Crouching Tiger, Hidden Job Market

One of the questions that I get asked most frequently is “how do you tap into the hidden job market?” I just had an information interview a young woman earlier this week who was asking that very question. I have done a number of talks on this topic for students at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. That is what we are going to go through in this post.

Your Network

First let’s start talking about what your network can do for you. One of the first things that you should do when you’re looking to tap into the hidden job market is to beef up your personal network. The low hanging fruit is people that you have a personal relationship with. What you need to do first is transform some of your personal relationships into professional connections as well.

Quite often we do not talk about what we do for a living with people that we care about. In my opinion this is a mistake. The people who care about you and who you care about want to see you succeed professionally. So go ahead and have a conversation about careers with your friends and see if they can help you come up with some ideas of where to find a job.

Before you go to your friends asking for help thinking of people you could work for, you need to have an elevator pitch about what you want to do for a living. What I mean by that is to be able to describe your ideal job without using a title in one or two sentences. It is impossible for you to know every job title that is suitable for you so let your friends do some of the intellectual heavy lifting for you in thinking about what jobs match what you want to do for a living.

Here are some examples of career elevator pitches that I have heard recently to give you an idea of what you should develop:

-       “I want to work with the public in something related to health issues. Maybe in policy or communications.”

-       “I like working in jobs where I am managing multiple projects at the same time. I find keeping all the balls in the air at once very exciting.”

-       “I am looking for something where I can use IT and/or research to help people better their circumstances.”

If you’re like me, your mind is already starting to go through all the workplaces you’re familiar with and making connections. The mind is an amazing connection-making machine. You want to craft an elevator pitch that is generic enough that it doesn’t force your friends to think of the same thing but with some hints of context in there that inspires their imaginations.

After talking to your friends, you should be building up a list of all the ideas they came up with and narrow that list down to the employers that you really want to pursue. That brings us to my next tip where we are going to talk about how to form linkages with companies that you want to work for.

Getting Your Foot in the Door

Once you identify the companies want to work for, you want to get your foot in the door. One of the presentations that I like to do is called “Dirty Rotten Tricks to Break Into the Hidden Job Market”. In the presentation (see below) I advocate using market intelligence research techniques to find the names and contact information for people inside the organization that can help you get a job there.

Check out the presentation above but I want to highlight my personal favourite trick: calling the voicemail system of a company late at night when no one is there. If the voicemail system has an automated attendant you can usually they press a letter key to find the names of people that work there. Go through it alphabetically and try to get the name and extension of everyone that works there.

Why would you do this? Because when you call the next day looking for a specific person such as Project Manager for Business Development you have the name and possibly the extension. This helps you get around secretaries and admin whose job it is to screen the calls going through to your target.

But this is just how you get the contact information. The real key is to avoid making cold calls. You want to make warm calls.

Warm Calls

The way to make warm calls is to find a piece of common ground with the person you want to talk to and make that connection. That piece of common ground is something you need to research, for example if your contact went to the same university as you – this is an excellent piece of common ground to form a connection with that person. In some cases you might have worked for the same employer in the past.

What I usually look for someone that we both know in common. For example I was on a project that required me to contact someone in the materials science department at a large aerospace company. Their automated attendant was a total brick wall. It would not allow me to surf around after hours – foiling one of my best tricks. What I did do was hop on the LinedIn.com and find a colleague of mine who worked there at one point in time.

I called him up and asked him if he knew someone in the materials science department and it turns out that he did! Not only did I get a name and a phone number for the person I needed to talk to but also a personal message to pass along when I called. This is an ideal warm call it what you’re looking for when you’re trying to tap into the hidden job market.

The thing you need to remember is most people with the authority to hire someone get bombarded with calls from people looking for work. You need to stand out from the crowd somehow and the best way to do this is to have a warm connection. The best way to create a warm connection with someone that you want to work with is to do your research and find a common connection between you and them.

Make sure you know as much about them, their job and the company they work for before you call so that you sound intelligent. Once you have them on the phone and you’ve made the connection, you need to pitch them on why they should hire you. Use a modified version of your elevator pitch that you developed for your friends and tell them why that means you’d be a good fit for their company.

How Big Is The Hidden Job Market?

I have seen some interesting stats from people trying to quantify the hidden job market. This always makes me laugh a bit because it’s like trying to calculate how much cocaine is on the market in LA right now. By definition, the hidden job market is hidden so any statistics you see about the size of the market is guess work.

I’ve seen estimates of anything from 30 to 80% of jobs are in the hidden job market. I don’t buy the 80% figure for a minute but anecdotally, I would believe something more like 40-50%. The fact of the matter is that there are always more jobs in the market than job classifieds will lead you to believe. Most employers only post a job publicly as a last resort and will first try for an internal candidate, then someone known to a current employee, someone currently working at a competitor and then last of all – some random that they find through a public job posting.

A Personal Story

I want to end with a personal anecdote. When I was a Research Analyst at the Science Council of BC (a job that I got despite the fact that it wasn’t posted), a young woman came by the office and pitched us on hiring her. She knew everything about what we did, she had researched each of us personally and found a common ground with each of us. She had a very clear description of what she wanted to do with her career and why she wanted to work at the Science Council. She also told us why we should hire her.

We were so impressed by this young woman’s proposition that we offered her a job on the spot even though we didn’t have any work available. We went to a couple of our partners and scraped together enough money to hire her as a resource on a joint project that the Science Council and another organization were going to undertake.

She was with us for about six months and then moved on to bigger and better things when the project finished. She was an excellent employee. I am going to post this posting on my LinkedIn network to see if I can garner any additional stories from folks who have found jobs in the hidden job market. Please post your own story in the comments section below.