Job hunting
the act of looking for employment
Job hunting, job seeking, or job searching is the act of looking for employment, due to unemployment, underemployment, discontent with a current position, or a desire for a better position. The immediate goal of job seeking is usually to obtain a job interview with an employer which may lead to getting hired. The job hunter or seeker typically first looks for job vacancies or employment opportunities.
Steps
Locating jobs
Common methods of job hunting are:
Finding a job through a friend or an extended business network, personal network
Through social media platforms, some of which have inbuilt job platforms and searches
Using an employment website
Job listing search engines
Looking through the classifieds in newspapers
Using a private or public employment agency or recruiter / headhunter
Looking on a company's web site for open jobs, typically in its applicant tracking system
Going to a job or careers fair
Using professional guidance such as outplacement services that give training in writing a résumé, applying for jobs and how to be successful at an interview.
Visiting an organization to find out whether it is recruiting staff or will be doing so in the near future and contacting the hiring manager or Human Resources department
As of 2010, less than 10% of U.S. jobs are filled through online ads.
Researching the employers
Many job seekers research the employers to which they are applying, and some employers see evidence of this as a positive sign of enthusiasm for the position or the company, or as a mark of thoroughness. Information collected might include open positions, full name, locations, web site, business description, year established, revenues, number of employees, stock price if public, name of chief executive officer, major products or services, major competitors, and strengths and weaknesses.
Networking
Contacting as many people as possible is a highly effective way to find a job. It is estimated that 50% or higher of all jobs are found through networking.
Job recruiters and decision makers are increasingly using online social networking sites to gather information about job applicants, according to a mid-2011 Jobvite survey of 800 employers in the US.
Likewise, job seekers are beginning to use social networking sites to advertise their skills and post resumes.
“Job hunting” enters the record as the act of looking for employment. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what hunting, looking and employment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Job hunting” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, hunting, looking and employment provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q629194. The Library of Congress control number is sh85070579. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010 and 2011.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Job hunting”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Job hunting primary sources, Job hunting archive and hunting research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Job hunting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.