Jeff Altman - The Big Game Hunter

Using the Back Door: Sometimes It Makes More Sense to Avoid the Front Door

When you see ads in newspapers or on the web, often the ad will direct you to email your resume to an address like hrmgr@nameofthecompany.com . There, it sits waiting to be evaluated by the person who is probably the least experienced in the department.

Even if you are interviewed by the company, you will probably start by meeting a human resources person who is charged with interviewing everyone from receptionists to accountants to technology professionals to security guards. Larger firms will compartmentalize the recruiting function because they have more jobs available.

What if your resume is buried and never called on? What if you are interviewed by human resources and nothing else happens? What can you do?

If you have a friend, contact them and see if they will dig to find out who the manager is who is hiring for the job. Although the likelihood is small that you know someone, never skip the step.

Your second choice is to call the company and ask for the person who heads up the function that the job is in and work your way down. For example, call and ask for the head of security and ask if they or someone reporting to them is hiring for the _________ position.

You can also check your local library for whether it has access to http://www.hoovers.com or other services.

If that doesn't work, see if your contacts on http://www.linkedin.com , http://www.ryze.com , http://www.xing, and http://www.myspace.com or others can point you in the right direction.

Lastly, if those don't work, try http://www.jigsaw.com . Jigsaw carries more than 3.5 million names at more than 370000 companies. The service is free if you input 25 email contacts per month (a contact is name, title, email address, phone number and address) or costs $25 per month to access 25 contacts.

I'm also going to take a demo of [http://www.spoke.com;] Spoke claims information about more than 30 million people. Again, I'm going to do a demo of the product but it seems interesting.

Any way you look at it, sometimes, it is far easier to go through the back door.