Tips To Crack The Hidden Job Market in 2023

If you are known to someone in that organization, even at a very informal level, your referral, your being known and liked helps you in the process. Let's talk about the data, what it really means, and why we use the term hidden job market, which I never intended to be this contentious, and a little bit about how you can help your clients understand what recruiters are doing, how they're recruiting, as well as what that means for them in their job search, and how they wanna run their job search completely separate, perhaps, from what recruiters are doing, because we know that that's just a little slice of the pie in terms of how jobs are found and how our clients are gonna land where they wanna land. We're gonna start in the way back, and I don't want you to say, well, Maria, this data's old. That's kind of the point, because I started teaching the Certified Hidden Job Market program in 2016, our first live promoted class was in 2017 after we piloted it in 2016. So I'm gonna show you a little bit about where the data came from that we started to teach then, and then we'll look at some of the more current data that has kept us on the track that we've been on, and of course, continue to inform our changes in the class as we teach it every year or six months or so, we add new information and update that information based on the data of how people are getting recruited and how they're getting hired. In 2015, my first interaction with Career Thought Leaders as the CEO was a small conference that was held in Baltimore. It was actually the first virtual conference because they knew that they were gonna be having a leadership transition, and so we had a small amount of people in the room and then 100 plus virtually, and Jerry Crispin was our presenter, and he shared this data with us at that conference in terms of how people get hired, and it was that 4% of applicants take the time to kind of make their referral known, and then that's kind of this headline thing. We start in with out of 100 applicants, typically 50% are unqualified. I've heard even higher numbers now, less people career changing, not necessarily doing a great job of explaining their qualifications. So if people are qualified, are they selected for an interview or not, right? I can interview four or five people tops. So you have a 20 to 25% chance of getting that job if you are qualified, just the numbers, right? I have this many people that are qualified, this many people are gonna get an interview. That may go up or down, but you can see how just the normal pool of whittling it down is going to result in getting that job. So candidates without a referral have a 1.7% chance of landing the job. And we'll talk about this a little bit in some different data as well. It may not be quite that low, but it's gonna be likely under a 10% chance of getting that job if you don't have a referral or some kind of connection. So this is something that you've seen before. It comes from the Guerrilla Marketing Job Search book, which was written in 2005. And then the article that this was in was in 2010. I believe that this may be where the confusion stems from, where people say that 80% of jobs aren't posted. But that is not what this graphic is saying. So this graphic is saying that when people report how they found their job, this is how they reported that they found their job way back in 2005. And we keep repeating this same data and kind of repeating it wrong, because again, we say that 80% of jobs aren't posted, but that's never what this data was saying, right? This data was saying that 80%, 75% of people said they found their job through networking. There's other data in a Harvard Business Review data that says it was around 60% of people said they found their job through networking. And that was with work ties, 15% that said they found it through networking with family and friends. So that's again where the 75% number may have come from originally even, because that research was done in the 1970s. And in fact, when I started using the hidden job market term and got a little bit of a hand slap for using it, someone said, that was from the 70s when jobs were posted in the paper. I said, well, I wasn't born in the 70s. So that was never how we were referring to it. We were referring to it based on here, the data from Jerry Crispin around the idea that if you're a referred candidate, you're more likely to get the job. And then some data actually from Lou Adler, this was from a LinkedIn post. And the idea here again, is that this is when people find or get into the job pool. That doesn't necessarily mean that the job isn't posted, but we've got some people that get in an internal move and this number has gone up in recent years the number of positions filled through an internal move is slightly higher than a 10%. And then we've gotten that working. Again, this means that the person was hired because they were known before the job was perhaps even posted. Doesn't mean the job wasn't posted, right? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And then you've got that resume search people that get hired after the job is posted. And then that, or resume search. So those people getting sourced, sorry, my apologies for that. 15% get kind of brought in by the recruiter. And that number has gone up a little bit because of course people are doing that proactive sourcing. And then the people that apply once the job is public. And the idea here is that if our candidates can become known before the job is kind of formally out there, they have a better chance whether or not the position is posted. And so the challenge here is that one, this data is hard for people to put their finger on. How did someone find out about the job? They say the data around how someone found you when they fill out that form. You know, if you said, how do you find me? Is almost wrong all the time because we found you seven different times. It takes seven to 12 different touch points and job searches the same way. How did they find out about the company or the job? Sometimes they're going to be able to put like a real pin in that. And sometimes they're not. And so how did you find the job? How did you get hired? What we do know is that you have a much better chance of getting hired if you are a referral regardless of how you come in. So let's look a little bit at some of that data. So this is from the 2020 job by planning guide for recruiters and it said that 30% of the workforce is hired from referrals, which making referrals the number one source for new candidates. And we'll look at some breakout of that here in just a minute. Now, referrals are the fastest when it comes to time to fill, which is one of the metrics that some recruiters might be looking at. And then this one is kind of most important to me. 70% of employees feel that referrals are a better fit for their company. So this is going beyond just the recruiter and how recruiters are looking at referrals to say that once you're talking about that hiring manager or people on the team, they're even more likely to hire you because you are a referral than the recruiters themselves, which a lot of this other data that we'll look at is specifically around referrals. So the job by 2020 planning guide, again, job by goes out and looks at about 1500, 2,500 companies, depending on the year and the study that they're doing. And they're gathering data from organizations around how they hire and who they hire. And so that's where that data comes from. I like to watch what they're talking about. There are other organizations and we'll look at some other data as we go through today. So then this is me putting together the class in 2016. All right, hidden job market, networking, most jobs are filled through networking. I'm gonna go and do this. And then kind of like got this hit in the face in 2016, went to a recruiting conference and heard this data like loud and clear from people. That job boards are a very high priority for most hiring managers, most recruiters. And you'll see this over and over in the job by data. This one, I pulled this from 2020 or 2021. But if you look at any of the recruiter nation studies from job by, this is a pretty consistent theme. That the source of hire and the quality of the source of hire, job boards and the company's career side are always fairly high in the source of hire quality. Why? Because if you go to my website and apply, you took the time, you knew who I was and companies like that. They like to see the candidates that apply on their company webpage. So then when we kind of went back and we started to put together the hidden job market course, it really became a very balanced job search course. However, that's not a very sexy name, right? So we kept the hidden job market course name because it is still important that our clients are proactive. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. And it doesn't mean that we can ignore their online applications. We just wanna be more strategic about it because we know this takes time. They're gonna be waiting through the application process. And so they do want to make sure they apply for the positions they're qualified for because the recruiters and hiring managers see those as quality candidates. We don't want them to miss out on that. We don't want them to be overly focused on everything else. And so they miss applying to something that they are very qualified for. Now, the great part is that a strategic job search actually makes doing both things easier, becoming the known candidate and making sure that we don't miss out on an application where we are qualified for that job. And I typically say around 75% of the qualifications. I know I hear people say going lower. Sure, if you wanna spend your time doing that, but we know that if you don't have a strong qualification on paper, applying online is gonna be difficult unless you have that network and that referral on the backend for you. So just a few more data points. This one was from 2021. So have referral programs gone away? Nope, not very much. 48% are seeing a higher participation in their employee referral programs and more employees are getting hired internally since the pandemic. Unfortunately, there's a lot of data around the pay challenges, the salary increase challenges when people stay internally. But if people are looking to make a move and they are in a big company, they may consider are there opportunities to move division to division and have that internal because they are looking more at internal opportunities, internal candidates than ever before. So referral programs not going anywhere, another data point from 2020, 82% of employers were referring that or seeing that the ROI for a referred candidate is better than other candidates, four times more likely to be hired if you're a referral, that saves the company money. So we've got all of these data points that make the case for employers, if you will, around why they would want to do referrals. So this is the number one thing that makes up the hidden job market. It's not about whether or not the position is posted. It's about that you are much more likely to get hired if you know someone, if you are referred in. And I wanna talk about a few different ways that this happens because people always say, oh, I work at the university, that can never happen or I work here, that can never happen. So I used to work at the university, worked for the university at 10 years before I started my organization. And the one opportunity that I had to hire, we had this happen. So it was for a professional position, an advisor role in an academic department. And we had the basic hiring process out of university, which my colleagues tell me is pretty much the same. You get a resume, you get a cover letter, and those are scored based on criteria that the organization sets out at the beginning. And everybody gets a score and you're put in rank order based on your score, what was in your resume and cover letter that showed you connected to the requirements of the job. So we had gone through and scored our candidates for the job. And we had decided before that that we were gonna interview 10 people. Well, I saw the name by number 13. And number 13 was someone that I had seen give a presentation on a neighboring campus when I'd gone on a tour there. For some reason, I don't remember why we were on a tour on a different campus, but she had been our tour guide and given a presentation while we were on the tour of this other campus. And I said, can we interview number 13? And our EEO person, equal opportunity, said, yes, you can interview number 13 as long as you don't skip anybody, right? Then it's still equal opportunity. Everyone who scored down to that number is getting an opportunity to interview. So we ended up doing 13 phone interviews. And everybody kind of knew that I knew her, but they didn't influence everyone's opinion on the committee, faculty, right? I was a staff person, they were faculty who were hiring for this role as well. And we interviewed all 13 people and lo and behold, number 13 was one of everyone's favorites. So she got invited to the on-campus interview with three other people. Had those on-campus interviews and number 13 blew everybody else away too, right? And ended up getting the job. But she would not have gotten that job if I didn't know her, right? Because that was how she got the interview to begin with. So even at a state position, even at a federal position, no matter what the organization is, if you are known to someone in that organization, even at a very informal level, your referral, your being known and liked helps you in the process. So that was a very informal opportunity for the referral, like kind of no like and trust factor to help that person out. It also works in a very formal way. So another candidate that I was working with wanted to make a transition out of one company into another and found a job that they were interested in. Now, the company they were interested in was actually a customer of the company they were working at at the time. And so they saw the position get posted, they contacted their connection at the company that was hiring and said, I'd like to apply for this position. And the person said, you know, oh, that's great, use my name, there'll be a place where you can put in a referral. This is an official referral program, right? That this company had, and a lot of big companies do have. As we saw in the previous slide, 80% of, 89% I think of companies that JobVite surveyed had a referral program. So my candidate puts the referrer's name in the slot and they get an interview. Now, this candidate didn't know this when they applied, but this company's process was that they interviewed all internal candidates first. And then after the internal candidates weren't a good fit, then their next step was to interview any referrals. My candidate was the only referral. So they were the only person interviewing for that job. They interviewed, they got the job, right? Now, if they were completely unqualified, of course, they may have gone through the position again, but as a hiring manager, you can assume that if this person is maybe even a B-plus candidate, it's like, yes, let's get this moving, let's get this over with, especially since they'd already spent months interviewing the internal candidates. Now they have one referral that they're interviewing before they would open it up to non-referred candidates. Now, not all companies are gonna do that, but companies do place value on their referred candidates, as we saw in the previous thing, where 70% of employees consider the referral to be the best candidate. So when they go through that process, even if they don't get that extra chance to be the only one interviewed, they get that psychological bump because they are the person that is known, liked, and trust by someone else in the organization. Those are the ways that the informal or formal referral programs can help our client. And we are working with them to figure out how can they become that known quantity, right? How can they become that person that other people are going to refer? And we're gonna get there in just a minute. But the other thing about the hidden job market is that it is hidden because our clients can't possibly know about every opportunity. They can't possibly know about every company that they should be looking for. And the only way that they identify them is one, there's an open position and now everybody knows and everybody's applying, or they're networking and they're doing their research and uncovering some of those hidden gems of companies that maybe they wouldn't have known about to be able to apply maybe to an open role or maybe before a role was posted, but just organizations that don't get as many applications, that don't get as much visibility, that maybe even trying to pay to get their job seen, but they just don't get to cut through all of the noise, right? And so this was one of the first clients that I worked with through this process, we'll call him Ross. So Ross came to me and he said, I want to work in this type of organization. It was very focused about the culture and type of organization that he wanted to work in. And so he put together a list of organizations, actually two lists, because he had two slightly different areas of focus, two lists of organizations that he was interested in. Then he started to send list A to people in his network that were kind of in that industry, people that were in the university space, that was this list was more university, college education based. And he started to send list B to the people that he knew in the nonprofit space. He sent list B to one of his colleagues that was in the nonprofit space. And that person came back and said, this organization isn't on your list. However, they're looking for someone like you, they're looking for someone like what you're saying you want to do. This organization was actually not even in the country that he was currently living in. He got the job, moved, right? Got all of that at a company he never would have uncovered if it wasn't for the type of job search that we're talking about when we're looking at hidden market job search. So it's that more proactive, how can you uncover opportunities that maybe aren't gonna hit the top of monster or career builder search or Indeed or wherever you're searching because they're small organizations or they're just organizations that don't maybe publicize that way. And of course, the opportunity to become that referred candidate, even if you do end up applying with everyone else once the job is posted. So what does this job search actually look like? I've had people say this, all you're doing is teaching how to network. We'll get to that. We're not really teaching how to network. You could read that in a blog or see it in someone's video and that's fine. What we're talking about is around creating a strategy. So first of all, helping people get really clear on their target. What do they wanna do? Where do they wanna do it? Because without that, you cannot be proactive. And although it sounds easy, the how to around it is easy. People can't do it, right? It's struggle. That's where coaches come in. They help people work through the challenges and the mindset blocks that keep people from getting focused. Most of the time, it's because they feel like they're eliminating opportunities and they don't understand that when you get focused, that's when the doors open up. Then you're gonna organize your job search. A lot of people in our organizations are teaching this. Get that target list together. You can't do anything proactive without a target list of organizations that you wanna go after. Then you're putting together your messaging. People always come, they want their resume first. Resume means nothing. If you haven't first thought about what do you wanna do? Where do you wanna do it? And who is that specific target audience in terms of the types of target companies you're looking at? Then we've got that detailed plan. How are you gonna connect with those organizations? And we're not only teaching networking, we're also teaching the direct approach. How do you go cold to some organizations, which a lot of people have made more popular these days. So we talk about how can you do that? And then go faster by engaging your power circle. Old Harvard Business Review data, 60% of people found their job through a work connection. The headline is very misleading because it says weak ties don't work, but then you read the article and it says 60% of people found their job through someone they used to work with and almost 20% found it through a friend or family member. So we talk about how can you have those conversations in a very productive way so that the people who want to help you know how to help you in a productive way and not just sending more ads to you or sending you to that open role that may or may not be a good fit. And then executing that plan and not just working through the how-tos. These are out there everywhere. As I said, you can read a blog, you can watch someone's video, you can see all the ways recruiters might tell you that you should job search and some people will be able to do that. And that's great, right? That's who that free information is available for. When we get our clients, if we're coaching, it's usually those people that are either overwhelmed by all of that or that need help translating the how-to to how do I, right? How do I network with my personality, with my issues, with whatever I've got going on or in my industry or in the industry that I'm targeting? How do I make this work for me? Yes, I've read the how-tos, they're out there, but I need help figuring out how I do it. And that's why we teach coaching strategies, not just the how-tos, because it's a lot of mindset reasons that people don't do these things, not necessarily because they don't know how, right? There's lots of free information out there to tell them how to do it. It's because they've got to have that deeper connection to figuring out how to do it for themselves and how to work around whatever mindset challenges they have to making that happen. And they're not alone in that, of course. I mean, we all have our own challenges in things we know we should do, we know how to do. I mean, all of us know how to eat healthy, right? It's not the how-to that keeps us from eating healthy. It's the emotional reasons that we eat junk food that keep us from being healthy. And the same is true for any type of challenging step that our clients are trying to take in their job search or in their career. So as you're coaching, and if you are a coach, hopefully this gives you some food for thought in talking about what you do and why it's so powerful. It's not about the transactional how-to. It's really about helping people uncover their own power to how do they make it happen for themselves. Thank you, everyone.