Everything in a successful job search is geared toward getting into conversations with the high-value job titles who have the authority to hire you, and failing that, the people who know and work with them. As we have noted, these titles are typically people one to three title levels above your own, or people who are otherwise closely involved in the selection cycle.
There will be times when you can’t find the right names and titles through your social networks—especially when you first start getting serious about building social networks and they aren’t extensive enough. Additionally, the higher up the corporate ladder of success your high-value job titles are placed, the less likely it is that these executives are visible or readily accessible through social networking. As a consequence, in this chapter we’ll look at alternative ways to connect with potential employers in your target geographic market, and the right names and titles to target within those companies. You can then work back through each of your networks for someone who can give you a referral or an introduction to otherwise inaccessible executives.
We’ll begin by discussing tactics to ensure that you know of all the potential employers within commuting distance, and then move on to a number of different ways to identify high-value job titles.
You will never identify all the employers and all the jobs that are suitable for you and located within commuting distance by visiting job sites and networking. Sometimes you have to reverse engineer your job search strategy with these steps:
There are a number of ways to identify all the potential employers in your area:
Note: Your alumni and college career services, and some libraries, may be able to give you free online access to the S&P and Zapdata databases, and possibly useful research databases.
Note: Not only is this an important step toward a direct approach, you can also look at who is following the company and commenting on their posts. This is useful for expanding your network with other committed professionals in the same field. You should then “like” their comments and link to them. This works on LinkedIn and on your other social media platforms.
With “Alerts” from any search engine, you can keep track of news on any topic that interests you, and in the process identify employers and often inside information about those employers, giving you ammunition for a well-considered approach. You can set up alerts for any topic using www.google.com/alerts or any other search engine. In a job search this could mean:
Use some of the great job search apps mentioned in the last few chapters using these same techniques.
After you decide on an Alert topic, you should then think about the channels where you want Google to search for this information: Everything, News, Books, Blogs, Video, Discussions, Applications, and more.
Bing and all the other search engines have similar tools that work in pretty much the same way, but because each search engine is built differently, they will all generate somewhat different results.
Once you have a comprehensive list of employers within commuting distance, you can start identifying high-value job titles. For the moment we’ll leave networking contacts as a resource to fall back on while we develop some new approaches to identifying high-value names and titles that we may subsequently be able to approach directly and turn into networking contacts for the future. Alternatively, we can cross-reference such names, titles, and employers with our contacts in our six major social networks for introductions.
We have already said that the hiring titles to target during your social networking and job search activities are usually people one to three titles above your target job, because these are the people most likely to be in a position to hire you. We also know that other titles likely to be involved in the selection process include management titles (again, one to three levels above you) in departments that have ongoing interaction with your department, peers holding similar titles to that for which you’re applying, colleagues in departments that regularly interact with your department, and internal recruiters and HR professionals.
In fact, any name at one of the employers within your commuting radius is better than no name, and with the Internet at your fingertips there is endless opportunity to identify the names of people who carry either the job titles that would give them the authority to hire you, or titles that can tell you whom to talk to, or at least get you one step closer.
Sometimes those job titles one to three levels above yours aren’t enough. Sometimes, your job and the corporate structure that towers over it can make for upward of half a dozen pitches to a target company, just to ensure that all the right people know you are available.
For example, let’s say you are a young engineer crazy for a job with Last Chance Electronics. It is well within the bounds of reason that any or all of the following job titles could hold responsibility for, or be involved with the selection of, your job title, or at the very least could be knowledgeable about what is going on with recruitment in your area of professional expertise:
Apply this thinking to your title and situation, thinking through all the titles that could be suitable for approach in a larger company, then use your networks and the other tactics we’ve discussed to identify the names that go with each of these titles at a targeted company. The more options you have, the more approaches you can make and the more results you will get, especially when you approach each potential hiring authority in a sequence of different ways, as we’ll discuss over the coming pages.
Always strive to identify and get into a conversation with anyone who holds any of these types of high-value hiring titles at any and every company in your area, because getting into these conversations is the shortest path to job interviews, job offers, and getting the hell past the misery of this job search. This “direct approach” tactic is an essential element of your job search strategy.
There are a number of different tactics you can use to locate high-value titles relevant to your job search goals:
For example: A professional in pharmaceutical sales looking to make direct contact with hiring authorities for a job at a specific company in the Pittsburgh area could try all the following keyword searches and gather new usable information on each search. Try it yourself, first as a Google Search, then as a Google News search:
Try these and other keyword phrases suitable to your needs and you will come up with a wide range of job openings, companies, job sites, and recruiters. Just remember that the results on the first pages of a Google search are only those of companies that have spent time and money to ensure high search engine rankings. Continue to dig down in your search results and you’ll begin to stumble across people who hold these and similar job titles, usually linked to one of their social media profiles.
There are other online resources that can be valuable supplements to the information you get from your personal and professional networks. Sites such as www.vault.com will tell you what past and current employees think about their employer. Other online resources such as www.wetfeet.com will give you great info about your target companies, as will the contacts in your networks.
These searches will provide useful background information for pitching, and during interviews your homework will be evident. This is always flattering to the interviewer, who sees you’ve paid attention to detail and shown effort and enthusiasm, each of which can end up being deciding factors in a tight job race. As you develop folders of information on potential employers, be sure to capture the details so that you have retrievable insights for this job search and for future strategic career moves.
Here are some other online resources for researching companies and identifying management titleholders:
The resources available reach to the horizon. Standard & Poor’s also has a far less well-known database of executives by name and title: a Biographical Directory/Database that delivers some amazingly detailed personal information. These higher-level titles will be identifiable through one of the above resources or through one of the following options:
An increasingly popular recruitment tool is the incentivizing of referrals from employees with corporate Employee Referral Programs, which typically offer a monetary reward for successfully referring employees to the company.
When you have a list of particularly desirable employers, it might be worth doing a few database searches for phrases like “[company name] referral program.” If a company has an employee referral program, it can encourage a networking contact to act as a referral for you. This won’t work all the time, but when your target is a highly desirable employer, it might be worth the effort.
As you engage in this potential employer research, your database of potential employers within your commuting distance will grow exponentially, and you may also want to create a folder of dream employers in your career management database.
If you are just starting a job search, build the information in these folders and beware of applying for jobs with these “superdesirable” employers right away, even when you have networking contacts who can open doors for you.
I’m sure you sometimes hear about the hit shows on Broadway, but what you may not know is that these shows don’t actually start on Broadway: They go through months of rehearsals, previews with selected audiences, and then road trips to cities around the country to iron out the wrinkles. They do this because they don’t want to screw up when they open on “the Great White Way”—the most important stage in the world. These experts in seamless performance understand that it doesn’t just happen, that we make mistakes and have to iron them out, and that this takes a little time and effort.
This analogy has implications for your job search. Of all the professional skills that are important to landing your next step, your ability to turn job interviews into job offers is both the most important and, at the same time, almost certainly your weakest skill, because you have very little experience and skill in this area. In the early days of a job search, your social media platform, resume, and interviewing skills are probably still in the development and retooling phases, and almost certainly not up to speed. The last thing you need to do is land an interview at the company of your dreams and then screw it up because interview nerves make you trip over your tongue.
It is better to hold off on applying to your dream companies for a few weeks, until you know that your social media profiles and your resume focus on the same target job and reflect complementary messaging. Meanwhile, you can land a couple of interviews and learn not to swallow your tongue in the first few minutes, better preparing you to meet with the people at a dream employer.
All this research has obvious immediate value, but it has significant long-term value as well, because you are building a personalized reference work on your industry/specialty/profession that will help you throughout the twists and turns of a long career.
We’ll now turn to developing the best ways to leverage visits to local and virtual job fairs, and integrate the experiences with your overall social networking strategy.