In order to better understand the unpublicised job market, let's take a minute to review first the more traditional publicised job market in order to better understand the difference between both.
The publicised job marketplace is where we normally go for available publicised opportunities, you know, the newspapers ads, Job Banks, Staffing or recruiting agencies postings and Job Fairs.
But did you know that the publicised jobs only represent about 30% of all available jobs at any given time? Some experts in the field even claims that this job marketplace represents only about 10% of all available jobs.
So the logical question is, where are the rest of the available jobs?
The Unpublicised Job Market
The unpublicised job market, alias the hidden jobs market, is where job openings are filled without being advertised, or at least, not in the way we are accustomed as will see in a moment.
The unpublicised job marketplace represents about 70% of available jobs at any given time. But there's more; 85% of the six-figure wage positions are filled via this unpublicised jobs market. That means that the executive job listing we see in high end publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron's or The Financial Times, to name a few, only represents around 15% of the six-figure wage positions available.
Then the question is why this hidden market exists in the first place?
Why there is not just one place we can go and find all available jobs in the market?
To help ourselves answer these questions, let's take a quick look at the mechanism of both employment markets.
How the Published Job Market Works
In the case of the more traditional job marketplace, we perform our search on the available job listings to determine what positions we want to pursuit. Then we send our resume to either, the employer, placement agency or headhunter, contingent on who post the listing.
Once your resume is received, the enlisting team does the first screening of the received resumes. The living resumes are then sent to the hiring manager to review and the actual interview process begins.
First, HR or the hiring agency do a first round of interviews to see if the candidate fits into the corporate culture and to validate the resume information. Then the hiring manager interviews the screened candidates to select the most suitable one. Once the interviews are performed and the best candidate selected, the job offer process begins.
If the hiring company is acting the process, the HR team will present the offer the HR team will present the offer. In the case of a head hunter, it will serve kind of an go-between between the hiring company and the candidate, making sure the candidate receives a good offers as its commission if normally a percentage of the final wage.
How the Unpublicised Job Market Works
In the case of the hidden jobs marketplace, the process is kind of more streamlined and or even more discrete.
The job fulfillment process on this market is more company driven, sometimes victimisation external resources, but in rather a different way than in the traditional job market. On this market, job referrals are more common as companies looking for good candidates ask business partners, suppliers, contacts in other companies or even their own employees for referrals.
Some companies even have employee referral programs; after all, who better than the employee to know if the referred candidate fits the corporate culture as he or she lives it every day. In one Fortune 500 company I accustomed work for, the employee referral program actually paid a cash incentive for every referred candidate that got employed and completed their first three months on the job.
When you compare how both markets works, you power be thinking that the unpublicised job market is not as easy or convenient as responding to publicised jobs ads. But when you look at the number of possibilities available, definitively the hidden job market is something that you should consider as part of your overall job hunting strategy.
