At this time of year, we tend to get panicked calls from candidates who for a host of different reasons find themselves desperate to find a role a role before Christmas.

If that’s you – should you be worried?

Generally speaking the market does slow, especially when the “silly season” officially commences after Melbourne Cup. There tends to be fewer new roles available as clients focus on dealing with end-of-year deadlines and increased marketing activity in the lead-up to Christmas, and lots of social distractions!

However, people do still change jobs regardless of the time of year so there are always some opportunities. Accounts continue to move and with that movement new roles do open up. It certainly not a hard and fast rule that it does slow down over Christmas – December and January last year were incredibly busy for our team.

Here are three ways you can maximise your chances of picking up work prior to Christmas:

Open up your search to short-term freelancing roles.

As the holiday season hits (it seems increasingly popular to avoid Christmas in Australia and take your holidays in December) lots of organisations (agencies especially) are short-staffed but still faced with tight deadlines. We often find there is a big need for contractors to jump in and handle busy workloads. And of course you never know where contract roles can lead to…..

Up your networking game.

There’s lots of Christmas get-togethers and industry end-of-year events – go to as many as you can. It can also be a good excuse to get your contacts together, you could organise a catch up for teams you have worked with in the past for example. Every opportunity you have to talk to people and spread the word that you are looking is invaluable – the wider the network of people “keeping an eye open for you” the more chances you have of connecting with the right opportunity

Do some seasonal work.

It may not be your ideal scenario, but maybe you can leverage the role into enhancing your CV. For example, take a retail role in a small boutique – and whilst there see if you can work on their Social Media presence so building your skills in that space. Go and work in a tourist-based business and offer to create some eDMs for them. Don’t say no to cashflow and try and think laterally about maximising opportunities.

So don’t panic – and as we always tell our candidates you don’t need there to be a hundred jobs – just the one job that is right for you.