For many decades running, one of the most commonly cited “truisms” about looking for a job is that you shouldn’t rely on published advertisements alone for finding your next opportunity – with the statistic often cited being that only 15-20% of all jobs are actually advertised and the remainder of roles (often called the “hidden” job market) are filled through networking and word-of-mouth.
I’ve certainly expressed this sentiment many times over the years, myself, and have encouraged (at times begged) many of my clients to diversify their efforts beyond just applying to published advertisements alone. Not only are published ads the most competitive channel for landing an opportunity, and often quite rigid in terms of required qualifications, but many job seekers also fail to realize that a significant percentage of them aren’t really a fair fight to begin with. Many of them are written from the outset to justify hiring an internal candidate or to favor folks made known to the company via a networking referral. Additionally, there are times when the company may change their mind and decide not to fill the job, after all, but the advertisement remains in circulation out in the web — like a zombie — wasting applicants’ time and giving them false hope.
But let’s go back to the notion of a “hidden” job market for just a second. Is this really still a thing, in an age where so much of the job hunting process now revolves around the internet? Do the percentages cited above still hold? Or has this commonly-shared advice become a bit dated and out-of-touch in recent decades?
In researching this question further, I started by running a general search on Google and turned up a ton of relevant articles (many examples here) that adamantly support the principle that most jobs, to this day, still don’t get openly announced in public fashion. I’d say roughly 80% of the experts cited agreed with this core notion and urge job hunters to adjust their efforts accordingly. And yet, there were also a few voices of dissent. Several authors I came across (see examples here, here, and here) have laid out cases for why the “hidden job market” concept is a fallacy — or an outdated concept, at best — with their primary argument being that companies can now advertise jobs freely, on their own websites, increasing the percentage of published roles compared to days past when companies had to pay to run them in the newspaper.
Alas, even in reading all of these different perspectives, it’s still really difficult to nail down the absolute truth of the matter. Not only have no definitive scientific studies (at least that I could find) been conducted on the subject, but there are also numerous little wrinkles people might overlook, at first, that complicate things further. For example, in analyzing this question, one might ask:
- Does the “hidden” job market mean an opportunity that truly isn’t documented anywhere on the entire web? Or merely a role that an employer hasn’t paid to advertise on a third-party employment website?
- If one engages in networking with their friends/colleagues and one of them shares a job opening the individual hadn’t seen before, do we consider that lead a “hidden” one that was surfaced through networking? Or is it instead just a “published” lead like any other?
- If a person applies to a job they found published online, but gets preferential treatment in landing the job, based on networking, how does that affect the statistics? And same question if an internal employee applies to a job in their own company and lands it, despite the job potentially being advertised simply for legal compliance reasons?
- If a person works as an independent contractor, pursues a self-employment route, or “creates their own job” so to speak, does this count as creation of a “hidden” job? Or do you omit those results from the analysis entirely?
Ultimately, even a few quasi-empirical efforts to study this subject (see the surveys here and here) produce wildly different results, so again, I have little hope that this debate will be conclusively resolved to anyone’s lasting satisfaction. Luckily, though, despite experts gnashing their teeth over the subject, I don’t believe the exact percentage of “hidden” vs. “published” jobs matters all that much in actual practice. It’s still agreed by virtually all parties that tons of jobs are found by BOTH key methods under discussion — applying to ads, as well as through personal contacts — so a smart job hunter will should diversify their efforts and diligently pursue both avenues.
On top of this, I’d share just a few additional observations and related suggestions:
- Even if we stipulate that the jobs posted on a company’s own site aren’t hidden in a literal sense, for all practical purposes they’re still going to be missed by 99.99% of job hunters out there. For example, there are over 140,000 companies in the Seattle area alone and most job hunters I’ve encountered only check a handful of the largest company sites like Microsoft, Amazon, and the like. So if you’re a job seeker, and not doing so already, I’d recommend you research a list of small-to-mid-size companies that are relevant to your background, frequently check their website, and make a proactive effort to get on their radar screen.
- Secondly, in the majority of successful career transitions I’ve witnessed, networking and word-of-mouth play at least some role in the eventual outcome. So while yes, it still makes all the sense in the world to apply to published openings of interest, the notion that this activity should be done in isolation without any related networking efforts puts people at a severe disadvantage. As stated above, there are many other factors in play, even with published leads, and it’s not always the case that the company hires “the best candidate” based on resume qualifications alone. In most cases, a referral is essential to greasing the skids.
- And lastly, I’d argue that many perceptions around the job market are greatly skewed by the sheer amount of attention that gets placed on the largest and most visible employers alone. In reality, according to the SBA, small businesses comprise 99.9% of US employers and as I suspect we’ve all witnessed, such companies tend to fill jobs informally and under the radar all the time. They often just grab friends, acquaintances, and other folks in their network to fill open roles on the fly, versus going through the time, trouble, and expense of running formal advertisements. Are these statistics truly factored into the mix?
In conclusion, would I agree that the use of the term “hidden job market” is misleading, outdated, and often used by disreputable career services as a fearmongering tactic? Absolutely. But does this necessarily then imply that the vast majority of positions are filled from published, easily-findable job advertisements? Nope, not even close. Even in today’s web-driven world, there’s no substitute for personal referrals, and an immense amount of roles are either newly created or filled “upstream” before ever seeing the light of day in advertised form…
