How to Master Today's Hidden Job Market

Most people know how to find, apply for and manage one’s candidacy with published opportunities and those that come from recruiters. Many people have also stumbled upon opportunities in the hidden job market that have led to a new position. But few follow a proactive process to maximize the value of the hidden job market. This is unfortunate since the hidden job market contains some of the very best opportunities. You can find yourself hired without any other candidates even being considered. And the role you can secure may even be tailor-built based upon your specific skills and experience, not merely the skills and experience your new employer had been seeking. In an earlier post, I provided a playbook for students looking to secure an internship in the hidden market. This guidance is for those of us who are no longer students.

Make it a Lifestyle not a Project

In my own career, the two best jobs I ever secured both came from the hidden job market. But perhaps more importantly, they each came from a connection I had been engaging for over a year. Had I ignored the hidden job market during each of those years prior to my being hired, I would not have secured either of my two best jobs ever. However, if you are reading this post because you urgently need a new job, you can still start today. You may find you have already been doing much of what you need to do to exploit the hidden job market. Either way, you can absolutely start now and reap the benefits for the remainder of your career.

Establish Your Goals

This is the fun part. It is not primarily about your next position. (Don’t worry; we’ll get to that soon.) It is about setting big, meaningful short- and long-term goals for yourself: Realistic, but big. And if any goal is particularly ambitious, it is probably a good idea to have a backup goal. Your goals are also not merely about the zenith of your career, but that is certainly a major part. Instead, your goals here are about everything you want to accomplish professionally in the remainder of your career. They can even include your goals for an interesting, stimulating or lucrative semi-retirement. The point is to think—no dream—big, wide and deep.

Experts say you need to write down your goals, so write them down. And be sure to revisit your written goals regularly. As you grow as a person, you may discover your goals change. This is normal, natural and healthy. When your goals change, update what you have written and make it a regular practice to review and update your written goals.

Determine the Stepping Stones

Having identified your goals, you next need to identify the skills and experiences you will need to secure the professional roles that will allow you to achieve your goals. Assuming you do not yet possess all such skills and experiences, you will need to identify what professional roles will allow you to gain such skills and experience. It may take a few iterations before you identify what role or roles you can target today as your next stepping stone toward achieving your goals. But once you do, you are ready to take the next step.

Articulate Your Pitch

Next you need to be able to describe your ideal role along with your qualifications to anyone who might be able to help you. At one extreme you’ll need an “elevator pitch” which compresses your pitch into thirty seconds or less. Here’s a sample pitch I helped a professional friend craft for her search.

I’ve spent the last three years as Product Manager at a SaaS startup. I was the day-to-day manager of our offshore development team, and I took the product through a major upgrade of its user interface (UI) leveraging the services of a UI consultancy. I’m looking to work for a highly accomplished senior product manager at a late-stage startup or early stage growth company.

On the other extreme, you’ll need to be able to speak to your interests and qualifications for up to two hours in a job interview. To be successful at this other extreme, you’ll need stories that will drive home how you accomplished things or achieved successes (ideally, quantifiable successes) leveraging those skills and experiences. Anticipate the questions you would receive in an interview and make sure you have a story to address each.

In my experience, most people need to practice both their elevator pitch and their story-telling before it will flow naturally. If you have a friend who can help you, that person can provide honest feedback regarding how you’ve structured these communications, how you deliver them and any body language that may seem distracting or contradictory to the message you are trying to communicate. This feedback will empower you to adjust until you get your communications just right. An active job-seeker may even want to pair up with another active job-seeker to practice both the elevator pitch and interview answers multiple times together.

Engage and Expand Your Network

If you are an older professional, by now you should have a large professional network, hopefully maintained on LinkedIn so that you do not lose touch when people change jobs. If you are a younger professional, you will be pleasantly surprised how much established professionals who can help you are very willing to do just that, provided you reach out. But whether you are a young professional, an older professional or somewhere in between, you should always be expanding your network. And if you are in transition, you now find yourself with more time on your hands to re-engage professional friends from the past as well as make new ones. The slice of the hidden job market you can exploit is in the hands of the professional contacts you can engage.

Tools like LinkedIn make it very easy to engage your network. You can send a LinkedIn email to any first connection. You can also export your entire list of LinkedIn connections to a spreadsheet and most will have up-to-date telephone and email contact information.

Depending upon your background, you might be a little hesitant to ask people for help. But as you reach out, you’ll find that most people are very interested in helping others, especially those they know will at least pay it forward. But whether you find it easy or hard to ask for help, you will find yourself in a greater position of strength if you can also offer help which is the next topic covered here.

Offer to Help

At any point in your professional life, you have enjoyed the benefit of a vantage point and experience others lack. Some of this will admittedly fall under the category of confidential information that you cannot share. But much of it will fall within the public domain.

In the case of my professional friend mentioned above, we put that recent experience right in her elevator pitch. She had been the day-to-day manager of an offshore development team. And she had taken a SaaS product through a major upgrade of its user interface (UI) leveraging the services of a UI consultancy. This is meaningful experience and learnings she can share with others. So that when she asks for help, she can offer help. And when she does not need help, she can still offer help that will secure her good will in the future.

The same should apply to anyone with a professional history. You should always be in some position to offer help to others. This could be pro bono work, industry or market insight, or the ability to make an introduction. Offering help is something you should be doing regularly. But it is particularly important when you are actively looking.

Negotiate Your Role

Finally, you will reach the point where you are in active discussions with an organization you would like to join and the stakeholders who would like to hire you. Because you have come upon this opportunity through the hidden job market, you are not merely applying for an open position, but in many cases bringing a set of skills and experiences the organization lacks. Therefore, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate a role that will leverage your strongest and most unique talents. Likewise, you are in a stronger position to negotiate responsibilities that will take you closer to achieving the goals you set at the beginning of this exercise. The path that gets you to this point is not easy, but in the end most find the effort in the hidden job market was well worth it.