Inside the $10,000 job search: Career coaching, LinkedIn fees, résumé help

Mint

3 days ago

It takes a lot of money to make money, especially when it comes to looking for a job these days.
Josh Morgan, 45 years old, was laid off from his senior finance role late last year. After several fruitless months of searching for a new one, he paid a company about $10,000 for six months' help.
The firm provides weekly meetings with a career strategist to evaluate open roles and sources potential jobs from talent recruiters. It also created a personal website for Morgan and lets him use software that helps tailor his résumé to job descriptions.
'They're like a marketing company, and I'm the product," said Morgan, who lives in Greensboro, N.C. He is still looking for work but says the price will be worth it if it helps him land a job faster. 'I'm in a fortunate position to be able to do it."
Two converging forces are driving up the cost of finding a job for many Americans. One is the exploding cottage industry of networking and job-search subscriptions, career-coaching services and artificial-intelligence tools—all capitalizing on job seekers' frustrations in a stalled hiring market. The other is the growing length of the average job search as companies slow recruiting and leave positions unfilled.
It now takes the average worker 24 weeks to find a job after losing one, nearly a month longer than a year ago, according to federal data for July. And the number of long-term unemployed is rising.
The longer people have to pound the pavement looking for work, the more the costs climb.
'I wasn't anticipating this much of an investment," said 28-year-old Kyle Talley, a former audio technician who started looking for a job in coding or cybersecurity last year.
Talley has since spent more than $200 on LinkedIn Premium for networking and about $900 on coding classes to show employers he is up-to-speed on the latest tech. He paid $50 for a career coach and more than $700 for paid AI tools like Grok and ChatGPT Plus to improve his résumé and sharpen his coding skills. Another $500 went toward study materials for certifications that mentors and professors said were must-haves to land work.
What Talley has shelled out for the job hunt doesn't count everything he has invested in training for a new career. He spent $17,000 last year for an eight-month coding boot camp and now plans to attend college for cybersecurity.
James Finley, a software engineer in Glen Carbon, Ill., became so frustrated from three months of searching that he explored putting his website URL on a digital billboard for $100 a week. He nixed the plan after getting a job offer last week.
'It's trying to be louder than anyone else," said Finley, 39.
Spending money on LinkedIn Premium, where connections can help users find someone on the inside, 'has a pretty big ROI"—return on investment, said Edward Voelsing, founder of Rivet Group, a recruiting firm in the Charlotte, N.C., area. Connections are helpful in a stagnant market, where applicants can average 100 applications for every interview, he said.
Masha Tatianina, a 47-year-old product designer, employed such a strategy before landing a contract role in July—she spent several hundred dollars over three months of job hunting.
In addition to LinkedIn Premium, she paid about $80 for FlexJobs, a remote-work database. She subscribed to Teal, a jobs site that suggests positions and recommends résumé changes, for about $80. Plus, there's Claude, Anthropic's artificial-intelligence assistant, at $20 a month—what she calls a 'game-changer" for interview preparation.
Yet there's no guarantee all of the expenditures, and hustle, will get results. Looking for a business or engineering internship, Mialy Jacky, a 26-year-old graduate student, has been traveling to networking events. In the process, she has spent more than $1,000 on conference registrations and lodging, plus transit and food, and about $75 to join national associations for mentorship.
Jacky briefly had an internship offer last summer but had to keep looking when the program was canceled. Some of her costs come from not wanting to miss any opportunity: After an unexpected flight delay in Dallas, Jacky bought a $50 networking outfit from T.J. Maxx, then drove to corporate-office suites, distributing her résumé—without success.
She is now gearing up to find a full-time job after her November graduation and budgeting $200 to travel to an August networking event in San Antonio.
'I'm not sure what else to do, what other resources I haven't thought of," said Jacky, who lives in West Monroe, La.
Sometimes it's the least-expensive moves that yield results.
Andrew Yates, 43, tried for 10 years to break into the human-resources field without success. He took out $22,000 in loans to earn a master's in HR from Colorado Christian University to get an edge. Then he spent $225 to take a test through SHRM, an industry group, to get a 'certified professional" designation.
What ultimately worked? He mentioned to a man he met at the gym that he was job hunting, and his new workout buddy gave him a referral to his company. Yates got hired and moved to Dallas for the role.
That $20 monthly gym membership ended up paying dividends, he said: 'I guess that was a job expense, unknowingly."
Write to Lindsay Ellis at [e-mail]