It isn’t just a new term, it’s a new standard
 
Job Hacking is to being creative with driving your career as Growth Hacking is to being creative with driving user growth for technology companies.
 
In today’s job market, especially in cities where the technology sector is growing with incredible speed, it would be reasonable to think that it’s quite easy to land a job at any of the fastest growing companies.
 
But you’d be wrong. It can be easy — if you have the right experience and know the right people. But if you are missing even just one of those items, the recipe for job placement breaks. This problem has been exacerbated by the increase of online job boards and here’s why: recruiters are inundated with stacks-on-stacks of resumes from every Tom, Dick and Sally who think they would absolutely crush the role. So how do you stand out? No need to cross your fingers or wish upon a star, the answer is simply to do some creative Job Hacking.
 
The steps to Job Hacking are simple, it’s in the execution where things get tricky. Each scenario requires a different approach; so one example won’t quite do it justice. Below are the key elements of the concept:
 
Step 1: Finding Waldo
 So you do a little searching on LinkedIn and elsewhere, looking to identify key individuals: who is the recruiter, who is the hiring manager, who works in the same department as that role? Finding the right people to reach out to is a skill in and of itself.
 
Step 2: Messaging Waldo
 Now, we have to find a savvy way to reach out to the recruiter that they will actually pay attention to. And the message we send has to have the right content: engaging, informative, and short. One could argue proper content curation is the most difficult piece in this entire puzzle.
 
Step 3: Poking Waldo & Friends
 A lot of people will tell you that job searching is a persistence game, which is partially true. I like to say it’s about polished persistence. Sending 10 emails to the same person will quite literally get your resume dumped in the circular file; however, finding various people and poking them a time or two with very fine quality messages — that could get you somewhere.
 
As the job market and related technologies evolve, so will the creative ways we can Job Hack. At AlwaysHired, we make it our business to stay on top of it so our candidates are always best positioned to get their foot in the door with an interview. We offer an entire ‘Jobs Bootcamp’ dedicated to teaching the details of this material and a variety of other topics including elevator pitches, resume curation, interview prep and more.
 
For more sweet job tips, shoot us a note at gatekeeper@alwayshired.com.
 
– Gabriel Moncayo, co-founder, AlwaysHired