The beginning of the year is a great time to step up your job search game, but searching for a job now takes more time than ever. On average, job-seekers now spend 3 hours and 16 minutes searching for jobs each day — 44% longer than during the 2008 recession.

Searching for a job is now a part-time job in and of itself. Over the last decade, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of online resources for the job search, so any job seeker looking to conduct a comprehensive search needs to dedicate some serious time. People are getting choosier about their jobs too, so there’s extra time involved to ensure you’re finding the right job. And employers are inundated with applications so you have to apply to more jobs than ever to make sure you’re one of the lucky few who land an interview.

Don’t have that kind of time? We can help.

Not only that, but we crunched the numbers from a variety of sources and found that:

Job satisfaction is down — on average, people stay at jobs for 1 year now rather than 2 years.

If you’re at the top of your field, employers are willing to do more than ever to try to keep you happy.

There are some easy things you can do to give yourself an edge.

Job satisfaction is down

Not happy at your current job? You’re not alone. 71% of currently employed people in the US are thinking about looking for a new job or actively looking already. And we’ve found in data from our users that people are leaving jobs sooner, likely an indication of lower job satisfaction.

The average job tenure has gone down from 2 years to just 1 year. No longer do you have to feel guilty about cutting and running 12 months in — this is the norm now, and companies aren’t likely to hold it against you.

Employers are trying harder than ever to keep top talent

The class divide continues to grow. Compensation is up, but improvements on this front have disproportionately impacted the top income-earners.

In the last 10 years, total compensation for 90th percentile income earners went up by 26% compared to a 21% increase for 10th percentile income earners — but the real gap was in benefits, where the value of benefits for 90th percentile earners went up 37% compared to a mere 15% increase for 10th percentile earners.

Employers are trying their best to attract and retain the best talent, and that doesn’t just mean paying them more, it also means providing them with great benefits.

How can you make sure you get as much as possible from your next job?

Don’t sell yourself short : apply for those “stretch” jobs even if you’re entry-level and the posting asks for 3 years of experience or you only meet 50% of the requirements.

: apply for those “stretch” jobs even if you’re entry-level and the posting asks for 3 years of experience or you only meet 50% of the requirements. Once you do get an offer, don’t forget to negotiate. 73% of employers are willing to negotiate salary, but 55% of workers don’t ask .

. Get creative with negotiating. If the salary can’t budge, you may be able to get a better title, more vacation time, or a more flexible working arrangement.

You can give yourself an edge

Want to get yourself out of your current ho-hum job into your dream job? Based on our analysis throughout 2018, here are some key things you can do to maximize your chances of getting an interview.

Looking for more ways to give yourself an edge? Check out our definitive guide, summarizing all the analysis we did in 2018 (35 data-backed tips!) on how to improve your chances at getting an interview.

Methodology

In-house Analysis

To determine the change in average job duration, we randomly sampled 55,587 employments across 15,041 users from TalentWorks. Then we grouped those by the month each job ended and computed the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile job durations for each month. All analysis and graphing was done using python with pandas, sklearn, scipy, and bokeh.

Outside Sources

Why Are We Doing This?

With ApplicationAssistant right now, we can boost the average job-seeker’s hireability by ~5.8x. But, what makes ApplicationAssistant work has been an internal company secret until now. We’re fundamentally a mission-driven company and we believe we can help more people by sharing our learnings. So, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Creative Commons

We’re not only sharing this but also sharing all of it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In other words, as long as you follow a few license terms, this means you can: