How to Break into the Hidden Job Market

Here in Boulder we are drying out flooded basements (and in some cases, living rooms and kitchens) this week. In the mountains just west of us, whole neighborhoods got washed away. We've had a visceral reminder that Mother Nature is stronger than any force ever devised by men. Water goes where it wants to go.

The good news is that we humans are part of nature, too. At the church where I sing, the pastor said in his sermon that when new landscaping moved the church's front sidewalk ten feet to the left, daffodil bulbs under the soil moved ten feet to send up shoots through the grass beyond the sidewalk. Nature is nimble. Luckily, so are we.

Mother nature finds a way around broken systems. The Black Hole recruiting process has failed us mightily, and resilient humans are abandoning it in droves. You know the engine I mean: the mechanical, bureaucratic online application machine that frustrates job-seekers and keeps talent-starved hiring managers from meeting the smart and capable people outside the walls who could solve their problems. Black Hole recruiting is an example of our misplaced belief in technology to solve human problems.

We know better. We know that vibrant humans and their stories aren't easily translated into keywords, and that left-brained skill-matching algorithms are the worst possible way to evaluate people. Mother Nature found a way around the Black Hole recruiting dam years ago, and that's why analysts estimate that seventy percent or more of job openings never get posted. The Black Hole machine never sees them, and neither do the job applicants who are married to the Black Hole system. Nimbler job-seekers get those jobs before the public ever knows they're available.

You can enter the hidden job market yourself, any time you like. You need an invitation to do it, and luckily there's an invitation included in this column. Before you get your invitation to break into the hidden job market, I want to give you instructions on how to use it.

Remember the movie "The Wizard of Oz?" The wizard gives Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man medals and awards for valor and brilliance, but he tells them "you had to find it in yourself, first." It's the same way with the hidden job market. I'm going to give you an invitation, but in order to use it you'll need to tap resources in yourself that may have been waiting under the ground to flower, like the daffodil bulbs we spoke about before.

Here's what you'll need to shift in yourself to step into the hidden job market and get the seventy percent or more of jobs that never get posted to the public.

Shift Your View on Work

If you believe that your work, your income and your professional advancement must always come in a box labelled Full-time Job with Benefits, you won't be able to enter the hidden job market where so many self-actualized working people are making hay and having a blast right now. If you can only imagine working for a company where the job, the title, the role and the salary come from a chart in Human Resources, you are shackled to the wall of the old-fashioned, Godzilla recruiting world.

If you can step out of that box, you can vault over the wall into the hidden job market and thrive there. It isn't difficult, but it requires you to step away from the false security that the full-time salaried working world provides.

Shift Your View on Yourself

If you've always described yourself as a bundle of Skills, Competencies and Years of Experience, you're going to need to rethink what you bring to the talent marketplace or stay stuck in the un-hidden, frustrating traditional talent market. The insulting Skills Dogma that teaches us to brand ourselves as shopping carts piled with Communication Skills, Negotiation Skills and Administrative Skills springs directly from the Black Hole recruiting system. People who are disempowered and dependent on employers to save them from unemployment have been trained to describe themselves in the most mewly and ineffectual way ever.

Remember Dorothy's first approach to the Wizard, before she found her voice and snagged the witch's broom? Dorothy was as supplicant as any job-seeker, at first, full of "If it please your Majesty" and all that rot. You are just as much in business as any corporation is. You have something valuable to sell, and until you know what you've got, what it's worth to employers and which organizations are most likely to need what you bring, you're going to feel as though you have to beg for a job.

FREE WEBINAR with Liz Ryan Thursday, September 26, 2013: Put a Human Voice in Your Resume, Job Search, Career and Business

The hidden job market, of course, has nothing to do with begging.

Shift The Power Equation

As long as you believe that you will be very lucky to get a job and that that will be difficult because of the large number of other people who are job-hunting, you will not be able to use your invitation to enter the hidden job market. The hidden job market is all about the belief that you have something special and valuable. You do have it, and until you see what you have and why employers should value it, no one else will see it either.

In the hidden job market, we don't ask employers "Got any full-time jobs?" (that's our need talking) but rather "Got any problems keeping you up at night?" When we can shift the power equation to talk with hiring managers about their problems rather than our own perceived need for the fake security we think a full-time job brings, we can rule in the hidden job market.

Shift your Approach

There are no Black Hole recruiting portals in the hidden job market. Instead, there's a powerful network of people flowing in and out of organizations like water, surging around impediments and carrying great solutions from one to another. When you allow yourself to step off the crumbling cliff call Full-Time Jobs Pursued in the Usual Way and dive into the hidden job market stream, you'll see this for yourself.

Citizens of the hidden job market - we'll call them Ozians, after Dorothy and her friends - don't fill out online job applications. They never think about Skills and Competencies. They tell stories about crises they've averted and big, expensive problems they've solved. They don't ask "Got any job openings in your company?" because they couldn't care less about that. They look for business pain, and luckily there is business pain everywhere. When they see pain they could help to solve, they talk to the person in pain.

See how simple that is? Ozians think in terms of projects, not full-time salaried jobs. We are all working on assignments at any moment, in any case -- I worry about full-time people who can't tell me what they're working on that's critical to their organizations - and Ozians know that the more critical assignments they can rack up in their portfolios, the more valuable they will be.

Ozians pick up projects at neighborhood block parties and kids' soccer games. They know forty people who could use their services at any time, so even if thirty-three of them aren't hiring, there are still seven who are. They don't look for employers to give them job security, because they know that employers don't have the power to do that. We carry our job security around with us.

You can break into the hidden job market any time - the how-tos are below. Keep in mind that the how-tos are the easy part, once your worldview shifts and your body says "Aha! I KNEW there was a better way." There always is - Mother Nature is one clever lady.

Here's your invitation to join us in Oz. Don't forget your ruby slippers!

Listen to the Podcast: Breaking into the Hidden Job Market

Break into the Hidden Job Market: Ten How-Tos

1. Understand what business problem you solve. Forget your skills and years of experience: no one cares about those. Figure out what business problem you solve, a la "I fix broken customer service systems" or "I make local brands national brands." (See the exercise below for help with that.) You can solve more than one type of business problem, of course.
2. Get a business card that brands you for the hidden job market -- that brands you as an entrepreneur. You'll decide in each interaction whether to give out your company business card, your own business card, or both.
3. Learn to spot business pain around you. It is easy to do, once you've been in the business world for awhile. You know what pain startup founders have. You know what irks Production Managers and ails CFOs. Learn to hear the difference between a job-search pitch ("You need PR? I've done tons of that!") and a pain-solving conversation, which is focused on the problem rather than any particular solution.
4. Put a price on your services. Use salary, payscale and indeed to give you a bead on what your brilliance is worth to people in pain.
5. Productize what you do. "I do bookkeeping" is wan, because millions of people do the same thing. "I can take your receipts and invoices and give you back a CPA-ready packet for your tax return" is a product. All of us are product developers, and your next step is to think about your clients' pain and the product bundles that will alleviate that pain best.
6. Appreciate your network. I didn't say "Go get a network" or "Milk your network." There's too much frantic network-building and network-milking already. Start by thanking the people you know for being your friends. Ozians network instinctively (water flowing around rocks in the stream) and get a lot of business that way, but they don't network to get business. Big difference. First step: go see five good friends of yours, one at a time for lunch or coffee, and don't talk about your job search or your business life. Just listen, and advise your friends. Your mojo will grow, and that's what consultants like you need most of all -- mojo!
7. Reach out to hiring managers directly. This is the step that causes dyed-in-the-wool good-boy/good-girl employee types to quail. Go ahead -- no one will come to your house and puncture your tires if they don't like your pitch! Send a Pain Letter and a Human-Voiced Resume to any hiring manager you like. There's no penalty. Only good things can result.
8. If you're working full-time right now, you can cultivate your network and grow your side business as a problem-solving consultant. If you're not working, you can dive in all the way.
9. Use LinkedIn to generate a list of target employers to contact in your area. Conduct a simple People search on LinkedIn using just your own postal code and keywords (terms closely related to the pain you solve) to generate a list of LinkedIn profiles and from them, a list of employers who should know about you.
10. Look in the mirror and say to yourself "I am driving my own career from now on." Write it on a piece of paper. Say it to your cat, and say it to your friends. It's true. No employer will ever own your career again, because it belongs to you.
11. Hurrah for you! You are halfway to Oz already. Now go get yourself a nice gelato.

Our virtual course Breaking into the Hidden Job Market teaches these topics in detail over 12 weeks.

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