Looking for work

on Mar 31 in Job Search tagged by Trevor Hicks

You all know I just completed a job search and will be starting next week in a new job and company that I am very excited about. But I want to comment publicly on all the job searching advice I’m seeing on the web and elsewhere.

In particular what motivated this post was an article I was linked to from MyYahoo called How to Get a Job When No One’s Hiring. It’s essentially a bunch of quotes from Ottawa-based headhunter David Perry. His thesis is

you’re wasting your time if you’re looking for job postings online.

the bottom line in today’s economy, he says, is you have to tap the “hidden job market.”

He then goes in detail about how to tap in to this hidden job market.  This is very representative of the advice I was given by many people and to many other job seekers I’ve talked with.  Now there are a few nuggets of wisdom in this article, particularly making sure you have a good LinkedIn.com profile.  He also mentions ZoomInfo which honestly I have not heard of before, it may be worth checking out.  I did generate calls from recruiters based solely on my LinkedIn proflile.

But what I want to challenge is this point I see repeated over and over again not to waste time on the web, you have to network to find a job.  I think this thinking is outdated for a couple of reasons.  First, the web technology has greatly matured, not only are job postings reaching a huge audience of people, but the text and context searching tools have also improved to the point that it is possible to narrow down the hundreds of responses to a manageable number of worthy targets for the HR professionals to review by hand. And the second reason is that sourcing candidates directly saves a lot of money paid to recruiters which is quite attractive in this economy. This is the first serious recession in our economy since the web was invented. With so many qualified people looking for work and the ubiquitousness of the web, it’s possible to cost-effectively fill even fairly senior roles like the one I landed via the web. I think the rules that Perry and the other advice givers play by have changed just in the last six months. My experience was that networking consumed a lot of time and effort and mostly connected me to a bunch of great people who just didn’t have any jobs to offer.

Perry points out all sorts of ways to find and connect to people and he emphasizes what you have to do to get their attention and then land the job. All perfectly reasonable advice except I want to point out one fact about Perry in the article’s first paragraph. He’s filled 996 jobs in 22 years with a total salary of $172 million.  Do the math, the average pay is about $175,000. When you figure in inflation, you have to assume his average placement today is north of $250k.  How many of us are searching for jobs in that pay range? The rules are different when you’re searching for the engineering or mid-level management jobs most of my friends are looking for.

So here’s my advice, work the web!  In my time out of work I landed a total of 3 serious job interviews, all of them found on public job postings on the web. The job I eventually accepted I discovered from a posting on TheLadders.com, I had to pay $30 for one month, but it was well worth it, I saw a suitable job posting in Houston almost every day. The other interviews were found by picking companies I was interested and searching the career section of their websites. The benefit to working the web is that you are always working with people that actually have job openings to fill.

Don’t neglect networking and keeping in touch with contacts. I’m not saying that the techniques in the standard advice book don’t work, just that in my own statistically insignificant sample size of 1 that only the web was effective. Indeed my favorite technique was to identify a job opening via the web and then work my network for contacts to the HR professional doing the screening or the decision maker on the job.

I’ll briefly discuss recruiters. My experience with them was uniformly positive, some better than others, but I didn’t meet anyone that caused any trouble for me. But like with any networking, it’s good to meet the recruiters but don’t invest too much time with anyone that isn’t discussing specific job openings. They aren’t trying to place you, they are paid for filling an opening. Don’t rely on a recruiter to keep an eye out for a job for you. Sometimes they have access to a job or an HR professional that you don’t, but often they are working from the same internet job postings that you are. If you can get yourself through the HR screener or in front of the decision-maker via other means, you make yourself more attractive to the hiring firm as they avoid the 30 to 35% fee that recruiters charge.

And finally, if the web is important than your online profiles and your resume become magnified in importance. You have to invest in the electronic you. TheLadders.com gave me very good advice on my resume for free. Of course they also offered to actually spruce it up for a big fee, but I felt confident I could do it on my own. I also attended a lecture by Rick Gillis who helped me more than anyone with my resume. I got the call for the interview for the job I ultimately accepted during the lecture, fortunately they left a nice voicemail, so I was already “in” by that point. But Rick is well worth listening to, I’d buy his book if I were still looking.

So that’s what I have for now, I hope those of you looking for work find it useful.