I wrote about the hidden job market, based on a tweet I shared a few days ago. I promised to share where this hidden job market is.
When I was in my job search I went to a two day workshop. I didn’t want to go – I thought that two days outside of my office (away from my email) was too long. But that workshop opened my eyes to ideas in the job search that I hadn’t thought about – and I realized I was doing all the wrong things.
One thing I learned was about when people (a) know about jobs, and (b) apply to jobs. Imagine this scenerio:
Let’s say your boss comes to you and a coworker and says “I just got approval to add another person to our team. Do you know anyone that knows how to ___________________?”
At this point, about 3 people know about, or really care about, this position. To the rest of the world it doesn’t exist.
You might recommend a few people, who get resumes in. Your boss (the hiring manager) has a handful of resumes… and not much clutter to wade through.
Then, other people in the company learn about it, and a few more resumes come through. These are warm leads, and they get attention.
Let’s fast forward a few weeks to when the job opening is formal, and posted on job boards. Especially in this market, there are hundreds, thousands…. maybe hundreds of thousands of people combing the boards… when they see that guess what? They send in a resume.
This is when the resume submissions go from less than a dozen (when no one knew it was there) to more than hundreds.
It is no longer a hidden job.
Does this make sense?
The hidden job market, as far as I can figure out, is the jobs that no one knows about… the jobs you might find out about before the rest of the world finds out.
The bad news is that there is no website to find the hidden jobs… that’s why I said in the last post that it takes time, effort and tact. I’ll wrap it up in the next post.
