By Neil Patrick
The unemployment figures are daunting and the competition
fierce. You can send out 100 resumes a week and still have trouble finding a
job. So, where is the hidden jobs market and how can you tap into it?
Depending on your location and industry sector, anything
from 60-90% of hirings are never advertised. That’s right 90%! That’s because
in these hard times, firms are increasingly reluctant to pay
recruiter fees. It’s also because firms are getting savvy about how they can
use their own networks, both personal and online to find the perfect candidate
for the role.
From the applicants perspective, since an advertised role
attracts an average around 200 applications, this means that your resume will
get an average of 5 seconds attention upon receipt – and yes that’s a fact
proven by research.
So signing up for jobs boards, scouring firms’ advertised
vacancies online and posting your resume speculatively is a really bad
strategy. It might make you feel better because you are so busy, but it’s a
recipe for a long and probably disappointing job search.
But there is an alternative and it means that you can be in
the 90% rather than the 10%. It also means that instead of fighting against 200
others, you may very well be one of just a handful of candidates considered.
Couple this with the other tactics that I have posted here and suddenly your
chances of success are more like 50% instead of 0.5% - that’s right 100 times
greater!
So how do you leverage your network to penetrate the hidden
jobs market? Well you can start right here with this video from an NYU
conference where several experts describe their experiences and provide some
great tips. It’s just 10 minutes long . How many good openings could you find
on the job boards in that time?
No comments:
Post a Comment