Here's why:
- The Want Ads. It's generally acknowledged that 80 to 90 percent of all positions are filled without ever being advertised. This is true for entry-level positions as well. Hiring someone is an extremely stressful process that can make an employer look like a genius or a fool. So as a rule, employers would rather hire privately, choosing from a pool of people they or their friends know. (After all, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.) It's usually only after these private avenues have been exhausted that an ad goes in the paper.
If you do respond to a want ad, it's likely that your resume is one of hundreds that were received. (I was told recently that one Fortune 500 company receives more than 150,000 resumes per year.) Your odds of winning something in the lottery are better than they are of getting an advertised job which really fits you.
Want ads are also not always placed to fill a position. A company might be doing research (i.e., how much to pay a new position), fulfilling legal requirements, or recruiting talent for future openings.
- Employment agencies. The overwhelming majority of agencies are hard-working, reputable firms that will help you match your experience with whatever openings they have on file. The problem is, they look at your experience, not your talents. If you're looking for a lateral move into a position similar to the one you just left, by all means, register with the employment agencies. But it just won't work if you're looking for a change.
- Blanket mailings of resumes. Again, if you're looking for a lateral move into a similar position, this might work. But fewer than one percent of all unsolicited resumes result in a job.
- Networking. A few years ago, this new dimension was (consciously) added to job-search programs. While networking activities increase a person's number of contacts and may help speed up the job search process, they rarely lead to the right kind of position nor do they tap into the broadest range of available positions.
What, then, is a better way to go about doing it? It is important to establish a series of professional relationships within a targeted area of the marketplace.
Think back to the typical hiring process described earlier. The employer thinks of all the people he or she knows and talks to friends about all the people they know. The key is to inject yourself into that process; to become one of the people the employer or the employer's friend thinks of Determine exactly what it is you want to do, then do a little research to pinpoint where and for whom you'd like to do it. Find out who the people are that make the hiring decisions and develop an orderly, professional method of contact. Present your talents to them, not your background, and present yourself as a potential profit center. To be effective, you'll need to do three things:
- Communicate what your talents are. You must be able to present yourself in a direct and readily understandable manner.
- Teach a potential employer about your product (your talents). To do this, you must know and believe in yourself thoroughly. You must also be presenting yourself to someone who finds your product valuable. (For a teacher to be effective, the students must be interested in the subject.)
- Market your product. Remember that you're selling something. Take an active, not a passive role. Determine a potential employer's needs and clearly demonstrate how you are uniquely qualified to fill them.
I would guess that 80 to 90 percent of all the decision makers are accessible if you can get around their defense mechanisms, the most obvious one being the personnel department.
While they serve many valuable functions, personnel departments, often called "human resources," ironically don't always deal with people. In the hiring process, they mostly deal with pieces of paper. They are not designed to identify people's talents; they're designed to develop job descriptions and find the person whose experience most closely fits the description. They also act as a screening service to keep people away from the employer so he or she is free to concentrate on more important tasks.
