Tough Economy Jobs

We’ve all heard about the hidden job market – the idea that many available positions never make it to the job boards because they’re filled by internal referrals. We’ve all been told that once those jobs do reach the job boards, they will be hit by so many applicants that it will be very hard to stand out.

What does this mean for a job seeker? That to increase your odds of landing a good job, you should get yourself referred to the hiring manager. That sounds great in theory, but the very reasonable response of most job seekers is:

“What if I don’t know any hiring managers? What if I don’t have those contacts?”

That’s a fair question, and platitudes about seeking referrals don’t help. You need to find a way in. In this and the next post, I’m going to show you a technique for doing exactly that.

To start with, you’ve got to figure out where it is that you want to work. Make a list of 10-20 positions that you want to get into, and do your homework about the company. Make sure that you really do want to work there, and that you’re a good fit for the company.

Once you’ve got your list, open up your web browser, and surf over to LinkedIn. You do have a LinkedIn account, right? If not, then create one now, and add all of your contacts immediately. LinkedIn is a phenomenal tool for job searching, but most people don’t understand how to use it. It is not just a way of posting your CV online!

Think of LinkedIn as the business version of Facebook (come on, you do know Facebook, right?) – you have your profile (which is a business profile in this case, so basically your CV), and you have connections to “friends”. These are your contacts.

Here’s the real beauty of LinkedIn. You know how if you search for someone in Facebook, it will tell you who your mutual friends are with each of the search results? LinkedIn does that too, only super-charged by two souped-up features:

1. LinkedIn won’t just tell you who your mutual contacts are with the search target, but also what is your closest degree of connection, and through who. In other words, if I search for Bob Brown, LinkedIn might tell me that my friend Jack knows a woman named Sarah (who I don’t know), who knows Bob. Armed with this information, I can ask my friend Jack to ask Sarah to get Bob’s contact information for me.
2. LinkedIn allows you to search by fields other than the person’s name. For example, company name.

These two features together mean that you can take your list of target companies, search for them, and get the chain of nearest connection into each of those companies. This is an incredibly powerful technique, and I urge you to try it right now.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how you can turn these cold leads (because let’s face it, they are pretty cold, through a friend of a friend of a friend) into warm referrals to the hiring manager. Don’t call anybody yet – wait for the next post before you do that. Start by just listing your target companies, and your chains of connection into each one of them.