The Sunday Scaries aren't supposed to keep you up at night. But lately, they do. It's 9 p.m., the weekend is slipping into Monday, and the dread starts settling somewhere behind your ribs. You already know what this week looks like, because it looks exactly like last week. And the week before that.
That all-too-familiar feeling is becoming more common. Gallup's latest workforce survey found that 51% of U.S. employees say they're either actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities, a number that’s near the highest rate of turnover intent Gallup has tracked in a decade. But optimism about the job market isn’t nearly as high: just 28% of workers think now is a good time to find a quality job.
A lot of people are in a version of the position you’re in: unhappy enough to want out, but uncertain enough to wonder if leaving is even the right move. For many, the underlying question is whether they can actually look for a new job without blowing up the one they still have. This article walks through how to do exactly that: how to tell when it's really time to move on, how to run a discreet and strategic search while you're still clocking in every day, and how to evaluate what you find so you don't land in the same spot six months from now.
Before you update your resume or refresh LinkedIn, career coach Annette Garsteck wants you to slow down for a week. Your situation may feel urgent, but the moves you make in the next month will go better if you've done a small amount of work on yourself first. Garsteck specializes in coaching people through transitions while they're still employed, and she's spent years watching them skip these steps and later wishing they hadn't.
"These are probably things you should be doing for yourself all the time and have skipped or neglected because you're so heavily stressed at work," she says.
Garsteck's favorite first-step exercise is low-tech. Take a piece of paper and fold it in half. On one side, write down the things about your current role that you love and want to carry into your next job. On the other side, write down what you want to leave behind.
"Maybe you need to set a better boundary to leave behind the calls you were getting at 7 in the morning and 7 at night," Garsteck says. "This list usually points to something we've let slip. Not being clear about our work hours, not setting the expectation that there's a work me and a home me. And then the lines and the boundaries just get all woven together."
This exercise gives you two things: specifics you can screen for in interviews, and a quick reality check on whether a new job is actually the fix. Sometimes the paper reveals that you don't need a new employer so much as a conversation you've been avoiding with your current one. More often, it confirms what you already suspected and hands you a clearer target, whether that’s a similar role at a different company, or a full career transition.
Once you know what you're looking for, start gathering the materials that will prove you're worth hiring. Performance reviews. Metrics you own. Dashboards that show your impact. Project wins with numbers attached. Anything that tells the story of what you've actually accomplished, and that you have the skills employers are looking for.
"You want to make sure you have that information at home with you," she says. That's partly a practical point. The day you decide to leave, or the day your employer decides for you, is not the day you want to be scrambling to reconstruct your last two performance reviews from memory. It's also a trust-building exercise with yourself. Having the evidence close at hand makes the search feel less theoretical.
"The current job search environment is very, very relationship-based," Garsteck says. The network you have right now — former colleagues, old managers, people you trained with, the contact you grabbed coffee with twice in 2023 and then lost touch with — could be the network that will actually help you find your next role.
The problem is that stressful jobs tend to eat into exactly the relationships you'll need later. You stopped returning messages because you were drowning. You skipped the industry meetup because you had a deadline. None of that was a mistake in the moment, but it leaves you starting a search with a colder network than you should have.
Start warming it back up now, before you actually need anything. A message that says "thinking of you, how are things?" lands differently than "I'm looking for work, can you help?"
A normal job search is about visibility: you want as many people as possible to see your resume and your LinkedIn profile. A search you're running while still employed is about controlled visibility. You want the right people to see you, and the wrong people not to. That changes which channels work.
Public job boards are the default, so most people start there. Garsteck doesn’t recommend it.
"If you're conducting a confidential job search and you do not want people at your current job to know, networking is the way to go, because you'll only tell people who will keep your information in confidence," she says. Your network gives you control over who knows what. A public application doesn't. The company you're applying to might call your current employer for a reference without warning, or a mutual connection might mention the conversation to someone on your team.
Applying online isn't off-limits, but it shouldn't be the lead. Start with the people who already know your work.
Recruiters at staffing agencies match candidates to roles at companies they already have relationships with. For an employed candidate, the role a staffing agency or internal recruiter plays is specific: they act as a confidentiality buffer between you and the market.
"Recruiters are always looking for the best candidate, and they're going to keep you confidential, because they don't want somebody else to snap you up," Garsteck says. Their self-interest aligns with yours.
There's a second benefit: access. Staffing partners have existing relationships with companies you'd otherwise have to work to reach. So instead of tapping three connections to find someone who knows someone at your target employer, you're working with someone who already has that relationship.
A good recruiter is also a source of information you can't easily get on your own. "Interview the recruiter extensively about the company's culture and the interview process," Garsteck says. "If they're very transparent and willing to share, chances are you'll get the information you need." If the answers feel thin on a first call, keep asking. A recruiter who's genuinely advocating for you will work to get the answers, even if they don't have all of them on the spot.
You don't have hours every day for a job search when you're working full-time. Garsteck says you don't need them. "You don't need three or four hours a day to conduct a valid and complete job search," she says.
Fifteen focused minutes at the start of lunch is enough if your job alerts are already filtered, already going to your personal email, and already arriving as a daily digest so you're reviewing once instead of reacting all day. Save the heavier work (applications, interview prep, LinkedIn updates) for evenings or weekends.
Garsteck's advice for the evaluation stage is to treat the interview process as a two-way information exchange. The company is deciding whether you're a fit. You're deciding whether they are, and you have more leverage to ask than most candidates realize.
These five questions are worth considering before you accept an offer:
None of these are trick questions. They're the things a thoughtful candidate would want to know before making a move that affects the next several years of their career. The answers you get (or don't) tell you whether this opportunity is a real fix or just a different version of the job you're trying to leave.
If the paper folded in half told you it's time to move on, a Kelly recruiter can be the confidentiality buffer Garsteck recommends. One conversation, kept private, with someone who already has relationships at companies you'd otherwise have to work hard to reach. That's a different kind of job search than the one you're probably used to, and for someone who's still clocking in every day, it may be the only kind that actually works.