Professionals who are happy at their jobs often find themselves bombarded by unwelcome calls from recruiters. The opening gambit goes something like this:
“I wanted to let you know that I’m conducting a search for a highly prestigious company looking for someone who can fill the role of X. I’m wondering if you know anyone who might be interested?” Or, if they want to be less subtle they might just say, “I wonder if you might be interested in learning more about this opportunity?”
[See: 10 Ways Social Media Can Help You Land a Job.]
But when you are desperate for headhunters to notice you, it’s hard to get their attention. So, the question job hunters frequently pose is this: “How can I get recruiters to help find me a job?”
To understand the answer, you need to understand that recruiters get paid to find candidates not easily found by other recruiters or by the companies themselves. These are “passive candidates” who are not actively looking for positions by posting their resumes online but who are open to being courted for opportunities of interest.
In order to be perceived as that passive candidate, even when you are actively seeking a new position, it is helpful to know how you can position yourself online in such a way as to be found. And knowing the mechanics of the “finding” process makes it much easier to work that process for your own purposes.
First and foremost, virtually everyone in the recruiting and sourcing professions amasses a large set of LinkedIn connections. It’s not uncommon for such people to have thousands of first-degree connections, reaching an overall third-degree network of millions of profiles from which to find people. One of LinkedIn’s main revenue streams is selling specialized services to find and manage contacts for recruiters.
Yet there is a host of other sophisticated ways that talent acquisition directors, recruiting managers and sourcing professionals apply their craft. Recently, 1-Page, a company that describes itself as a “disruptive player in the human capital technology space” on its LinkedIn company page, published, “Sourcing Secrets Revealed: The Complete List of Sourcing Tools, Apps and Extensions Used By The Best of the Best.”
In 1-Page’s list, some tools parse through large databases of clients and directly export people with sought after keywords, skills or employment history into spreadsheets. These, in turn, provide the recruiter with phone numbers and email addresses, and make it easy to make call lists or to send customized and highly personalized emails to hundreds or thousands of potential candidates as quick as you can snap your fingers.
[See: 10 Things Your Mom Didn’t Teach You About Job Searching.]
Other websites, web browser extensions and Gmail extensions can scrape the entire internet to find your email address, your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, as well as lists of attendees at conventions, conferences, alumni gatherings and more.
There are still other tools that act like applicant tracking systems to track all interactions with prospective and actual candidates. They can integrate all this information with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts as well as other tools.
Internet Archive, a web application, enables you to “search a database of 500 billion old web pages and articles” to find projects a job candidate previously worked on, according to 1-Page. Sortd, another tool, “allows [recruiters] to plan and schedule emails to prospective candidates” and Email Hippo can be used for when a recruiter wants to reach a large number of candidates, according to 1-Page.
Based on all of these tools recruiters use, here are some important takeaways:
1. Just because the email you receive from a recruiter seems to be personalized, chances are that many others are getting the same communication in order to rustle up an initial pack of potential candidates.
2. Make sure that you have a complete LinkedIn profile that includes your job titles, projects, publications and skills.
3. Carefully review your entire social media presence. Anything inappropriate on any single platform like Facebook can nullify all the good stuff you’ve provided on LinkedIn.
4. Create your own personal website and be sure to have your own resume on it so that it can be found by those programs that crawl and scrape the web.
5. Be sure to attend relevant professional conferences, conventions and other gatherings. Chances are that attendee lists will make their way online and stay there for years afterward. You can be found by having your name on an event list from years earlier!
6. Think twice about branding yourself as “looking for new employment opportunities” on LinkedIn or elsewhere. It can easily decimate your ability to be seen as a passive candidate that a recruiter would want all to themselves.
[See: The 8 Stages of a Winning Job Search.]
In the hide and seek game of job hunting, remember always to hide in such a way as to make yourself easily findable!
Happy hunting!
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How to Get on a Recruiter’s Radar originally appeared on usnews.com
