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➤ Passion

Clients often ask me to find someone with “fire in their belly”—that is, employer speak for passion. Employers know that many employees coast through life preferring to be safe rather than sorry in their career. I have had the great fortune to work with brilliant technical people who are also passionate about what they do and want to leave their mark on the world. They challenge others to stretch and open their minds to new possibilities. Passionate workers envision what is possible, not just what is. They have a zest for life and a sense of urgency that infects everyone around them. Show an employer that you have that spark and they will hire you over more experienced candidates any day!

➤ Cultural Compatibility

By the year 2010, the cumulative codified knowledge of the world will double every 11 hours. What you go to bed knowing at night will be outdated by daybreak. Shelf life for knowledge is the same as that for a banana. To succeed today, a company’s employees must share knowledge freely, a concept that is foreign to most organizations, where people hoard knowledge to safeguard their jobs.

In the upcoming book, Building Organizations That Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound (Ottawa, ON: Totem Hill), Ron Wiens, Ken Sudday, and I focus on how to build a corporate culture that produces a winning bottom line by focusing on the organization’s Relationship Intelligence (RI). The authors explain that the ability of employees to trust is a measure of the organization’s RI. Companies with high RI will succeed because they can build new knowledge and therefore new products and wealth on a constant basis. In contrast, companies that have low RI and hoard their knowledge will fail.

As a job hunter, you cannot risk being viewed as “political” or as “playing games.” Managers who play politics have a devastating impact on their organization regardless of their personal performance. The winning companies are the ones whose players play for the good of the whole. They know how to fight and disagree with each other but they do so not for personal gain but for corporate gain. The paradox is that managers who play this way end up with the fattest personal bottom line.

That is just the beginning of what is expected. Particular qualities and attributes dominate each hiring level, and you need to be aware of the different interests that govern each. We go into greater detail in Chapter 12, when we discuss face-to-face interviews.

■ THE HIDDEN JOB MARKET AND WHY IT IS HIDING

Okay, so it is a misnomer. The hidden job market isn’t really hidden. It is just not in plain sight. It is called the hidden job market because of the way jobs are created and filled.

Most jobs are created in a company in one of 3 ways:

1. The company is growing.

2. Someone quits, leaving a vacancy.

3. Someone is being replaced, and the employer does not want the employees to know about it.

When the company is growing, the owner, president, or someone else may know they need to make a new hire, but they haven’t initiated any measures to find someone. They may not have had the time. They may not quite have the budget. They may not want to go through the hassle of advertising and interviewing. So while the need is real, the job itself remains hidden in the hiring manager’s head.

When someone quits, managers will first consider eliminating the job. If that is not feasible, they will look inside their organization to see if there is an employee they can promote into the role. If they can’t find anyone, they’ll likely ask their coworkers for referrals. If that doesn’t work, depending on the size of the company, they may run an ad through HR, or hire a headhunter. They may even run it on a job board or in the newspaper as a “company confidential” box ad. Companies will contact a headhunter when secrecy is required because the recruiter can conduct a search without anyone ever knowing.

In all cases, the job remains hidden to the outside world for weeks if not months; hence the term hidden job market. The only