Your anecdotal experience isn't very important though. I've gotten jobs with search times of 3 months, 1 month, 16 months, and my current search is 14 months. T

Your anecdotal experience isn't very important though. I've gotten jobs with search times of 3 months, 1 month, 16 months, and my current search is 14 months. The salary weighted average would put it close to, but slightly less than, 10 months, and the average salary is a bit higher. No one's claiming it's a perfect rule. Only that it's useful on average. I do live in an area without many jobs for the current search, but I am not searching for jobs in this area, only in other areas with many jobs. In previous searches I was living in large urban centers with well-known tech companies, large start-up communities, famous universities, etc. etc. and it did not materially make the search time shorter on average. Overall though, I don't care as much about your anecdata vs. my anecdata. I more believe the heuristic because so many people describe it as accurate and it has been around a long time and vetted by people who work in recruiting professionally.