Many job seekers unfortunately limit their search to the use of well-known job portals such as Indeed and plain job listings on social networks for professionals like LinkedIn. While there is nothing wrong with using such tools as part of your overall activities, there are three good reasons why they shouldn’t become the main focus of your search.
The problem with public job listings
1. Competition
Listings on these platforms are intended to reach as many suitable candidates as possible. In crowded job markets, that means your job applications will face fierce competition from other candidates. Normally, there is only one position to fill. If you don’t manage to present yourself as the number one candidate in the end, you will not get the job even if you are the second best and ahead of many others.
Therefore, unless you believe to be the perfect candidate for a particular opening and you know how you can convince the other side of it, applying for jobs listed on public platforms quickly becomes not only a waste of time but also very frustrating.
2. Quantity
Over the years, publishing vacancies on these platforms has become very expensive for employers which makes placing job ads there a matter of last resort for them. The fees that recruitment agencies and headhunters charge are even worse and many businesses cannot afford to use such services.
Neither can you rely on finding all available jobs on the websites of hiring companies because it can take them a lot of time to write the job descriptions and they don’t want to get spammed with bad applications.
So, whenever they can, hiring managers and recruiters fill their openings through other means.
3. Quality
The more attractive the open position, the easier it is to fill it. Therefore, it is safe to say that the best jobs normally do not get advertised at all. That means you will need to find a different way to discover them. In the end, you want to get a great new job and not just any new job, don’t you?
What that means for your job search
In summary, the three problems explained above lead to the fact, that most job vacancies never get advertised or listed at all. It’s in the nature of this fact, that reliable statistics on it are hard to get. However, the estimates of the number of hidden job vacancies I’ve been hearing from industry experts for years now consistently fall within the range between 60% and 80%. So, if you limit your search to the use of job portals and the websites of large corporations, you’ll miss out on not only the best but also most openings.
Focus on professional networking instead
So, how can you tap the potential this giant hidden job market offers? There is only one good answer to it: smart networking! Here is why:
- Professional networking allows you to target exactly the fraction of the job market that is actually relevant to your search profile. That maximizes not only the number of suitable openings you become aware of but also your chances to get hired for one of them. At the same time, it minimizes the number of dealings that turn out to be only a waste of time for you.
- Professional networking will provide you with valuable information about the open positions and their context far beyond what is written in the official job descriptions. That will help you make better decisions and present yourself particularly convincingly as the best candidate.
- Professional networking gives you better and earlier access to the actual decision-makers. That will save you a lot of time and may also reduce the number of other applicants you have to compete with because the managers primarily focus on your application first.
So, to optimize your job search and the outcome of it in the form of a great new job, make networking your primary activity for it. If you do not know where to start, click on this link.