There’s often talk about the ‘hidden’ job market and that most of the time, jobs aren’t even advertised (over 80% of the time, according to Nancy Collamer, writing for Forbes Magazine). So how do you go about uncovering the hidden job market?

1. Networking

To be honest, I always cringe when I hear this one. ‘Networking’ to some can mean standing around at pointless events hoping to bump into someone ‘relevant’ to your industry. But if you are wanting to make meaningful contacts, you need to be smarter about the way you network.

Good networking should be more about giving than receiving. It’s easy enough to start with your existing network and a channel like ‘LinkedIn.’ By responding to articles, answering questions and increasing your involvement with your contacts, you will start to appear on other people’s radar. Help someone out – offer advice or a contact that they might benefit from. When you’re ready to take it up a notch, consider joining a professional networking group.

1. Be proactive about who you want to work for

Most of the time we decide we’re in the market for a new role and start searching job search engines like Seek, right? We should really be turning this process on its head and thinking about where we want to work first. Once you have nutted this out, you need to set up a few systems to monitor their activity:

• Set up Google alerts to receive news about your target companies
• Start following them on Twitter
• Check the newsfeed of your target companies

This should give you an understanding of who some of the key decision makers are in your target company and any changes/growth that they are undergoing. One way to use this information is to weave it in to the conversation during an interview. Or using this information also might help you reach out to various contacts to organise a catch up with regards to activity at the company, if they were not at the recruitment stage.

1. Cold call or email them

A quarter of jobs on the market go to candidates that have cold called, according to experts Kazim Lazimeji, author of the article ‘7 ways to unlock the door to the hidden job market’. As you might expect, timing is everything. However, if you are calling after finding out some information from your research (the company might be expanding or a contact might have left a role), chances are, there might be a position available if not immediately then in the future. The worst case scenario is that the person you called isn’t able to meet with you, which is exactly the same position you were in prior to calling.

If you’re interested in exploring the hidden job market, talk to the Recruitment Consultants at Flexi Personnel.