The Surprising Truth About Employers Who Are Hiring - CareerAlley

The Surprising Truth About Employers Who Are Hiring - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. It doesnt work to leap a twenty-foot chasm in two ten-foot jumps. American Proverb It is ridiculous for career experts or major web sites (i.e. Yahoo, AOL, etc.) to write articles to notify job-seekers which employers are hiring. Guess what? Every great employer is ALWAYS hiring! Hiring someone is nothing more than an investment. Every employer can and should create a job any time the right person comes along. If you can prove to the real hiring decision-maker that you will provide a positive Return on Investment (i.e. your value will significantly exceed your salary), then it would be stupid for the employer not to hire you. Great employers recognize this. Employers who dont understand this are organizations you shouldnt want to work for anyway. If an organization is not consistently looking to hire top talent, then that organization is headed absolutely nowhere in the future. Great organizations recognize that they need to have a pipeline full of talent since they will inevitably experience change and turnover within their organization. If someone tells you his organization is not hiring, he either doesnt want to hire you, or he isnt the real decision-maker. That might sound harsh, but its the truth. At the start of the recent recession, I was able to get multiple 6-figure offers from organizations in industries I had never worked in before. While none of these employers was officially hiring, each organization was willing to create a job for me. How did this happen? In brief, I used networking to get connected with real hiring decision-makers (i.e. not the HR department), and I presented myself as a solution for the challenges each organization was facing. Im not sharing this with you to brag or to try to impress you. Instead, I want to open your mind and get you away from the typical job-seeker mindset that the only way to get hired is through an advertised job. Applying for advertised jobs (i.e. through major job boards, newspaper ads, career fairs, etc.) is actually the worst way to try to get hired, especially in a tough economy. While I landed multiple 6-figure offers at the start of the recession through networking, I found it incredibly difficult to stand out (like most job-seekers) when I applied blindly to advertised job openings. There was a very logical reason why. When a job is advertised to the public, you are not the only person who can see or apply for the opening. For example, a senior hiring person from a Fortune 500 company recently told me that his company received over 12,000 applications for one position last year! Its pretty hard to stand out if you are in a stack of hundreds or thousands of resumes, which is usually the case with top employers, especially in a tough economy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over 70% of jobs are filled through personal contacts and networking. Less than 10% of all jobs are filled through online job boards. Theres a very logical reason why this happens as well. Pretend you are an employer for a second. Would you rather hire someone you found on Craigs List or someone that was referred to you by a person you trust and respect? Its a no-brainer. Employers only advertise jobs to the public as a desperate, last-ditch effort if they have been unable to find someone through their existing network. As a result, most jobs are filled behind-the-scenes, while most advertised jobs feature intense competition. If you want to get a better job faster, you need to stop looking for jobs and start looking for people. Do whatever it takes to get yourself in front of people who have the power to hire you or people who can refer you to other individuals with the power to hire you. When you spend the bulk of your job search on networking with people from your ideal employers/field/industry, you will get hired much faster than the typical job-seeker who only applies for jobs being advertised to the masses. Byline: Pete Leibman is the Founder of Dream Job Academy and the Author of the new book, I Got My Dream Job and So Can You. His work has been featured on Fox, CBS, and CNN. You can visit www.BestCareerBook.com for a free video series from Pete on how to get your dream job. This is a Guest post. If you would like to submit a guest post to CareerAlley, please follow these guest post guidelines. Good luck in your search. Visit me on Facebook