Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [32]
The hidden job market is your private laboratory to test out the best methods for finding your dream job.
➤ Cracking the Hidden Job Market
For most people, the Internet is a mess. It suffers from too much information and too little structure. Most people looking for a job online quickly get overwhelmed with the quantity of responses from a search engine. Headhunters use the following types of Internet searches to find new job openings, and you can do the same thing:
• Target competitors.
• Obtain referrals from associations.
• Conduct Internet searches.
Here is how to reverse-engineer what recruiters do, so that you can target your next employer.
Target Competitors
The easiest place for a recruiter to sell your skills is to a direct competitor or at least someone who is in your industry. Go to www.hoovers.com. Enter the name of the company and hit the “capsule tab.” This will give you a snapshot not only of the company but also of its competitors. You can play the competitor’s competitors game all day at Hoover’s and never finish. Go in looking for what you need and don’t waste your time playing with the technology. This is a very rich resource.
There are 2 other key organizations you can also try: www.edgar-online.com and www.herring.com.
Obtain Referrals from Associations
The next best way to research an industry is through its associations. The best site to find the association most related to your interests is the American Society of Association Executives: www.asaenet.org. All I can say about this site is wow! I recently visited it so I could e-mail a colleague in New York a place to start her search for an accounting job. I did a keyword search on “accounting” that brought back 244 hits. By refining it to just include those in the state of New York, I received 15 hits that ranged from American Association of Hispanic Certified Public Accountants to the Society of Insurance Accountants. Clicking on Society of Insurance Accountants gave me their address and phone number. The site runs the gambit from “Accounting” to “Youth organizations” and represents more than 300 industries. It is a great place to start.
Conduct Internet Searches
By far the best way to discover new opportunities is by doing structured search engine queries. And it is fairly easy to do. Here is how to do targeted research to find companies and the people who can hire you.
Develop a Target List of Companies
Here is an example using Google.com to search for work in advertising in New York:
• When you do targeted research, generally you concentrate on an industry or a geographic preference (in this example, New York City). Use whatever city you like.
• We need to find the names of all the advertising companies in New York. There are easy ways to do this using the Internet. Go to www.google.com and type the following words in the advanced option in Google: advertising, new york, directory, conference. You are instructing Google to search for a directory of advertising firms in New York or a conference on advertising held in New York. We want this information to obtain leads to companies.
Your text needs to be filled in as shown in Figure 3.1. The results returned when you hit the search button will be similar to those shown in Figure 3.2.
At the time I did this search, the first result was for a conference held in New York for the advertising industry. The next 2 hits are both for directories of advertising companies in New York, complete with Web addresses, phone numbers, profiles, and more.
Figure 3.1 Google advanced.
Find People Who Can Hire You
Once you have a target list of companies, you need to find out the names of the people who can actually hire you. Go to each company’s web site and gather names. If you are lucky, every