Hidden Job Market Penetration Tactics

I read an interesting column on the Californina Jobs Journal website this morning by David Perry, author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. Perry offers some search engine-optimized tactics for penetrating the Hidden Job Market that are well worth mentioning.

As you (hopefully) know, it is absolutely critical to tap into the Hidden Job Market for maximal job search success. Surely it's old news to you that 85% of all jobs are never advertised in print or online and that only 4% of job seekers who use online search methods actually find jobs through the Internet. Today the savvy job searcher makes sure they implement strategies to get their resume directly into the hands of hiring managers rather than relying on shotgun resume dissemination to produce results.

How can you do that? Perry suggests leveraging the power of Google to source leads and background information. In short, he recommends that you:

• Pinpoint the type of job you want and the location where you want to work.
• Use a search string like [advertising + "new york" + directory OR conference] - with your terms inserted, of course - to source company names in your preferred geographic location. The terms "directory" and "conference" will help you to tap into online directories in your target industry or online listings of industry conference attendees.
• Repeat this process until you have exhausted your list of industries/job functions and preferred geographic locations.
• Now identify the company websites associated with each employer your search turns up and peruse each site to pinpoint the names/job titles of people you can send your resume and cover letter to. You're not looking for names of HR Directors. Instead, you are searching for executives and department heads who ultimately hire in the part of the company you want to join.
• If this doesn't produce the names you need, go back to Google's advanced search box and look for the targeted job title at your targeted company [company name in the first box and job title, i.e., Vice President of Sales & Marketing, in the third box].
• Use the results of this last search to identify all the people who have ever held senior sales/marketing positions in your targeted company and to source other current/past employees of that company with whom you can network.
• Once you pinpoint the name and title of the best person for you to send your resume to, go back to Google's advanced search box and insert the person's name in the first box and the company name in the third box to generate a list of press releases, articles, conferences, and the like involving the executive you are targeting.
• Read a few of these and identify a snippet of information you can quote in your cover letter to that person. Use your cover letter to demonstrate a positive connection between this snippet and your experience or qualifications for the job.

Cool, huh?

The Power of Word Choice

Word choice isn't just for English majors - but it is often overlooked by job seekers and resume writers alike.

Word choice is the art of selecting the right word for the right use. Clear communications naturally emerge when we use the best word to express what we are trying to say.

When we fail to use the right word, our verbal and written communications cloud the issue at hand and make misundertandings more likely. Poor word choice can lead to:

• Vague sentences
• Imprecise quantifers
• Incorrect assumptions
• Inaccurate statements
• Reduced impact
• Boring repetition
• Failure to communicate

One of the mistakes I often see in resumes - including those designed by certified professionals - is the failure to pay attention to word selection. This failure reveals itself in resumes, letters, and interview responses as:

• Using a similar-sounding word inappropriately. For example, have you ever known anyone who said pacific when what they actually meant was specific?
• Repeating power verbs in unimaginative ways. With thousands upon thousands of words at our disposal, there is absolutely no reason to use the same action verbs over and over to start sentences and bulleted statements.
• Using vague quantifiers. Quantifiers such as many, some, varied, and several, to mention but a few, have been weakened by consistent overuse.
• Selecting weak action verbs. Action verbs aren't all created equal. Using a word with less punch (like improved) communicates less than a stronger verb (like strengthened).

So, what can you do to bolster your word selection skills?

• Buy a word-a-day calendar or subscribe to a word-a-day RSS service (many are free) to stretch your vocabulary in new directions.
• If you wish to emphasize a skill in a document or an interview response, use synonyms to communicate without repetition.
• Don't rely on spell checkers to ensure good grammar. The word pacific may be spelled right, but if you use it in place of specific, that usage will still be wrong - and embarass you.
• When you find that you have already used an action verb in your resume or letter use a thesaurus to find an alternative selection.
• Rather than rely on vague quantifiers, get specific. How many? If the number isn't impressive, describe what you did in other more meaningful ways. If the number is impressive but you don't want to be explicit, then try something like more than $10 million.

With the continuing rise of digital communications (pagers, cell phones, chat, email, web, blogs), verbal and written communications are decaying rapidly. You can easily set yourself apart from other candidates by taking a little time and energy to boost your vocabulary and word choice.

Landing a Great Job Without a College Degree

Many successful mid-career professionals have less than a Bachelor's Degree or no degree at all. If you're one of them, how do you stay ahead of your more credentialed peers in the job market?

While having a degree, especially a BA/BS or higher, is a definitive advantage in the job market, the lack of one doesn't have to spell disaster. But there are two vital things you will need to attend to if you want to ensure that your lean academic credentials don't hold you back:

Positioning: How you position yourself in a job search always makes a difference to the outcome of your search, but positioning rules when you have one or more significant weaknesses in your background or experience.

• Do whatever research is necessary to make sure that you have selected the right industry(ies), company(ies), and type/level of job titles to pursue. If your positioning is skewed, your job search results will be, too.
• Your Career Summary assumes more importance when you have to compensate for less training and education. Make yours stellar by using industry-specific key words in both the body of your summary and in your listing of key competencies.
• Rely less on applying to open positions and more on marketing yourself to targeted employers. Make exceptional use of your networking contacts to help you get your resumes into the hands of hiring managers.
• When you read online job postings, consider applying for the position if you meet 75% or more of the hiring employer's requirements. If you don't have the exact educational background they are looking for, yet you meet the majority of the rest of their requirements, consider applying anyway. What have you got to lose?
• Weave quotes from managers, clients, and/or peers into your resumes and letters. You can source them from your performance evaluations, thank you notes/letters/cards/emails, client evaluations/testimonials, and 360-degree assessments, or you can solicit them by asking people for feedback on your performance.

Sell your strengths: Again, this is always good job search and career change advice, but when your academic credentials are leaner than you'd like, relying on your already-proven strengths assumes greater importance.

• Showcase your achievements in your resume, letters, and interviewing responses. Make darn sure you've identified, collected, prepared, and practiced a wealth of success stories to prove your achievement portfolio.
• Give your success stories more space and attention in your resumes and cover letters. Consider creating a Select Achievement Highlights section in your resume to draw more attention to them.
• Make sure each job in your work history delineates at least 3-4 solid, measurable achievements.
• Include more success stories in your cover, follow-up, and thank you letters.
• Collect, document, and report more of your informal education background - on-the-job training, self-taught skills, and continuing education seminars/classes. Lace your education section with as many of these as possible.
• Don't overlook the awards you've received, whether from employers, volunteer work, or academic participation. Awards are often vital to report, but they grow in importance when there are one or more lapses in the balance of your professional background.
• Supplement your resume with a "brag book" or achievements portfolio.

Let's face it - we all have liabilities to consider when we market ourselves into new jobs. Th key is to recognize them and develop a savvy plan to overcome them.

Do Social Networking Sites Help Job Seekers?

They can if you use them right. Before we talk about that, though, consider some numbers.


Joe Whyte showcased some interesting social networking stats this week on his blog, Search Marketing Standard. LinkedIn, one of the largest of the social networking sites whose ranks include Ryze.com and Spoke.com, has seen growth up to 1,000% in the last two years. They currently have 10 million registered users, while Ryze and Spoke have 250,000 and 30 million, respectively (Spoke is actually a sales generation tool with a social networking component).

• How can you capitalize on all that networking power for your job search?
  Do the obvious: register. Pick one or more sites and establish an account.


• Build a strong profile that showcases your skills, experience, and credentials.


• Send out invitations to your friends, family, and peers to get them, well, “linked in”, but it’s worth the time.


• Import your email network(s) via CSV (comma separated) files.


• Connect with former classmates and colleagues.


• Secure recommendations from others on your work.


• Search and apply for jobs posted on the networking site. LinkedIn, for example, uses the DirectEmployers database for their job listings, and when you apply for a job via their site, the recipient employer not only receives your resume/cover letter, they also receive your LinkedIn profile along with access to the recommendations others have written about you.


• Identify your inside connections at a workplace and network with them to get your resume in the hiring manager’s hands.


• Look for tools and add-ons that will help you to establish a habit of staying socially connected. On LinkedIn, for example, you can download an Outlook Toolbar that helps you manage your contacts, stay in touch, and coordinate your invitations. They also have a JobInsider function you can download which will alert you to the presence of your inside connections at particular companies when you’re performing online job searches.


• Look for groups to join in order to tap into industry/professional groups, college/corporate alumni organizations, and industry conferences.


• Look for ways to give before you try to get. Offer ideas, connections, and resources to others. Pass on job leads and news. Send copies of articles and blog posts of interest.
  

The bottom line? Don’t set up an account on one of these sites unless you intend to use it. The only thing worse than missing out on social networking opportunities would be having professionals and employers see your incomplete profile and being turned off by it.

Online Guerrilla Job Search Techniques

Almost every client I have ever assisted with resume design and/or job search techniques is surprised to learn of many "hidden" functions of the myriad job boards available online. For example, have you ever utilized any of the following:

• Meta-search boards


• Advanced search functions on generic job boards


• Networking tools such as Monster.com's People Finder function

Each of these functions is "hidden" in the sense that you usually have to click through several screens to find them, and most job seekers don't bother to do that. The average job seeker conducts a series of significantly less-than-in-depth position searches and never learns to optimize the advantages of online job boards.

Many job seekers are still unaware of the time-saving advantages of utilizing meta-search boards such as Indeed.com, SimplyHired, or even Monster's Military.com/spouse. These boards and many like them specialize in aggregating job postings from a wide variety of sources such as the major generic job boards, niche boards, online help wanted ads from newspapers, geographic-specific boards, and employer websites.

What difference could such job boards make for your job search? By developing several strong automated search agents and/or advanced searches, you can "program" meta-search boards to source leads for you from the many resources noted above, thus saving you significant time and energy in your job search and helping to preserve your all-important life/work balance.

In a recent post on the MyGlobalCareer.com blog, author Jennifer Hamm reports that Jonathan Duarte, founder of the GO Jobs online job board, believes that advanced search functions often require too many steps to appeal to many job seekers. Duarte also notes that many job seekers know too little about Boolean search techniques, and that such knowledge is key to taking full advantage of advanced job board functions.

What difference could advanced search functions make for your job search? By learning and applying Boolean search terms such as "and" and "or" and expanding your targeted use of key word/job title terms, you can improve the quantity and quality of job leads sourced for you.

Monster's People Finder function is a great example of another "hidden" function of job boards that mid-career job seekers should aggressively use. You can find this function on Monster by setting up an account and clicking on the My Monster tab, then looking down the navigation menu on the right for Networking resources.

The millions of job seekers who create Monster accounts are invited to record their current and past employment in their account. Monster tracks this information and allows you to search it via People Finder.

What difference could a People Finder function make for your job search? By utilizing People Finder functions, you can source new networking leads and identify professionals currently working in your targeted prospect companies, thus deepening your penetration of the Hidden Job Market.

Not all job boards offer people finder functions, but some websites are beginning to specialize in helping job seekers to connect with past/prospective networking leads. Consider using services such as LinkedIn.com, Rize.com, PeopleFinders.com, and MeetUp.com to help you expand your networking and referral-building efforts both online and offline.

The bottom line? You can conduct a smarter online job search and yield more targeted results by using fewer job boards in more strategic ways. Try one or more of these approaches today, then let me know what difference it makes in your job search by posting a reply to this post.

ZoomInfo

Have you heard of ZoomInfo.com yet? Similar to LinkedIn.com and Rize.com, ZoomInfo allows you to build a personal/professional profile and link your network to those of others. ZoomInfo also enables you to connect with people you may have lost touch with (35+ million folks are already profiled) as well as seek jobs and new companies to contact (3+ million are already listed).

Do social networking sites such as these really help job seekers? The jury is still out on that question, but for now this much is evident: Such sites certainly won't help you if you're not listed on them. If you're not into face-to-face networking, why not give virtual networking a try? You've got nothing to lose and potentially millions of ways to gain.

In my last two posts, I've shared with you a number of creative job search techniques, also known as "guerilla" tactics ... tactics that require little investment in time or money, but may pay off big time in terms of results. Today we'll take a look at profession-specific guerilla tactics that help you to prove your match to the type of work you are seeking.

Profession-Specific Creative Approaches

• Business Administration/Marketing: Write a standard product introduction in the format of a press release or a product brochure. The kicker is that the product being introduced is you. Include full specifications about yourself as the new product.
• Accounting/AR/AP/Payroll: Design a general ledger, payroll form, or other industry-appropriate document, using your skills, capabilities, and strengths as the raw data.
• Marketing/Promotions/PR: Create a marketing flyer to reach your target market. The format can vary based on the type of standard communication specific to a particular industry, so it usually ties in with a specific theme. The best format is one that is standard and recognizable as an "industry format" for your chosen industry.
• Desk-Top Publishing/Journalism/Writing: This technique works well for those in the publishing and creative fields. Create a one-page newspaper with yourself as the headline and sideline stories.
• Technical Sales: Develop a product ad about yourself which follows the industry format for such an ad. This technique works well for the technical fields, such as Computer Science and Engineering.
• Finance: This technique works very well for Finance and related majors. Write a tombstone ad similar to those you would find in Barron's or The Wall Street Journal that are used for listing an initial public offering or corporate bond offering.
• Accounting: Granted, this technique only works well with accountants seeking a career in public accounting. It is written in the same standard format as the audit certification statement made by a public accounting firm after an audit. The twist is that this is written about an accounting grad, "certifying" your background and skills in the industry. It is then signed by either a fictitious "Partner-in-Charge" with the firm or, better yet, by the academic head of the school of Accounting at your college.

• 7 Steps to a More Fulfilling Job
• Developing a Job Search Portfolio

More Creative Networking Techniques

Did you enjoy reading yesterday's creative job search/networking tips? Great, because I've got more for you!

The Time is Money Technique

Want to make sure your mailed materials are reviewed ... even when it may be among a stack of hundreds of other resumes? Follow this simple technique: attach a crisp new $1 bill to your resume/cover letter and place a yellow post-it note on the bill with the following handwritten note:

I know that time is money and I value your time. Would you please invest two minutes in reviewing my resume today, and in taking my phone call later this week? I appreciate your time.

Sincerely,

Your Name

The Video Resume Technique

Trying to get your foot in the door of an employer located at a distance from where you live? If you are able to create a master video of your responses to some standard interview questions, that video can be duplicated and utilized as support for your job search. A video interview tape can be utilized in two ways: first, as a door opener with a select few employers that you are targeting, and second, as an alternative method for moving forward a stalled phone interview process.

In preparing the video resume master for duplication, it is important to record an appropriate introduction and closing for the tape. Your introduction should be short and sweet, explaining who you are and the purpose and format for the tape. Your closing should provide a very specific next step for the employer to follow in making direct contact with you. Have copies made for you professionally to avoid any cheesy did-it-in-my-basement look. And label each tape with a printed label, including your name and contact information. Always include your written resume folded and attached to the videotape.

The Audio Resume Technique

If you have a strong voice and would like to make a unique impact on a company, send an accompanying audio tape or CD along with your resume. On this tape/CD, take no more than five to ten minutes to explain why you are the best person for the job. Most hiring managers have a commute and a car and a tape/CD player. Make sure you stick to a tight structure and script the dialogue only as much as you need to stay focused. This is not an opportunity for you to tell your life story. It is, like your resume, an opportunity to entice the hiring manager into a potential interview.

The Voicemail Resume Technique

If you have the Audio Resume Technique mastered, you may want to place the information on commercial voicemail for playback on demand. Simply rent a voicemail number which will allow you to have a lengthy outgoing message, and record your two or three or five minute introduction to you. Then publicize your voicemail via a simple postcard mailing to select companies (you can send it to as many as 40 companies for under $10) which provides them with a number to call to learn more about you and your background.

Be careful to avoid the appearance that you are selling any product other than you. Make it clear that you are providing the employer with your audio resume. Many will react positively, since they are able to hear your voice and learn more about you without making the commitment to talk to you directly. And it is unique!

Here are some more creative ideas for you:

• Three Guerilla Job Search Tactics
• Three Odd Ways to Find a Job

Creative Networking Techniques

I've stressed in a number of ERR blog postings that creativity is a must throughout your job search. Well, it's time to get concrete about what that really means. Here are a few unusual and unconventional tricks and techniques you can leverage throughout your search:

The Post-It Note Technique

If you have a strong advocate among your references or network, you may want to consider this resume-enhancing technique. Have the person fill out a series of Post-it Notes (3"x3" size works best) with the following handwritten note:

Excellent Candidate--
Definitely Interview

They then sign their name (and title, if appropriate). This technique works best when the resume is being sent to a contact who knows your reference. But it can be used virtually anytime you want an extra impact with the "instant recommendation." An alternative would be to have your reference write: "Highly Recommended--Definitely Interview" on their business card, which is then attached to your resume.

The Highlighter Technique

Another unconventional method of bringing additional focused attention to your resume is to selectively highlight two or three of the most important points with a highlighter pen. Again, use of a highlighter is often accepted as a means of emphasis in communications and will provide your resume with the nearly immediately eye-catching color that will draw the reader to the key areas of your background. Also note that if your resume is circulated beyond the original recipient, it will usually be assumed that the recipient highlighted the resume, making it an even stronger message.

The Bolding Technique

If you are sending your resume via e-mail, you can also emphasize important points in your resume by bolding keywords and key phrases. This technique is especially helpful if you know what the employer is looking for in filling a position and you want to highlight that experience on your resume. This technique is used quite often by staffing agencies and contracting firms who are responding to specific employer requests. By bolding or highlighting the key information, it jumps off the page (or the screen, as the case may be) to emphasize that the resume meets the necessary qualifications of the position.

The Baby on the Doorstep Technique

Baby On The Doorstep is a sales technique named after the proverbial "drop the baby off on the doorstep and someone will make sure she is taken care of" method of adoption. This sales technique is used every day by energetic salespeople who call on customers unannounced, in person--many with a great deal of success. You just pack up your resume, head down to the company location, and try to find your way as close to the hiring manager as possible. Ask if the hiring manager is in, state your name and that you have a personal package to be hand-delivered. If the person is out, ask when he or she will be in again and call at that time. If the person is in, ask to meet briefly. When and if you do get through, say that you were "in the neighborhood" and decided to drop off your resume personally. State your interest in working for the company and ask if the person would schedule fifteen minutes so that you can talk further. Do not push for anything more than that. If you are offered time right then, go for it. If not, be willing to come back at a later time that day or later that week. Remember that you are interrupting the person's day and schedule, so take only what you are given and don't push for more.

Three super articles you must read on creative ways to leverage the power of networking into job possibilities:

• Using "push" techniques to go to the hidden job market
• Using "pull" techniques to bring the hidden job market to you
• Keeping your network strong throughout your job search

Elements of Great Elevator Speeches

For those of you working on refining your 10 to 30-second and 1 to 2-minute personal commercials, also known as elevator speeches, here's a helpful list of must-have elements.

Elements of a great elevator speech: Purpose Essence of what you do Jargon-free Audience Problem/Need Benefits/Consequences Uniqueness / USP Call-to-action To prepare your elevator pitch, ask yourself these important questions: Purpose: How and when will you use this speech? Essence: Think beyond your job description. Think about the BUSINESS IMPACT or how you impact people. Will you reduce the number of call center inquiries? Will you reduce the number of lawsuits? Will you improve communications processes? Will you help companies find new customers? Use plain language principles: Kill the jargon and buzzwords. Who is your audience? How does your product / service solve their problem or need? How will your audience benefit? What are the consequences of inaction? How are you unique? How are you uniquely qualified to deliver the product or service? What differentiates you from the competition? What is your Unique Selling Proposition? What are your advantages? Call-to-action: What do you want the listener to do as a result of hearing your elevator speech? Are you looking for sales prospects, information, referrals, an appointment, a business partner, an investor, a new sales channel? Ask your listener for help in getting what you need. Ask an open-ended question. This will begin a dialogue, and possibly a new mutually rewarding relationship.