Job Search: Hide & Seek

Hide and seek, a classic children’s game.  The premise is simple.  One child is “the seeker” and all the rest are asked to hide.  The last one hiding is the winner.

Job Search is just the opposite. You want to be the first one “caught”.  Thus, you need to be the most obvious place “the seeker” will find you.  Put another way, you need to visible in the most likely place “the seeker” will be looking.

In the Winter-Spring 2010 Staffing Management magazine, there is an article called: New Age of Recruiting Relies on Direct Contact. The article was based on the finding of JCSI Corporate Staffing survey of Human Resource professionals.  Interestingly, the survey participants said they have no plans to use;  TV/radio ads, online videos, open houses or newspaper ads.  So where are companies looking to fill open positions?

If you are a job seeker and you want to “get caught”, you need to put these additional survey finding to work:

Human resource professionals plan to increase:

• The usage of LinkedIn
• The usage of Facebook & Twitter
• Tapping into employee referrals
• Their own corporate websites as a recruiting platform.

Human resource professionals plan to decrease:

• The usage of retained search professionals
• The usage of contingency search professionals
• Posting positions to online Job Boards
• The old fashioned career fairs

If you look at the eight bullet points above, one cannot help but notice 3 Internet driven recruiting techniques are growing, while the use of search professionals and job boards are decreasing.  This is exactly the job seeking shift we’ve been talking about for the past year.

Do not fight these trends.  Embrace the Internet as the emerging central platform for finding your next job faster.  Build a strong online identity, use automated job search software and “Get caught”.

Finding Jobs Online

How do individuals prospect for work on the Internet?

Staffing.org [ www.staffing.org ] recently surveyed job seekers to learn about Internet job search behavior.  Two thirds of all respondents indicated they spend time on the leading job boards. 

 Specific to the survey, the top 4 sites used were:  Monster 63%,  Career Builder 57%,  Hot Jobs 34% and  Craigs List 31%.  This correlates directly to the idea that despite there being as many as 10,000 job boards on the Internet, the largest sites still dominate consumer traffic.

Interestingly, studies have shown that only 10-15% of all jobs are filled through job boards. 

 So why are so many job seekers spending time on job boards?  The answer is multi-faceted.

1. Job boards market and advertise like crazy and thus they are always front of mind. Do you realize three different job boards had Super Bowl ads last year?
2. It’s easy to do.  Simply sit at home and surf  The Net!  It is the path of least effort.
3. To the credit of most job boards, there is a lot of interesting career transition content on these sites.
4. The consumer is not educated to the idea that most jobs are not ever filled through job boards.  They are still operating under the guise that Job Boards are today’s newspaper and newspapers are where you find jobs.

Out recommendation to those in career transition:  If  job boards successfully match candidates to jobs 10-15% of the time, they, at most, deserve 10-15% of your job seeking time.  Take the other 85-90% of your time and tap into the hidden job market.  How do you find the hidden job market?  By researching and networking through companies that would fit your personal targeted hiring profile