Career Advice: Spring Clean Your Job Search

April 22, 2010 — -- Baseball is back. Flowers are in bloom. Garage sale season is on. And everyone you know is frantic to shed those last few winter pounds so they can rock their favorite swimsuit come June (not to mention clean out their closets so they can find that blasted bathing suit in the first place).

But when you're job hunting, organizing your closets and summer social calendar shouldn't be the only to-do's on your spring cleaning list.

If your winter search for work has met with limited results, it's time to give your job-seeking strategy a sprucing up, too. Because come beach season, the only things you're going to want to dust off are your barbecue recipes and margarita glasses.

So before Memorial Day whizzes by and we slide clear into leisure season, let's talk about how you can clean up your job search.

Stop Banging Your Head Against the Wall

By now, you've probably heard it said 100,000 times that networking is king and the job boards are a sucker's game. But if an unlikely method of drumming up viable job leads is working for you, who am I to argue?

Heck, I know someone who knows someone who knows someone with no prior TV writing experience who got hired to write for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" by answering a Craigslist ad. I'm betting you've heard similar success stories.

That said, if a particular aspect of your job hunt hasn't turned up a single lead, it may be time to take a step back and try something new. If you've spent the past six months hitting every job fair in town or trolling the job boards from dawn till dusk with nary an interview to show for your efforts, it's time to make room in your schedule for some new maneuvers.