Bob Burg, in his book, Endless Referrals, reinforces the idea that each person you know knows on average 250 other people.¹ To connect live with one individual is to empower that person to be able to speak on your behalf through the power of personal experience to all of these other people. Having seen you, having interacted with you, having made emotional contact, and having made positive emotional judgments about you, they are in a better position to sell you than a two-page résumé could ever do.

THE HIDDEN JOB MARKET

So, stop waiting for your desired position to be posted or advertised, and go out and get it instead. The best jobs are seldom advertised. In fact, many companies looking for qualified staff approach the search in precisely the opposite way than you would expect.

• First, they’ll search from within their own ranks, looking for an internal resource.

• Next, they’ll seek out recommendations from internal people (once again proving the value of lifelong networking).

• If that turns up nothing, they’ll turn to professionals such as recruiters to find suitable candidates.

Only when these methods fail will they post positions in the Careers section of a newspaper, or on Internet-based career sites. These publications are their last resort. It is up to you, then, to take the time to get to a senior decision maker in that company and tell her about yourself. The job you’re looking for may not even exist at present; it may have to be created. But that’s not necessarily a problem. If a senior officer sees value in having you aboard, then she will make sure the position is created. The company may not even know that they need you until you tell them. Jeffrey J. Fox, in his wonderful book, Don’t Send a Résumé and Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job, puts it this way:

Each decision influencer and decision-maker has different needs and concerns. Your job is to determine those needs and prove you can satisfy those needs. There is only one reason people hire someone, and that is to solve a problem, calculate the cost to the organization of not solving the problem, and demonstrate that you are the solution.²

Time provides the perfect platform upon which to frame that demonstration, and the Internet delivers the material with which to work. You can dig up the dirt on the company, its competitors, the state of the market, upcoming trends—all kinds of things that are publicly available through online sources. This material allows you to identify possible sources of a company’s “pain”—the types of things that keep a top executive officer awake at night—which can then be formatted into a well-crafted, one-page pitch letter, or perhaps the agenda of a 15-minute phone call or, better yet, a meeting.

One of the key points that is easy to overlook when moving too fast on this issue is who you need to talk to. It is most likely not the head of HR, unless the solution you’re proposing has to do with HR. Most people think they should approach someone in HR, since HR does the hiring. But in actual fact you need to target your approach to the senior officer of the department or area in which you wish to work.

Your goals are to find out who that person is, who her gatekeeper is, and how to get the attention of both of them for five or 10 minutes. This in itself may require a couple of coffee meetings with other people in your network, or perhaps with people in the company itself—people you don’t even know but who you could call out of the blue to get pointed in the right direction. Think of the principle of the cheetah described in Chapter 1. Waiting and preparing in order to hunt carefully is a better use of your time than starting immediately and wandering aimlessly.

Case Study: The Dental Firm

Recently I delivered a speech at an annual meeting of a Swiss-based dental technology firm. As I was describing this very point, the concept of hunting down your own job, the senior vice president of the U.S. division of this company stood up and asked if he could interject. Naturally, I said “sure.” He proceeded to ask the assembled group whether they were familiar with the company’s vice president of research and development. Yes, everyone knew him. I held my breath. “Well,” he said, “that’s how he got his VP job. He called me one day out of the blue and pitched me on some ideas and told me about some trends that he foresaw in the market which intrigued me. I wanted to hear more, so I invited him in. That’s how he got his job.”

This concept represents the art of leveraging the hidden job market. It does not refer to jobs being surreptitiously passed on to cronies in some secret way. This job market is hidden in the same way that a landscape is hidden when you drive past it in a car. You might be traveling faster, sure, but details are lost through speed and height; all you see is blur. When you take the same route by bike, you travel slower, but you see not only trees but the types of trees. You sense subtle changes in climate and terrain, and all things become clearer, including the shortcuts. It’s ground-level work that helps the connections get made. It’s somewhere between a science and an art: remarkably effective, yet maddeningly unquantifiable. It’s slow, yet it’s fast.