To better understand the unposted job market, let’s take a minute to first review the more traditional posted job market to better understand the difference between the two.
The published job market is the place we usually go to look for available published opportunities, you know, newspaper ads, job banks, recruitment agency postings, and job fairs.
But did you know that posted jobs only make up about 30% of all jobs available at any given time? Some experts in the field even claim that this job market accounts for only about 10% of all available jobs.
So the logical question is, where are the rest of the available jobs?
The unprecedented labor market
The unpublished job market, also known as the hidden job market, is where job openings fill up unannounced, or at least, not in the way we’re used to, as we’ll see in a moment.
The unpublished labor market represents about 70% of the jobs available at any given time. But there is more; 85% of positions with six-figure salaries are covered through this unprecedented job market. That means the executive job listings we see in high-profile publications like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, or The Financial Times, to name a few, only account for about 15% of the six-figure salary positions available.
So the question is why does this hidden market exist in the first place?
Why isn’t there just one place we can go and find all the jobs available on the market?
To help us answer these questions, let’s take a quick look at the mechanics of both labor markets.
How the published job market works
In the case of the more traditional job market, we perform our search on the available job openings to determine what positions we want to fill. We then send our resume to the employer, employment agency, or headhunter, depending on who publishes the list.
Once your resume is received, the recruiting team performs the initial screening of the resumes received. The surviving resumes are then sent to the hiring manager for review and the actual interview process begins.
First, HR or the recruitment agency conducts a first round of interviews to see if the candidate fits into the corporate culture and to validate the information on the resume. The hiring manager then interviews the selected candidates to select the most suitable one. Once the interviews have been completed and the best candidate has been selected, the job offer process begins.
If the hiring company is carrying out the process, the human resources team will present the offer. The human resources team will present the offer. In the case of a head hunter, it will serve as a kind of intermediary between the hiring company and the candidate, making sure that the candidate receives a good offer such as his commission, although it is usually a percentage of the final salary.
How the unpublished job market works
In the case of the hidden job market, the process is more agile or even more discreet.
The job fulfillment process in this market is more company driven, sometimes using external resources, but in quite a different way than in the traditional labor market. In this market, job referrals are more common, as companies looking for good candidates request referrals from business partners, vendors, contacts at other companies, or even their own employees.
Some companies even have employee referral programs; after all, who better than the employee to know if the referred candidate fits into the corporate culture as they live it day to day. At a Fortune 500 company I used to work for, the employee referral program actually paid a cash incentive for each referred candidate who landed a job and completed their first three months on the job.
When you compare how both markets work, you may think that the unposted job market isn’t as easy or convenient as responding to posted job ads. But when you look at the number of possibilities available, the hidden job market is definitely something to consider as part of your overall job search strategy.
