In today's economy, when a company advertises a job opening, they receive tens of thousands of resumes, and thousands of people looking for work show up at their door step. This creates a heavy burden on the company's human resources department. Is it any wonder that they keep their job opening a secret, leaving it to their employees and their friends and families to help locate suitable candidates for a position.
Companies are always hiring to replace people who quit, got fired, or retired. But intoday's economy, most jobs are not posted for the general public to apply. Most job opening information is kept private among employees, family and friends. And most of the people who get hired did not apply to a posted opening at all. The key to success in the current job market is breaking through to the hidden job market.
Are you spending all your time applying to posted job openings—postings that draw hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of applications? No matter how perfect you are for the job, there is always someone else who's a little more qualified, more experienced. Career guru Donald Asher offers proven strategies for finding great opportunities in any industry. Cracking The Hidden Job Market you'll stop wasting time and effort and beat the job-search odds by learning how to:
• find jobs that are never posted anywhere
• get complete strangers to help you find a job
• convince potential employers to give you an interview - even when they're "not hiring"
• find - and land - the new jobs in this, or any, economy
Every page of Cracking The Hidden Job Market is packed with no-frills fundamentals to change the way you look for a job, this time - and forever!
Excerpt:
You get a job by talking to people. You don't get a job by having a great resume, a good interview look, a firm handshake, or a solid education. You get a job because you get in front of somebody, and she decides to add you to the payroll. You get to talk to employers by talking to people. Most job seekers look for jobs by talking to computer software. It's faster to talk to people. People are more likely to pass you along than computers are. Computers are picky. People are helpful.
Your biggest job as a job seeker is to talk to people. That includes the classic interviewing for a known opening, or course, but it also means talking to everyone about your search. It also includes all modalities of contact, face to face, over the phone, via email, even old-fashioned snail mail. It definitely means working your contacts on social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and others.
Once you get to the point where you talk to strangers about your job search, you'll be close to getting a job. People in line to buy coffee. cab drivers. Someone with a cute dog in the park. They're the key. Social scientists have discovered that your first ring of contacts is actually not that useful to you. You have the same knowledge as all your close friends. It's those peripheral people who can connect you to the information that can break open your search.
Most job seekers think you get a job by hiding in the dark, submitting resumes for openings posted on the Internet, and hoping for the best. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You get jobs by talking to people. This has to drive your strategy.
Let me be exceedingly clear: talking to computers doesn't count.
Most jobs are never advertised. More exactly, most people who are hired did not respond to an advertisement of any kind. A job might have been advertised all over the place, but the person who got hired did not apply for that posting. This is critical information for a job seeker who wants to crack the hidden job market.
Think about Internet dating. Wow, are some people liars. They say they're wealthy and sane, when they're broke and crazy. It's the same with hiring. The national lie rate on resumes is about 25 percent. One in four job applicants has an outright lie on the resume. So what do you do about this? You favor candidates who have someone who will vouch for them.
Excerpt Continued:
Most people would rather date someone's cousin or coworker than a complete stranger. It's safer. Hiring works the same way. The hiring manager has a stack of 1,000 resumes, and a colleague walks in with a resume and places it on the desk and says, "I know this person. He's sane and presentable." That's a fundamentally different applicant.
Here's a point for you: hiring managers don't need to know you very much. If they know you at all, you go to the top of the pile. A friend of an ex-husband's tennis buddy's dog walker's accountant is a close enough connection.
Companies don't make you work too hard to get a job in the hidden job market. For example, they strongly favor hiring candidates who are referred by current employees. One third of companies hire someone for every four people introduced to them by current employees, and another third hire someone for every ten people current employees will vouch for.
The last third are more picky, but this is a profoundly important point: in many cases you will need only a handful of personal referrals to land a job! Compare that to the thousands of resumes floating around the Internet, and the thousands of applicants applying for postbed openings! (To read about the latest research on the size and nature of the hidden job market, see my website, Asher Associates
Contingent jobs are great jobs. Contingent jobs are part-time, temporary, or contract assignments. Many job seekers shun these jobs (until they get desprrate). Depending on which source you cite, though, somewhere around 10 percent of all jobs in the economy are contingent. That's a lot of jobs! And here's the clincher: about two-thirds of new jobs are contingent when they are created.
When a contingent job becomes a permanent one, the incumbent is almost always offered the chance to become a permanent employee in the same role. The trend toward internships and job "tryouts" even for mid-career adults is in full swing. "I've had people who are horrible at interviewing but are awesome employees, and people who are great at interviews and horrible employees," says Steve Newcomb, CEO of Virgance, which partially explains this trend.
This used to be a bottom-feeder area of the economy, but not anymore. There are agencies to help you find contingent jobs all the way up to CEO.
You have to bug people to get hired. You have to make contact several times with an organization to be hired. This will be driven partially by them and partially by you. They'll have a plan to interview you a certain number of times, for example. But you need to have a plan to get into their minds all the while you are under consideration. Don't ever let a hiring authority forget about you.
Onetime applications almost never work. If you make contact with a company and they say, "We're not hiring. You're not right for us anyway. we'd never hire you. We don't even like you," then let it go. Move on to the next idea. But if they say, "We're not hiring right now," or "You're not right for the opening we have now," then you've got to design a way to make contact with them over time. We'll look at some cool, creative, and game-changing methods to make contact and stay in contact. Hiring can take weeks, sometimes months, and you need to stay on the radar for the whole time. Never self-select out by fading away.
Michael Sykes of Glenwood, Illinois says, " Cracking The Hidden Job Market is an exceptional guide from Donald Asher who has twenty years of working with job seekers from CEOs to college students. It is written for a particular reader. If you are smart, hard working, a real contributor and someone who is open to new things,great! It will help good, intelligent, high performance people find employment and will advise and advance them to their personal and professional objectives!
This may not be the only job book that you will need! You'll probably need a resume book and an interview guide. You may need some reference works peculiar to your field. You should read a new career book about once a week during your job search. However, this should be your central guide to getting a great new job. Every page of Cracking The Hidden Job Market is packed with brusque, no-frills fundamentals to change the way you look for a job this time - and forever! Click here for more information.
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