How To Find Unadvertised Jobs

http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/find-unadvertised-jobs/

by Ashuu • 13 years ago

71 41 13 years ago

Well this is unfortunate: http://i.imgur.com/41Yn4ye.png

CGamesPlay• 13 years ago

You might have more luck getting the developer to fix it by providing some information about your browser. It works fine in the latest stable Chrome on Mac OS X, for example.

patatino• 13 years ago

broken on firefox 26, win 7

width="871" on the second image seems to be the problem.

nawitus• 13 years ago

Broken on Firefox for me too.

bhassel• 13 years ago

quick fix to make it readable on firefox, I right-clicked on the paragraph -> Inspect Element, selected the div.single-content and removed the "float:left" CSS rule.

EnderMB• 13 years ago

You can also make the large Google screenshot smaller if you use the Image Zoom plugin (or know how to change it using Firebug or the default dev tools). I believe that is what's causing the layout to freak out.

lukeschlather• 13 years ago

View -> page style -> no style.

One of my favorite features.

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

Same thing for me on OS X 10.6.8 with Firefox 26.0.

hartror• 13 years ago

Same here Firefox 26.0 Ubuntu 12.04.

This is why I have Evernote Clearly installed: http://evernote.com/clearly/

Istof• 13 years ago

You can also use a bookmarklet like these https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Theodores• 13 years ago

Isn't it better to let a recruitment company do the hard work for you?

In a technical job market there are recruitment consultants that know all of the companies, what might work for you and where there might be a need. In my experience they do provide a very good service. However, we tend to dislike them when they are not needed so we might overlook them as our first point of call.

chadillac• 13 years ago

A company like "Glass Door" perhaps?

auctiontheory4• 13 years ago

Isn't it better to let a recruitment company do the hard work for you?

If you want to entrust your professional future to someone who doesn't understand the work you do and whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with yours, sure.

Recruiters aren't all bad - they can be one prong of your job-search strategy. (I just found a great startup job through a recruiter.) But don't put them in charge.

And read Ask The Headhunter.

mooreds3• 13 years ago

Plus one for reading Nick (the author of 'Ask the Headhunter': http://asktheheadhunter.com/

The site has been 'online since 1995' and looks like it, but has a wealth of advice for taking control of your destiny when looking for a new job. This is my favorite piece on how to interview: http://asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm

edwhitesell• 13 years ago

There are also a number of people looking for jobs who simply refuse to use recruiters/headhunters. Most just need to fill a quota. It's very rare to find one who truly wants to find the right job for you.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

"Recruiters aren't all bad"

I keep hearing it, but I haven't really ever seen it.

lsc• 13 years ago

In a technical job market there are recruitment consultants that know all of the companies, what might work for you and where there might be a need. In my experience they do provide a very good service. However, we tend to dislike them when they are not needed so we might overlook them as our first point of call.

wait, really? There exist recruitment consultants who are paid by the employee, and not the employer?

I mean, I'm mostly asking 'cause I kinda want that job. I think I'd be good at it; I have a pretty good track record of getting my friends jobs. Hell, I'd show up for the interview.

(If you are talking about the regular kind of recruiters, who are paid by the hiring company... that's a very different thing. They can be useful, but you need to remember who they actually work for.)

joshz• 13 years ago

Taleo makes a great job making it as painful as possible to search and apply for jobs. I find it pretty funny a "hack" of how to look through taleo listings is in an article about unadvertised jobs.

auctiontheory4• 13 years ago

Yup. On the one hand, recruiting is hardly the rocket science of software engineering, and on the other hand, it's hard to imagine a more user-unfriendly system than Taleo, yet somehow they seem to dominate the market.

nowarninglabel• 13 years ago

Silk Road and SuccessFactors are just as terrible in my opinion but seem to also have a healthy percentage of the market. I believe all these HR software systems follow a similar pattern of starting out solving a fairly simple problem, then as Sales brings in more and more disparate customers, the developers keep tacking on stuff until it is a hodgepodge mess.

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

I was expecting a post that told you to "get off your lazy ass and look for some in your area". Instead, I got a primer on Google search operators.

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

In my experience 'Option one' is not so bad. You need different industry directories (not just "yellow pages") to find most relevant companies and then contact them. Laborious but better than being one in a hundred applicants.

motters2• 13 years ago

At least within the area of the UK which I lived in until recently the idea that there are lots of unadvertised jobs is a myth. When I was unemployed I did the experiment of applying both via "the usual channels" and also speculatively based upon fairly elaborate analysis to try to identify suitable organisations. The number of "conversions" - which means inquiries turning into job interviews - was vastly higher for the usual channels, with very few companies responding to speculative inquiries.

benaston• 13 years ago

I have done the same and come to the same conclusion.

ig12• 13 years ago

What makes you think your methodology was a good one for finding the unadvertised jobs ?

Plenty of unadvertised jobs will go through networks, word-of-mouth and personal recommendation - obviously cold-calling wouldn't give you good results in such cases.

Generally it's estimated that roughly 40% [for 2009-2010] of jobs are unadvertised, and that's calculated using US BLS data (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.htm) comparing number of job openings companies state they have versus actual hiring numbers.

While there might be variation between countries, I doubt that there's significant difference between the UK and the US.

motters2• 13 years ago

I think my methods were good. They were based on data mining company information for all companies registered with Companies House, such as changes in numbers of employees, net worth, main products and the like. I tried to apply scientific method to the task of finding employment.

If the unadvertised jobs cannot be detected by any empirical evidence then I would suggest that they be treated like other mythological phenomenon.

burnerphone44• 13 years ago

Obviously, companies advertising a job are more likely to have a job; this does not nearly imply the converse (that a majority of jobs are advertised).

Your experience might also reflect the type of job you were looking for. For a job with a large pool of potentially compatible employees that advertising gave me easy access to, it would be prudent to advertise.

Finally, I could offer anecdotal data in the opposite direction.

auctiontheory4• 13 years ago

You misunderstand how "unadvertised jobs" work. They are "sold" through word of mouth. Unless you're within the employer's personal network - and your message does not indicate it - you'd never find out. Your speculative inquiry would not get a response because they don't know you, and they prefer to give the job to someone who comes with a referral.

mooreds3• 13 years ago

Uh, so the answer to 'how to find the unadvertised job' is 'look at company websites' or 'do google searches'?

I haven't been in the job market for years, so I don't have a great answer, but these seem pretty weak ways to find jobs that aren't advertised, because, if they are on company websites or available via Taleo, they are advertised.

How about:

  * research a company, find out their biggest problem (competitive research), find the manager who should be tackling the problem (linked in), and email him an outline of a solution.  I don't manage a ton of folks, but if someone did this, we'd definitely have a conversation.
  * go to tech meetups and meeting interesting people
  * comment on a corporate blog regularly
  * offer to work for free (if you can afford it)
  * ABL (always be looking)
  * never eat lunch along
  * blog about the industry you want to get into
  * work on an open source project
  * instagram (or whatever the kids are doing these days)

This is an oldie instance that one of my friends did to get hired back before the dotcom bubble: http://donwrege.com/XOR/home.html

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

"* offer to work for free (if you can afford it)"

I know there are stories where working for free is a good strategy, but they are vastly outnumbered by stories where not working for free was the best option.

I'd argue against it unless you have a really, really, really good reason to work for a specific organization for free.

mooreds3• 13 years ago

I think you are correct. One reason I worked for free for an organization was that it was in an entirely different space than my previous experience, and I wanted to know more about it. Other good reasons to work for free: * gain skills * meet people

But you definitely want to be careful and limit it, otherwise you'll get taken advantage of. It's very similar to offering a free software service--often you don't know if what you have is valuable until people start paying for it.

praptak• 13 years ago

" When you see a job posted on (insert leading job board name here) somebody paid to have it advertised there. You know where it’s free for a company to post all of their jobs? Come on, guess… If you suspected a company’s own careers website, you would be correct!"

If somebody paid for it recently, it is a strong signal they really have an opening. Jobs on companies' own sites might only be there to:

a) show to customers and investors the company is in good shape.

b) keep their recruitment buffers filled just in case.

I've been through jobs in companies with "no recruitment" enforced due to budget cuts and guess what, the job ads on their sites were still there.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 13 years ago

My last job we were advertising and interviewing for a position that did not exist on the belief that somebody wanting job X could be talked into job Y instead.

I don't work there anymore.

jeza• 13 years ago

Unless it's an ad from a recruitment agency. While I'm certain that recruitment agency ads do often advertise real jobs, there are instances where I'm pretty sure there are other recruitment agencies that advertise fake positions. They are then used to collect CVs of the applicants so they have a database of candidates which they can use if an employer asks for someone for another position.

slykat• 13 years ago

Can't you just used Indeed.com? I thought every major ATS allows you to submit your job listings to Indeed.com and similar sites.

kika2• 13 years ago

It could be a waste of your resources, because many such listings are actually not designed to lure good qualified prospects, they have a completely opposite intent - lure idiots and unqualified people. Even if you apply, they'll talk to you, then talk again, then disqualify you on some ridiculous grounds.

I'm talking about Green Card PERM process in these companies. The law mandates them to advertise, but their intent is to prove to the DOL that there's no adequate candidates around. They _already have_ someone for this position, moreover, this person (most likely) already occupies this position, they just started his/her GC process.

How To Find Unadvertised Jobs

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