See if you can answer the following multiple choice question.

In order to find new experienced employees, do employers:

a)use social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

b) primarily use major job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs

c) use their own career websites as the primary advertisement source

d) use niche job board sites that cater to specific communities

e) focus on getting their jobs found with a Google type search

f) spend time getting their open positions listed on SimplyHired and Indeed

g) all of the above

If you answered – [private](g) all of the above – you’d be correct.

If you can’t be found in all of them, you’re only exposed to part of the available jobs.  Even with this list, only about 95% of all available jobs are listed in traditional places you’d look.  In other words, the unadvertised job market is about 95% of all the job market.

How do employers learn how to do that?

Employers turn to a couple of trusted experts to teach them how to get their jobs found in places other than the big job boards.  In an upcoming post I will discuss why employers have begun to migrate away from big job boards and I’ll reveal how you can reverse engineer this process to take advantage of the same expertise to find jobs.

In other words, these same experts who teach employers how to use these other less traditional job advertising and posting methods, have made available what they’re teaching employers.  They’re doing that to level the playing field and at the same helping their clients by educating job seekers to find the employers in a more specific and narrowly focused way.

A true story

A rapidly expanding, small technology employer that provides tools for testing computer networks, was seeking a Marketing Director with some social media experience.  They used Twitter to find their ideal candidate.  The job was never made public anywhere else.

If you are a Marketing professional and weren’t actively using Twitter, you never had a chance to get this job because you never knew it existed.

By the way, if you’re thinking they only used Twitter because the job required social media experience, you’d be wrong.  The company does much of its recruiting through such sites as Twitter, Cragislist, Facebook and LinkedIn.  This story was reported in the September 2009 issue of Fortune Small Business magazine.

Another reason employers value these sites are not just because it allows them to find talented employees efficiently, but they get to know the person behind the blog post, profile page or tweet and that adds to their intrigue and interest.

If you don’t know how to use these tools, it is imperative to learn how.  Be sure and view the LinkedIn video on social networking to get the job you want.[/private]

Your Resume vs. Technology - What Works