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I. Before You Begin Your Journey
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- Hidden Job Market/Developing a Network
- InformationaI Interviewing
- Targeting Companies
- Penetrating into your Targeted Company
- Getting Organized
Hidden Job Market/Developing a Network
While the visible job market can be a useful avenue to employment, it is not the most effective route. Over 70% of job openings require a bit of digging to access. Such positions can be found not through ads, fairs or agencies, but through both activating your personal network and approaching companies directly.
The more people with whom you discuss your job search, the more opportunities you will discover. Information offered through your personal network (of friends, family, past co-workers, etc.) often leads to a potential job. An effective job search strategy includes daily interpersonal contact, both by talking with people you already know as well as by meeting others. Building and then continuing to expand this network allows you to maximize your chances of finding employment.
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Through the CONNECT! Job Seeker Center, NOVA offers the following workshops to increase your networking skills:
WIA-enrolled clients can also join a Job Club. The Job Club is a weekly group session where participants ask job search-related questions, plan weekly job search activities, report back on activities, and receive support in their job search efforts. For more information about Job Clubs and workshops, call NOVA at (408) 730-7232 or see workshops. |
Networking: Making the initial contact
- Before contacting anyone, practice your skills statement. Make each person aware of your skills so that she or he can inform you of appropriate leads.
- Whenever you make a contact, be positive. Explain your situation but focus always on the future, not on the past.
- Ask for information that might lead you to a potential job opportunity (such as names of supervisors, personnel managers, companies which are hiring).
- Set goals about how many people to contact each day and fulfill these goals.
- Simply informing people that you are looking for work isn't enough. You must continually reactivate your circle of contacts, keep them working on your behalf. Chances are that you will have to contact a person more than once to keep him or her thinking about you.
- Provide a contact person with 3 copies of your resume to distribute. This will not only enlarge your circle of contacts, but provide a good excuse to call the contact back in order to ask if she or he needs additional copies of the resume.
- Ask your contacts for any job search advice. Be open to new ideas.
- While a person may not know of any job openings, he or she might know someone else who does. Your network grows and remains active thanks to these new contacts.
After contacting a person to whom you were referred, call or send a thank you note to the initial contact, describing the results. If a person helps you and receives no response, she or he is likely to assume that you don't need additional assistance. Keep your network alive through consistent contact.
Valuable job search information can be provided by those persons currently employed in the type of position in which you might be interested. By arranging an informational interview, you can gather facts about a particular industry or about specific jobs within that industry as well as open yourself up to actual job leads.
In an informational interview, you meet with a person currently employed in the job or field which interests you for the purpose of both gaining knowledge as well as widening your circle of contacts. By holding such interviews you can not only gather facts about your targeted industry and the specific jobs within it, but uncover actual job leads. Moreover, as members of your targeted field become part of your network, they can also offer useful feedback about your job search tactics.
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NOVA offers a workshop on Informational Interviewing which is open to WIA-enrolled clients only. In the workshop, participants find out how to successfully meet with company and industry insiders to get the best possible information available. For more information, call NOVA at (408) 730-7232 or see workshops. |
Targeting Companies
Another strategy to use in accessing the hidden job market is to target companies for which you would like to work (perhaps based upon data which you gathered through informational interviewing) and then actively pursue those jobs. Directly approaching a company which interests you and attempting to sell them your skills, without waiting to see an ad in the paper or be told about a job from a friend, often proves to be a very successful job search tactic.
Penetrating Into Your Targeted Company
In order to be employed at your targeted company, you must convince the person in charge of hiring that you are the best candidate for the job. But in order to convince this Personnel Manager or Hiring Supervisor of your superior qualifications, you must first speak with her or him. When accessing the hidden job market, you need innovative strategies which can enable you to reach the person who holds the power to employ you.
Three main obstacles stand between you and this key contact: his or her identity, his or her screening mechanism, and you. That is, your first hurdle is to discover the name of this key contact. Your second challenge is to angle your way through a maze of receptionists or secretaries in order to reach this contact. Finally, you need to conquer your anxiety, so that you are fully prepared to market yourself with enthusiasm and confidence when at last you obtain your key contact's attention.
These barriers can be overcome by applying creative tactics, patience and persistence. The first two demand a bit of detective work, the last calls for strong marketing abilities.
Discovering the key contact's name
• Call everyone in your personal network, looking for an inside contact. This insider might be willing to act as your ally, providing you with the key contact's name and other vital information about the company.
• Call the company and ask for the correct spelling of the name of the Manufacturing Manager (or whatever is the job title of your key contact).
• If this direct approach doesn't succeed, call different departments in the company and request the desired name.
• Arrive at the company, introduce yourself to employees as they come out after work or at lunch and ask them for the necessary information.
• Go to the local deli or café where people from the targeted company congregate and initiate a conversation with them.
• Take advantage of library resources such as Rich's Guide.
• Scan the directories of any professional organizations to which you might belong as well as university alumni associations or union groups.
• Utilize the library and career centers to obtain articles from newspapers and magazines dealing with various local companies. These articles may have valuable information including the names of key contacts.
The job search will include countless phone calls, letters, and meetings with numerous friends, acquaintances, and employers at many diverse companies, career centers, and in other organizations or settings. Since any contact (from meeting an employer to pursuing a classified ad) might prove a vital part of your campaign, you will need to keep a careful record of your job search activities and results.
After developing a system of organization which works for you, be sure to spend some time at the end of each day to keep track of the abundant paperwork that your active job hunt produces. Some strategies:
• Keep a daily record of activities (phone calls made, letters sent, people contacted, advertisements responded to, jobs applied for) and results (future leads, appointments made, interviews arranged). For example, establish a Daily Action Plan, follow it, then log the results.
• Record each contact with potential employers on a Job Search Record Sheet
• You may want to cut out the ads that you responded to and tape them into a notebook, writing down the date that you applied for the position and any other information which you learned about the company.
• Or, you might develop a 5 x 7 card for each potential job, which includes the business name and address and the name of your contact person, alphabetized by company. Writing your notes directly onto this card, you can keep a running account of each contact, the results of that contact and any future action to be taken.
• At the end of each day's job search, after organizing the outcome of your day's activities, outline a set of achievable, clearly-organized goals for tomorrow.
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