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Deft or Dumb: Quit Job to Focus on Looking for Another?
By Joyce Lain Kennedy

Dear Joyce: I'm putting in long days in a job I'm beginning to hate. I feel like I'm wasting away while others are getting rich or at least doing exciting things. At 27 years old and a college graduate, I'm still at home with my parents because I can't afford my own place. I've tried a little online job hunting at night, and I never fail to read the Sunday classifieds. There just aren't enough hours in the day to conduct a good search. I've been told that I should just quit my job and devote 40 or 50 hours a week to finding a better job. What do you think? -- S.H.G.

"I'm unemployed because I want to take care in steering toward the next level of my career" is the marketing rationale people use to explain in interviews why they are unemployed. It's a good spin, but don't go out of your way to have to use it.

It is almost never a good idea to end employment merely to make a career move. This is a candidate-driven (more jobs than quality people to fill them) market; employers are not as picky as they are in slow economic times when they have more people to choose from. Even so, employers still wonder what's wrong with you if you're jobless.

Change your time-management techniques and look for recruiters who, because companies are so desperate to hire, are more willing than before to function as your champion, often taking you to places you could not have reached on your own.

Recruiter Darrell W. Gurney, author of a new book I liked well enough to write its foreword, "Headhunters Revealed! Career Secrets for Choosing and Using Professional Recruiters" (Hunter Arts, www.hunterarts.com, 1-877-443-2348, $14.95), explains why, given a choice, you should remain fully and gainfully employed until you find your next position. A summary:

A hiring organization values something another employer has more than something it can get free. Call it human nature, but employment status is a screening mechanism.

Staying with your current job pays the bills. Your decision will always be better when you come from a place of finding something that really speaks to you rather than settling for a job out of desperation.

By remaining employed, you don't have as much time to become anxiety ridden, wondering when the perfect opportunity will turn up. The process can take a long time. Why sweat it?

What about arranging interviews? Gurney says that's not difficult if you're a strong, viable, marketable candidate: "Recruiters and employers will flex around your schedule for interviews because they always place greater value on a working candidate."

What if you're not a high-demand candidate? "Simply having more time won't help," Gurney advises. "Perhaps (by quitting your job) you will be able to bob around to interview with more headhunters, but there is little worse in salability than a less-marketable, out-of-work candidate. The why-unemployed question becomes a louder death knell."

What about individuals who are unemployed, often through no fault of their own? Isn't the premium that employers place on employment depressing? It need not be if you become a savvy job searcher. My advice to jobless professional, technical and managerial talent: Go ahead and talk with headhunters in this labor-tight economy -- you could get lucky. But search proactively on your own, too. Once you sew up a job, whether a regular-status position or a contract-consulting gig, look to your future by establishing or solidifying relationships with one or more recruiters who can fire the rockets for your next change.

Most narrow-niche executive-recruiter books fail to provide simple, meat-and-potatoes directions to develop career-productive relationships with search professionals. "Headhunters Revealed!" is an exception; it really is a blueprint for extracting the best rewards in working with recruiters.

E-mail career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at jlk@sunfeatures.com.