In most of the calls I have with jobseekers, they will ask me about The Hidden Jobs Market.
Is it real?
How can I access it?
But before we get into that, we should talk about tomatoes.
As you read this next section, imagine a tomato is a job.
So you want to procure some tomatoes. How do you do so?
Your local farm shop. The supermarket. Wednesdays stalls.
Maybe you subscribe to a weekly box of veg.
Maybe you grow your own.
Maybe you trade for the tomatoes from Tim’s allotment.
Maybe you look at people funny when they ask for an intro to Tim because his tomatoes are so wonderful.
You likely wouldn’t buy some from Amazon - they don’t sell fresh food. Not to me anyway.
Though you might buy tomato seeds from Amazon if you grow your own.
Maybe even cans of crushed tomato, sauce, puree or whatever meets your needs.
As the channel you use to source tomatoes isn’t the only consideration, so too is the configuration of what you need.
While you and others all access tomahtos in different ways, some of which overlap, and some of which are mutually exclusive - none of these channels are hidden.
It’s just that you may not know how to access some channels, while others won’t be available to you.
Now I want you to read that section again, but instead of being your desired job, you are an employer whose desired tomato is a candidate of choice.
Indeed, while recruitment is a reciprocal business that reflects, the analogy is better from the employer perspective because they are on a buyer’s journey where you are the product.
Employers simply want to fill their vacancies through the most economical means.
Some vacancies are easy to fill, others not so, and they will access the channels necessary to find the right people.
In many situations, they won’t advertise a vacancy, which might be for reasons of confidentiality or simply convenience.
Some say this is as much as 80%, a flawed figure which comes from a flawed survey by Lou Adler, or perhaps it comes from a newspaper article in 1974 before computers.
What employers don’t do is hide vacancies systematically.
To access these vacancies, you need to understand the channels through which employers hire, and invert these channels to form your strategy.
Much like how tomatoes are sold through channels which consumers buy from.
Is The Hidden Jobs Market real?
Yes and no.
Yes in the sense that not all jobs are advertised.
No, because it isn’t a term that has inherent meaning.
Speak to people who advocate for it, often a career coach, and they’ll tell you
it’s personal branding! It’s networking! It’s going direct! It’s being referred in!
which are all channels you can access as part of an appropriate multichannel strategy.
Which means if you have the right multichannel strategy, you access all jobs, including those which are hidden and those which are in witness protection on another continent.
Yes, it’s true that many vacancies are not advertised in the public domain.
I currently have two vacancies I’m not advertising publicly, yet this doesn’t mean I’m not trying to find candidates as comprehensively as possible.
The channels I use are CV databases on job boards (which I also use when I do advertise), LinkedIn, networking, asking for referrals, tapping into my own contacts, and headhunting.
These are the same channels you can tap into to access what some call hidden jobs.
Who are the headhunters that specialise in your domain? Nurture those relationships.
Who are the people who can refer you to jobs?
How can you be more findable on LinkedIn and CV databases?
How can you gain an understanding of how your ideal job is recruited, so that you can take advantage of those channels?
Those are better questions to answer to allow an effective multichannel strategy involving outbound and inbound leads.
Despite me being vocal about why Hidden is a flawed notion, two people have thanked me for advice that led to their new roles claiming they’d accessed the Hidden Jobs market.
As I gritted my teeth in hidden rage and congratulated them on their success, they unveiled the truth.
What they actually did was map out their real life network of people they’d worked with and gotten in touch.
If the people you know don’t know that you are looking for a role, what reason would they have to tell you about a role?
It’s simple marketing - right place (linkedin), right person (ex-colleague), right message (looking for work), right time (we’ve a vacancy).
Of course that takes a bit of luck to achieve the right congruence.
Odds you increase through volume and follow up.
And when you do find those opportunities, they are easier to win because you are a known name, not another unknown CV.
So there it is, the truth of the hidden tomato market.
Whether or not you subscribe to my view, don’t forget the vacancies in plain sight too.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg
p.s. Jay made a great point on the intro post, in that I shouldn’t try to be too helpful, in case you get a job quickly and unsubscribe. However, I like to think that if you secure a role and have hiring authority, you’ll be interested instead in my recruitment newsletter, which you can find here: