It is mid-October, and the fourth quarter of the year is flying by!

If you don’t like your current job, right now is a fantastic time to start job-hunting. Here are five reasons why:

1. The most common fiscal year-end is December 31. Companies large and small have allocated money to hiring new people, but if they don’t hire those people by the end of the year, the approved headcount may disappear. Hiring managers are under pressure to make new hires before the end-of-year holidays!
2. If you wait to begin your job search until after the new year, you will delay  your exit from your current less-than-wonderful job situation by up to six months, compared to getting the job search underway now. If you start getting Pain Letters out to hiring managers quickly you could start your new job in December or January.
3. Once the holiday frenzy sets in, hiring will become a much lower priority for everybody except the poor manager who is desperately trying to find someone like you. Managers who need to interview new hires before job offers can be extended will be much harder to schedule after Thanksgiving than they are now.
4. If your materials are in-house at your prospective new employer during October or early November, you stand a good chance of being fast-tracked through the organization’s recruiting process. If you wait until the new year to reach out to employers, the urgency will have abated. You will be one of gazillions of job-seekers who are flooding the market with resumes in January.
5. Lastly, the end-of-year craziness will take up a lot of your time and energy. Most of us take a few weeks at least to recover from all that commotion. If you start your job hunt now, you can be in a vastly improved professional state come January first — not just beginning to think about moving up and onward from your current state!

Here are the steps to follow once you decide to get your job search under way:

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How To Get Your Job Search Started

• Decide what kinds of jobs you want to pursue. Lose any thought you may have that the brand “Jack of all trades” is your best bet — it’s not. You have to decide what sorts of positions you are best suited for, and focus on those.
• Brand yourself for the jobs you want, in your Human-Voiced Resume, your LinkedIn profile and in your face-to-face and virtual networking.
• Make a Target Employer List of organizations you’ll focus on in your search.
• Network like crazy. Holiday networking is your best friend right now!

There are ten very useful weeks remaining in the year. Why not use those ten weeks to your career’s advantage?