The Hidden Job Market - Let's See How The Real World Looks
Is there a hidden job market? Are you looking for a job in this hidden job market? Are you hoping to find a candidate within the hidden job market.
Ask yourself this:Â
Does the current system help or hurt this process?Â
Watch the video. As it happens, I currently live in Madrid, Spain and like to visit the local mall, which is anchored by Carrefour, a large retailer. Within this mall, you will find dozens of retail stores and restaurants. It happens to have a coffee shop with comfortable chairs, so I spend most Sundays there. It’s a tough life, but somebody has to live it.
Pictured here is one of the many small retail establishments located within the mall. From time-to-time, it will put a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window. If you happen to take the time to go to their website and look for a job, this store doesn’t actually show a job opening – but there is a small sign in the window saying there is one.
The Business Environment
As you can see, it is a typical mall, located within a cluster of other business establishments. There are stores within it and all around it; there are many other businesses in close proximity. And right at the top of the hill overlooking the mall, there’s a taxpayer funded unemployment office. Each of these establishments may offer great careers within what is clearly a hidden job market.
This is a setup you might find anywhere in the world, whether in the United States, Spain or Japan.
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Breaking the Job Search Process Down
Let’s break down the current process for finding a job within any of these establishments. The first task for the hapless job seeker is to find out which businesses are actually in this geographic area. In this case, we would be happy if we found a job within one of the shops in the mall or within the area
How Methodical We Need to Be in Our Search for a Career
If we wanted to be methodical about our job search, we might do what I did, take some photos. Then download them to my laptop, and then start making notes of which stores or other businesses I saw. For each of these businesses, I would first need to look up their website, then on that website, see if they have any jobs listed. I might also spend sometime walking around the area between the unemployment office and the mall, making notes or taking pictures of all the business establishments I run across.Â
How Much Effort Would This Take
This would take quite a bit of time to just collect the information about which businesses are in my area of interest. Then I would need to spend what might be a few hours or a full day just finding the websites of each business and organizing them somehow, perhaps as bookmarks, or as entries in a spreadsheet. If I am looking for a job, perhaps this is a good use of my time. Perhaps not.
Now lets say I find 10 jobs of interest, I now need to apply to each one individually, normally on that company’s website. But, following the ‘best practice’ advice, I might start to see if I have any inside connections to any of these businesses. Â
Now I wait to have one of the HR people or more likely, their robot, to respond. It will typically be a perfunctory thank you for your interest or in Europe, no response at all. What if there was a better way?
When we started building this app, pieces of the solution for uncovering the hidden job market were already visible.Â
Every Journey Needs a Map
In the map above, you can see counts of jobs in particular locations for a single company. That’s a good start to solving the Job Seeker + Job Opening matching challenge. But it is incomplete.  Therefore, to make it complete, a solution was needed that would show all the jobs available from all the companies anywhere and everywhere. Consequently, the solution would also need to eliminate the need for the job seeker to know what companies are where. Why is that critical for success? Because now, if you’re a company hoping somebody finds your job opening, a job seeker first needs to know of your existence.  Finally, an ideal solution would provide a much more powerful and simpler search solution that uses the map itself combined with an ability to search by keyword, city, zip code, state and country to search for ALL jobs anywhere.
That’s the first part of solving the 2 sided Job Seeker + Job Opening matching challenge. Because these days, companies need a way to find candidates with far less effort than it currently takes. Above all, they need to find candidates who are physically closest to them that also meet their job specifications. That’s why Mapertunity, our solution to the Job Seeker + Job Opening matching challenge, is designed for candidates to put themselves on the map.Â
Imagine, if all the jobs and all the job seekers were visible on Google Maps, you can find the candidate closest to you or if you’re a candidate, you can find the job closest to you. Here’s how that looks.
This is how you uncover the hidden job market and as well, how you find the hard to find candidates. Go ahead, create your profile today or create your first job posting. Let’s get you a job.