You need to know where to look, when job hunting, and how to look.

If you haven't done this before, there are a few basic tricks you must learn:

Some job sites will be good, others will be quite useless. The job sites you need regularly have jobs in your line of work, and are easy to use. Some big sites are terrible, quite unhelpful, have old jobs on them, and are slow.

You should be able to get through all the current ads pretty quickly, if you're well organized, and find the jobs you're looking for easily.

That means you can do the day's applications same day, and be ready for any new jobs tomorrow.

You can see why a routine helps.

Believe it or not, it is quite possible to be so disorganized that you can't even achieve an application a day.

One of the realities of job hunting for the unemployed is that there are other demands on your time. These start from the moment you register for unemployment benefits. They're also compulsory, and messing up your unemployment insurance isn't something you want to have to worry about.

Interviews also consume time, productively, we hope, but you can assume at least three hours will be used up in the travel, interview and recovery phases.

That's why making absolutely sure you can do your job hunting in peace is so important. Time is being used up, and you're really chasing the problem, not catching it, if you have to be everywhere but looking for a job.

There's a further complication. You also need to be contactable for employers during the day. Nobody's going to mind leaving a message, but as you can see, that also involves more use of time in getting back to the employer, arranging times, or answering questions. Phone interviews are also getting much more common, and you need to be free for those. All of these things add up to more use of time.

The more you can do immediately, the less catching up you have to do.

When you're home, job hunting and getting things done, you're actually getting a lot more done than you might realize.