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The Most Effective Way to Find a Job
Advice from Donald Asher
Forget perfecting your résumé or working on your interview skills. Executing a good job-search strategy is far more important than either of those, and the best way to conduct a job search is to find the hidden job market.
First of all, you should know that a job is only advertised if an internal, informal placement effort has already failed. It will not be posted on the career site or placed in a newspaper or listed with a recruiter or agency if the manager can find someone to fill it first. In other words, all jobs that are filled by the informal network with a company are never advertised. This is the hidden job market.
The term “hidden job market” makes it sound like a conspiracy, but it isn’t. It’s just good business practice. Why go through the time delay, the expense, and the hassle of advertising a position if you can find someone to fill it first?
This is extraordinarily important for you to know: About half of all job openings are never advertised. Job market research consistently confirms this. So if you look only for advertised jobs, you’re missing half the job market. The advertised jobs are like the tip of the iceberg, while the rest of the iceberg is invisible. You have to find the hidden job market to run a successful job search.
But that’s not all: Announced positions draw the most competition.
Where the Competition Is-You Don’t Want to Be
Let’s analyze the competition at each stage of job creation, starting with the worst-case scenario: an announced opening. An announced opening is any position that is posted on a job board or a company’s website, advertised in a newspaper, or placed with an executive recruiter or employment agency. Announced positions comprise 100 percent of the positions that are not in the hidden job market, as well as some that are occasionally considered part of the hidden job market but aren’t-and the competition for them is fierce.
If you’re going to apply for positions that are posted on job boards or company websites or in newspapers or with executive recruiters, you have to be a very strong candidate. Why? Because you are competing with hundreds of other candidates to win the job.
How many people apply for announced positions? An advertisement for a good job in a medium-sized city will draw between one hundred and three hundred applications. In a depressed economy, it will draw even more. In San Francisco, a posting for a bartending position at a popular nightclub drew six hundred applications. The club held “open auditions” for the bartender spot, and four hundred people showed up. That’s for minimum wage plus tips, in a city with one of the highest costs of living on the continent…
In short, you could apply for announced openings forever and never get one. People who get jobs by applying for announced openings are overwhelmingly obvious candidates, with impressive and directly related recent experience. College students and recent grads are among the least likely candidates to get advertised jobs that draw hundreds of applicatons…
What about the internal, informal placement stage? This is a pretty good spot to look for work. Once a manager starts to ask around his department for help, he’ll learn about just a handful of candidates. Questions like “Do you know anybody who could help us out with this marketing campaign?” will generate a few suggestions. Or he may decide to look at some of the unsolicited applications that come across his desk every day of the year. Or he may call human resources and ask to look at resumes of a certain type. The internal, informal process may generate four to six candidates, sometimes a few more. So your competition at this stage is four to six, much better than hundreds or thousands.
But that’s not all: this is where the overwhelming bulk of hiring occurs. So by getting involved before an opening is formulated, you’re gaining access to these jobs. And you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to better than the handful of other candidates who will also be considered.
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Copyright © 2004, 2009 by Donald Asher From the book HOW TO GET ANY JOB 2nd ED: LIFE LAUNCH AND RE-LAUNCH FOR EVERYONE UNDER 30 (OR HOW TO AVOID LIVING IN YOUR PARENTS’ BASEMENT) published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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