We’ve explained previously that submitting resumes to job boards is a generally ineffective approach for actually landing a job. So how do you go about finding a job, then?
It is estimated that approximately 80% of jobs are filled through the hidden job market – that is, through jobs that are never advertised. That means the positions were never posted on a job board, on a company website, or anywhere for that matter. The hiring manager hired someone for the position for it was ever advertised.
How does this happen? And how can you take advantage of this market that accounts for the overwhelming majority of new hires?
This all goes back to our all-important principle: It is people (rather than companies) who hire people for jobs, and that we can understand the job market properly if we get into the mind of the employer. Do you remember how we described the process of hiring a babysitter? If you and your spouse wanted a quiet night out and hire someone to babysit your young child, how would you go about finding one? Would you put up a posting on Craiglist?
Of course you wouldn’t, but why not? Let me count the ways.
Finding a babysitter via Craiglist has the following drawbacks:
- You have no idea who you’re actually hiring. You really don’t want to entrust your child to a random person from the internet.
- You’d like to go out tonight. Finding someone via Craigslist can take quite longer than that.
- Odds are that multiple people will apply for the job. You’d much rather just hire someone that comes recommended than have to interview multiple candidates.
Well, all of these factors apply to full-time white-collar jobs as well.
If an employer wants to hire, say, a bookkeeper, she’d rather not post the job opening on a job board because:
- She’d have no idea who she’s actually hiring. She really doesn’t want to entrust her finances to a random person from the internet.
- She needed a bookkeeper yesterday. The financial mess has been getting out of control for some time before the employer decides that they really need to shell out the money to hire a full-time bookkeeper.
- Several hundred people will likely apply for the role, and who really has time to whittle that list down to the right candidate – assuming that the final candidate even really is the right person?
So what does an employer do if she wants to hire a bookkeeper without advertising the job online?
Well, what would our couple-who-wants-to-go-out do? They’d contact someone they already know and trust to be their babysitter. And if they don’t know of anyone, they’d ask trusted family and friends who they’d recommend, and then hire that person.
This, my friends, is the hidden job market. Yes, 80% of jobs are filled by employers reaching out to colleagues they already know and trust to fill the position, by either hiring the colleagues themselves, or the people who the colleagues recommend.
It makes a lot of sense why the vast majority of jobs are filled this way – because an employer would much rather hire someone they know and trust that hire a random person from the internet!
So, how do you take advantage of the hidden job market? We’ll address that in our next post.