How to find a new job while you’re still employed

Your grandmother’s advice still stands: Don’t quit your current job until you have a written offer in hand. Yes, it is a job-seeker’s market, with more perks and flexibility on the table than in past years. But it can take months, requiring multiple rounds of interviews with several levels of signoffs, to actually land a new position at a different company. The “Great Resignation” — which sees people quitting in droves without having another job lined up — applies predominantly to hourly workers and not to tech experts, says Donald Burns, an executive career strategist and resume expert based in New York. “Most IT people aren’t leaving that way,” he says. For the majority of white-collar workers, “there are all kinds of delays [to finding a new job] due to economic uncertainty and extreme caution exercised by employers” because of bad experiences, he explains.