“Hidden” Jobs Delivered Daily
With unemployment rates skyrocketing, more and more people turn to the online job boards to look for their next position. Both candidates and recruiters know how hard it can be to find the right job at precisely the right moment. But how effective is it to simply post a resume and search through jobs, especially when you’re up against a world of other candidates doing the same? As more companies turn to online job boards and networking, so do more candidates, and your job prospecting field becomes quite crowded and competitive. While posting your resume on Careerbuilder or Monster is surely a good idea, you can also use other techniques to find those “hidden” jobs – before your competition.
A Simple Approach
Google alerts offer a simple way of notifying you of events that you define using keywords. For example, if you’re looking for a marketing and communications job, you might set up an alert using some keywords such as “marketing communications job opening Massachusetts”. That’s a good start, but Google Alerts tend to deliver very broad results, and it’s tough to sift through them to find an actionable event. Thus, you may spend too much time trying to identify and qualify potential leads. Even a broad phrase like “job Chicago” may return many unrelated results, and when you do finally find a real job posting, chances are it’s not exactly “hidden” anymore.
Taking it Further
How does one go about finding “hidden” jobs with less effort? Several companies offer systems that provide exactly this sort of information. At CareerAdvantage, they use “trigger alerts” to identify actionable events within an industry that may indicate a hiring need within a company. Trigger alerts notify you of events within an industry of your choice, target specific indicators and offer insight that you might not get elsewhere. A company like CareerAdvantage offers services that allow you to set up very customized profiles, and provide tools to locate, manage, and follow up on these “hidden” job opportunities.
Candidates and recruiters benefit from these indicators because they are recent and relevant to their needs. For example, someone looking for an editorial position may receive a trigger alert describing how the New York Times plans to expand their online communications department; that’s a great indicator that they probably need to expand their current staff. Your CareerAdvantage account integrates with LinkedIn, so if you happen to have a connection at a company, you can reach out to that person and warm up your approach. The combination of hidden job indicators with social networking seems to be a no-brainer.
Setting up alerts via Google costs nothing, and can be an effective way to filter hidden jobs, but the amount of time you spend deleting irrelevant notifications that pass through your inbox will likely outweigh any benefits. Still, there’s something to be taken away from the general idea of capturing leads and indicators, and by using a tailored platform, prospective job seekers can really maximize the effectiveness of their job search.
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The trick I recommend for finding jobs that aren’t listed on major sites, like Monster or Indeed, is to set up a Google Alert with the keywords that describe your search, and the term inurl:job. This finds pages on company sites that list jobs may not have been posted elsewhere. You can target specific location by adding the major city in the area to your search
For example, you can find all the sales jobs in Boston with:
sales inurl:job boston
I’ve written up more details on this type of search on my blog:
http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/05/21/get-a-google-alert-as-soon-as-a-job-is-posted/