Ways to Get a Job

How to get a job essentially? Riffling the classifieds? Surfing Websites? Or Recommended by friends or business associates? Or by being a headhunted?

There are essentially three ways to get a job: the first, by riffling the classifieds and surfing job-search Websites; second, by being recommended by friends or business associates; and finally, by being headhunted. Of the three, being headhunted is easily the most flattering acknowledgement of your talents and potential… but it is also the hardest to achieve.

If you are on the job market, you are actively seeking work. You go through the classified every morning, receive emails from job-search Websites and ask industry peers for news of vacancies you could fill. But what if you’re not looking for a job? What if you’re quite comfortable where you are? What if you’re too busy to hunt? How will you know about opportunities elsewhere? So what’s the way to get a job?

This is where recruitment agencies come in. these are companies whose business it is to look for you when you are not looking yourself. Some focus on lower-scale vacancies and some focus on executive experience, typically filling non-management positions in sales and administration. The real headhunters, however, are generally called in to fill management positions and above.

When a company engages the services of a professional headhunter, it is usually secretive because they do not want their employees, competitors or shareholders to know what they are up to. Advertisements appear with mysterious P.O. Box addresses. Email addresses are sometimes deliberately misleading. No phone numbers are given. A lot of the work done is undercover-dinner meetings and after-hours interviews are not uncommon.

A headhunter’s job is usually to find the top performers within a niche range of skills, experience and other requirements. Their clients pay a lot of money for this work, and expect a lot more than the run-of-the-mill applications they receive in their mail every day. There are looking for quality, not quantity.

To appear on the shortlist that these headhunters present to clients is flattering acknowledgement that you are amongst the crème de la crème of your industry. But how do you get there?

Get Noticed

In every career path worth talking about, there comes a point when you achieve a certain amount of recognition and fame for your work that elevates you to the pantheon of greats, where you hobnob with your industry’s top performers and become a guru for juniors. Getting to this place is the first thing you need to do if you want to become a target for headhunters.