In a Yahoo piece today, Stephanie Loicacono wrote about the “hidden job market” and has a few ideas for those job seekers who are tired of throwing their resumes in with the masses. She quotes a stat: ”80% of all jobs are never advertised.”
That is somewhat correct. And our own stats at LINKUP.com basically agrees with her. BUT. What she really means is that 80% of the jobs are never advertised off their own website. More companies today are posting ALL their job openings up on their own career portals, where they can announce early openings for employees, and where they can control every employment branding issue. This is becoming more and more important as employers realize that posting a job on a jobs site like Yahoo, Monster or CareerBuilder really means that this job will soon be on 50,000 OTHER job boards. This is why duplicate listings on job boards…for the same job…is a huge problem for most job seekers.
Our site LINKUP.com is different. It is too bad Stephanie did not mention LINKUP.com because we are helping thousands of job seekers every day discover how to tap into the hidden job market.
(I entered “yahoo” into the powerful LINKUP.com job search engine and got nearly 1,000 jobs currently available. Check it out here.
2 users commented in " Tap Into the Hidden Job Market "
GL–Ms. Loicacono’s advice seems pretty shallow to me. Linkedin? If you’re an exec/professional/whiz kid, maybe. For the rest of us, I don’t see it as much help. My tennis buddies? Enough said. At my agency, we preach the Nick Corcodilos lesson: Spend at least as much time (preferably much more) pursuing companies as you do postings. One of the best ways to do this is with ReferenceUSA (see my article at the Riley Guide http://www.rileyguide.com/cwalker.html). In August I put together a call list for a client who had been laid off as a blow molder. When he called the 55 companies, more than half said they were not hiring but to come in and fill out an application. This says to me that when they have an opening, they want to fill it from a manageable stack of apps from people with the initiative to contact them rather than suffer the avalanche of crap they’re bound to get from a posting.
Ms. Loicacono is right that becoming known is very important. My boss likes to say ‘It’s not what you know, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.’ According to the careerxroads.com annual survey of Sources of Hire, 27.5% of new hires are the result of referrals (8.5% come from the big 3…er big 2 I mean…job boards).