen within a month.

This is the most obvious and first thing we can see. Obviously, January is a much higher hiring month than all the others.

Also, May, June, August, and September are higher hiring months.

But this doesn’t mean that you should apply in those months. It means that you should be preparing and networking in the months leading up to those higher hiring months. 

If you are on a shorter timeline, you want to be ramping up right now. 

Spend time… 

• Figuring out clarity on the type of job that you should do next

• Going in deep on translating your ministry experience so that it makes sense to hiring managers

• Building out your resume and cover letters

• Figuring out which organizations are most likely to see your ministry background as an asset rather than as a liability 

• Starting conversations with the people who will actually help you get a job.

  
  

(All of those hyperlinks go to other newsletter posts in which we go deeper on that subject).

All of this and more is what we focus on in the Interview Accelerator. Getting you to be the most attractive candidate possible for jobs that fit you and support your family. We’d love to have you.

The difference between applications and hires.

This is also important to show competitiveness in the job market.

Just because August and September are times when companies hire more, that doesn’t mean that it is easier to get the job. The lines are even here.

Applying in a time where the teal line is below the purple line (February) might actually be better than in September. 

So even though the summer months represent close to 40% of the hiring, they also represent 40% of the applications.

January through March represent 29% of the hiring, but only 21% of the applications.

The 3-month window of hiring.

While the job offers might have come in one month, many interview processes last longer than one month.

So if January represents 15% of hires, it also could represent close to 15% of interviews as well! And that would just really be in a 3-week period, so that would likely be creeping into November.

That means that (and this is just an estimation from me), 25% of all hires are being interviewed in the months of November and December (if you look at hiring percentages from November to January. 

That’s 25% of the interviews in that 25% of the year.

An additional note on the graph.

This is comprehensive data from LinkedIn. Industries differ in hiring practices based on fiscal years and busy seasons. While this trend can be applied to many jobs that you might be interested in, it won’t be true for all.

For example, I was hired in my HR job coming out of church on December 3. That’s the “lowest” hiring month of the year.

The company I worked for has a fiscal year starting in July. December was their May.