Are you job hunting? At the moment there are fewer vacancies, but more job seekers compared to the same period last year, April 2019, the media is writing. A very recent RAV training guide states: 60-70% of the jobs are in the hidden job market.

With exactly this statement gloor & lang was confronted recently during a training course due to company closure: That time we had reacted rather irritated because in times of social media and professional company homepages little stays really hidden.

gloor & lang has done some research for you to find out what this hidden job market is all about:

A research in 2016 of the company Metapage AG based in Zurich has shown that two out of three open vacancies of employers in Switzerland are never shown on job platforms! This makes a notable difference. Of course, not all jobs are advertised on job platforms by all companies. That would be far too costly and time-consuming. But is a job published on the homepage of a company really hidden? The question is also whether the study only included the most common commercial job platforms in Switzerland or also job portals on Xing and linked-in.

A report from the Zurich Economic Monitoring goes one step further one year later, in 2017: The majority of positions are filled through informal channels, it says. Around four out of five positions! So only 20% of the positions are publicly accessible. That would really surprise us since it doesn't go with the observations we make every day. However, the article puts the various sectors into perspective: in agriculture, art, education, teaching, and care: here the informal job market is particularly high. This makes sense since these employees are often well-connected regionally. This proportion is probably smaller in a high-tech or pharmaceutical company that is constantly looking for specialists.

Now a new study from 2018 comes to the following conclusion: In an article in "Die Volkswirtschaft" from October 2018 it says in Switzerland, 80 percent of open positions are advertised. In one-fifth of the cases, the jobs are allocated via "hidden" channels such as personal networks or social media platforms. One-fifth is 20%, not counting social media. So maybe 10% is still really hidden, i.e. not accessible from the outside.

In our opinion, the term hidden job market is very misleading, because it suggests that these could be jobs that are never visible at all. These do exist, but this is industry-specific and role-specific.

Correctly speaking, one can assume that jobs for technical specialists and managers are actually the ones most often advertised. Although there are jobs that are filled without being advertised, internal or informal placements are nothing new. All in all, the number of jobs not advertised has decreased in recent years, also due to low-cost publication options, says the Job Market Monitor team at the University of Zurich.

In addition, many job profiles have become so demanding that companies are looking for suitable applicants in a wider radius. The search intensity for highly specialized vacancies is usually rather high. So don't worry about the hidden job market! With smartness, know-how and exchange within your network you will hopefully still find exciting job offers, even if less than in 2019!