With a brand new year upon us, and a new presidential regime taking over this year, it’s safe to say nobody quite knows how the job market will respond and whether the economy will be taking a turn for the better or worse in the months ahead.   And while the U.S. unemployment level remains at a relatively low 4.2% rate, it’s also safe to say that such statistics don’t always tell the full story and that if you’re between jobs, your own personal unemployment rate is more accurately stated as 100% — and usually in fairly urgent need of being addressed!

This being said, if you’re going to be on the hunt for a new role in 2025, here’s a handful of tips I’d encourage you to factor into your “new year’s resolutions” regarding your career situation and finding a new opportunity:

1. Commit to real networking, not cosmetic networking.  Alas, quite a few job hunters seem to feel the end-all-and-be-all of networking is simply to alert your contacts that you’re in the market for a new job and then to sit back, waiting for them to send leads your way.  Unfortunately, this passive strategy usually doesn’t produce much in the way of dividends.  Instead, I encourage you to treat networking as a very significant, action-oriented aspect of your job hunt that involves directly asking people to make specific referrals on your behalf, educating them about the types of challenges you can solve, following up to alert them about your progress, and giving them tangible tasks to help with such as reviewing your resume, sharing interview advice, serving as a reference, and the like.  Each day, in other words, you should be reviewing the list of people you know and thinking of new ways to possibly engage them in helping you realize a successful outcome — and in addition to investigating ways to make new contacts, as well.

2. Focus on finding suitable employers, not just open job leads.  As I repeatedly emphasize to my client base, there are over 60x more companies in Seattle alone than most people typically estimate — and on top of this, the vast majority of hiring that takes place never sees the light of day in the form of a published advertisement.  So while sure, it’s totally possible that you could land your job the traditional way by applying to posted roles, I recommend you go the extra mile to find and engage tons of additional companies that aren’t openly advertising and/or that you haven’t heard of before.  Find networking pathways into these companies, if you can, or simply monitor their career page on a regular basis to see what opportunities materialize.  As a case in point, I spot-checked the websites of numerous small-to-mid-size employers around town and less than 30% of the job openings they had posted on their own sites were appearing on the typical job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn.

3. Up your interviewing game.  In the heat of a job search, it’s easy to fixate all of your attention on the task of trying to land new interviews, since that’s typically the biggest bottleneck job hunters run into these days.  Make sure you carve out sufficient time to improve your interview skills as well, however, so that when you finally do have a “golden opportunity” come along you can truly put your best foot forward.  In my own experience, I find the average job hunter to be, well, average at interviewing.  Not good and certainly not great.  I’m also repeatedly told by employers that many candidates come across as unprepared for interviews and that their answers fail to differentiate them in any significant way.  So even if you think interviewing isn’t a major part of your problem, I’d still encourage you to find time to work on that aspect of your job search toolbox a bit — and to take advantage of the ton of resources, tools, and practice websites that exist out there today.

4. Embrace AI, even if you hate it.  Sure, we could have a long and dramatic discussion about the role of AI and whether it’s the best thing ever created — or is an existential problem that might lead us down the route of the Terminator movies.  Simply put, however, AI is rapidly emerging as a tool that’s having a profound impact on virtually every job/career path out there, including my own.  So whether you’re an HR professional, an accountant, a technical writer, or an admin assistant, you’re going to get left behind if you don’t start learning how to use tools like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT to at least some degree.  The good news is that all of these tools (at least in their basic form) continue to be absolutely free and there’s a wealth of websites and videos out there explaining how to use them productively for different purposes.  So if you’ve found yourself behind the curve in this respect, I’d encourage you to make 2025 the year you get caught up with the trend — or better yet, out in front of it where your AI chops might make you a more attractive hire!

5. Have a game plan.  Lastly, as much as it may not seem like it, the challenge of finding new employment shares a lot in common with the other types of challenges people tend to embrace this time of year – such as getting in shape, losing weight, and the like.  As with any tough goal, the key ingredients to success are discipline, commitment, and focused effort.  So if you’ve been job hunting without a real game plan, daily routine, or measurable daily goals, 2025 might be a great time to “up your game” and put such structures in place.  Virtually any career coach can assist you in coming up with a suitable framework, but this certainly isn’t required if you can draw upon your professional strengths to create an effective goal-setting and tracking system, yourself.  At the end of the day, while you can’t directly control how many interviews you generate on an ongoing basis, you CAN control the effort you put into the process and gain an edge by approaching the problem with all of the same rigor and fortitude you’ve likely channeled into any other “professional” challenge on the job.  See the few prior articles I’ve written here, here, and here for a few interesting angles of looking at this particular issue…