Traditional Job Search is Dead

The days of looking online for a job posting, applying for the job, and then getting an interview are long gone.

In my last post, Social Disruption: How Job Search has Changed, I discussed why the current hiring process is broken.

If you want to stay employed, you will need to use new strategies and tactics to deal with the disruption that social media and technology has had on the job search.

Many companies no longer post positions publicly. Depending on who you talk to, 50-80% of positions are no longer listed. Check out these articles:

• Why The Best Jobs Are Never Advertised And How To Find Them

• Study: Half Of All Available Jobs Are Never Advertised

• Don’t Believe These 8 Job Search Myths

Risk Mitigation in the Hiring Process

When a company needs to fill a position, they want to mitigate risk.

The safest hire is an internal candidate. Many large companies may post their position publicly, even though they already have an internal candidate.

The next safest hire is an external candidate with a referral from an existing employee. A candidate with an employee referral will almost always be called for an interview. Employee referrals are golden.

These two groups of candidates make up over 90% of hires.

Does this change your attitude and strategy for your job search?

Let’s discuss a new strategy that I call the Social Job Search.

More: Employee Referrals – Your Ticket to Your Next Job

Social Job Search Defined

There are a few clearly defined steps to the Social Job Search:

1. Defining your personal brand—I have a new E-Book titled, “Personal Branding for Baby Boomers – What it is, how to manage it, and why it’s no longer optional” is now available on Amazon.com. Who are you? What talents and skills do you want to the world to know about?
2. Implement your personal brand—Create an online presence using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, e-books, blog posts, and other mediums that promote your personal brand. This is all about making it easy to be found.
3. Build a target list of companies that potentially need your services to solve their problems. Who do you want to work for next?
4. Network strategically with recruiters, hiring managers, and potential peers at your target companies. Make yourself known to people who can either hire you or affect the decision to hire you.
5. Investigate your target companies—Are these companies a good place to work? Is their public reputation true or just a facade? You will need to properly vet these companies.
6. Negotiate the hiring process—Act like a corporate negotiator to discover what the real issues are that the company is having so you can properly position yourself to be hired. I defined this process in the negotiator job search series.

I will be expanding on this process in detail in the series The Social Job Search. How to use social media to attract hiring companies to you.

The days of the traditional job search are over. May it Rest in Peace!

Marc Miller  

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