Marketing Career Zone

With up to 80% of jobs lying within the ‘hidden’ market and never being advertised, it clearly makes sense to put the vast majority of your own efforts to find a new marketing job into this area.  Job hunting in the hidden market, unlike the more traditional methods of finding work, however, is not about taking a passive or reactive stance and waiting for something suitable to come along.  It is about proactively putting yourself out there and making yourself visible to prospective employers.

In years gone by, before the Internet became such a huge part of our daily lives, networking was something which took place mainly in face-to-face environments or through letters of introduction.  Nowadays, of course, face-to-face networking is still every bit as important, but of course our other options are now vastly increased and many choose to do the bulk of their networking online.  Recruiters, far from simply posting online marketing jobs, actively trawl the Internet in their efforts to seek out those with marketing skills and experience.  If you do not have an online presence, therefore, and a good one at that, you might just as well be invisible.

What should you do then if you are starting from scratch and Googling yourself brings up a big, fat zero?  Actually, there are a couple of really quick and easy places that you can start.  Google profile pages allow you to create your own professional profile in minutes.  With plenty of space in the ‘About me’ section, you can take the opportunity to showcase your marketing experience (using keywords to draw potential employers to your page of course), and as time goes on and you add to your online presence, you can link directly to your other profiles and sites.  The beauty of the Google profile page is that, being a Google product itself, the search engine of course loves it.  You can find the main page for Google profiles at http://www.google.com/profiles.

LookupPage, at http://www.lookuppage.com, is another great resource to get you started.  You can either opt for their free membership or their Basic or Pro packages.  The two latter will guarantee you a top Google ranking for your name, but even the free package will place you in the site’s directory so that others can find you easily.

Of course profile sites such as these are not designed to act as social or business networking tools where you can add contacts and network your way towards marketing jobs.  What they are, however, is a quick and easy way to ensure some level of online visibility and a great place to start.  Remember that having no online presence when a prospective employer Googles you in this day and age is tantamount to telling him that you have no friends and nothing worth telling the world.

Just one word of warning with regard to these sites and any others that you choose to join…make sure that the information you display across them all is consistent, especially your name.  The name by which you are known is an important part of your brand and if you vary it from site to site, employers’ searches will fail to find all the great information that will help to ‘sell’ you.