How To Position Yourself Online For A Top Job

Did you know that there are 1,420 CEO jobs available online today? It’s an amazing number and up 40% on this time last year. So what does this mean for jobseekers (active and “passive”), companies, and headhunters, and how can you best position yourself for a top job online?

So What Are The Jobs And How Easily Can You Find Them?

Currently, it remains true that the CEO roles listed are usually not for Fortune 500 companies, which are still mainly handled by the executive search firms. However, there’s an increasing number of CEO jobs listed for some decent-sized companies, and some high-growth companies which are both privately held and publicly listed. There are also some prestigious and really interesting CEO opportunities in the public sector or in not-for-profit organizations.

The jobs available now are for increasingly bigger roles (click image to see job postings):

They are with high-growth companies both listed and private equity (click image to see job postings):

There are also some really prestigious and interesting jobs in the public & charitable sectors (click image to see job postings):

The CEO jobs we are picking up are also geographically quite diverse among developed and developing countries: while 240 are from the UK and 529 are from the US and Canada, 37 are from Africa and 291 are from China.

There are endless job websites out there, and newspapers still carry lots of important vacancies, but it can be tedious and time consuming to go through them all individually. “Job aggregation” sites like Indeed.com and Simply Hired have helpfully combined listings from most of the main job sites into one place, but search for “CEO” and you’ll probably still run into quite a few listings for PA and executive assistant roles. At World Of CEOs there is a new CEO Jobs search tool, which not only pulls in vacancies from all the main job sites, it gets rid of all the clutter and non-genuine CEO roles like “EA to the CEO”, which is how we arrive at our total of 1,420 CEO jobs…

So What Do These Online Recruitment Developments Mean For You?

First, companies are more aggressively going online and directly advertising vacancies themselves. For instance, IBM currently has 442 jobs listed on LinkedIn, GE has 449 and Pfizer has 249. Small businesses too are following suit. Jennifer Boulanger is head recruiter at Opower, a software company that helps people save money on their energy. She advertises on Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn, and estimates that she spends $165,000 a year on online searches. “It sounds like a lot,” she said, “but if we were still using search firms to fill most of our six-figure openings, we’d be spending millions.”

One trend that I find particularly interesting is that of “passive talent acquisition”, the idea that companies are now putting more effort into recruiting people who aren’t even looking for a job. LinkedIn claims that 79% of working professionals around the world are considered passive candidates, with 21% actively seeking a new job. In LinkedIn’s 2013 Global Recruiting Trends Survey, 3,300 talent acquisition leaders said that “finding better ways to source passive candidates” was the third most important long-lasting trend in recruiting for professional roles surveyed.

This trend is playing out both in the West and in ‘BRIC’ countries: in China & the US, 61% said that they focused on hiring passive talent, in Italy, 57% said that they keep a list of previously interesting candidates (and in India, 33% said that they maintain an active dialogue with them), and in Brazil, 22% maintain a list of leads who haven’t applied for any position. “Passive candidates are not really as passive as they say they are,” said Steve Guine, National Director of Staffing at IIT. “Like active candidates, they are more than willing to listen. The big difference being, they are more selective.”

Recruiters can now go direct to these would-be candidates. The Boston Globe cites the example of Maria Varmazis, a content strategist who for a few years had maintained a profile on LinkedIn, where she listed her career experience and skills. Then, in 2012, she was contacted through her LinkedIn account by Rapid7 Inc., a fast-growing Boston security software company: “I was not out there aggressively looking for a new job,” she said, “It was like a cold call. It was as cold as they get. I knew of the company, but didn’t know anyone there.” However, a short time later, she accepted a job offer as a marketing content manager at the company. “You have to consider it your own online branding tool,” said Ed Nathanson, director of talent acquisition at Rapid7 in Boston, “You have to market yourself.”

Unsurprisingly, headhunters too are picking up on this shift towards passive recruitment. "LinkedIn is a gold mine for passive candidates," said Jay Feeley, practice leader and account executive at MRI GlobalSearch. “Everyone is using LinkedIn, and if you aren't, it's probably a little bit of a concern," added Jessica Lee, vice president of talent acquisition at the Washington communications firm APCO Worldwide and editor of Fistful of Talent, a popular blog about recruiting.

The combination of these factors means that the online job search channel can’t be ignored, and not to engage in this will inevitably restrict job opportunities. The growth in passive talent search also means that it is important to “passively opt in” and maintain an online professional profile, or again be limited in future opportunities.

So How To Get A Top Job In This New World Of Work & How To Make Technology Your Friend?

Go direct yourself

The rising trend of going direct and bypassing the search firms and recruiters works both ways. It is also much easier to draw on social networks to find the relevant person to connect with a company and also draw on your personal network to contact them.

And if you’re not getting anywhere with the headhunter, don’t be afraid to go direct to the chairman or board members. Harriet Green, CEO of Thomas Cook, is a prime example of somebody who succeeded in spite of the executive search firms. She claims that they hold back talented senior women by focusing overly on certain set criteria: “Cut out the middle men,” she told me in her BBC CEO Guru interview. Talking about how she got the role at Thomas Cook, she described one headhunter she’d had contact with as being “unbelievably unhelpful”, adding, “Nobody approached me. I contacted the chairman and said: ‘I think you need me’. I’d never met him in my life.” Harriet, who came #28 in our World Of CEOs Global Ranking Of The Top 30 CEOs On Social Media, recommended using modern technology to contact chairmen, saying out that “one of the great things about governance is that all these people are known”.

NB Bear in mind that if an employer recruits you through a headhunter, they’re likely to have pay a 25% premium on your first year’s salary, so they may in fact prefer it if you contact them directly!

Get the insider due diligence on companies and leaders

As we witnessed with the travel industry, the internet is making companies’ reputation and culture much more visible and transparent. Jobseekers can use sites like Glassdoor.com to see “company reviews”, which give you an insider’s view on what it’s like to work in most major companies. They also include an approval rating for the CEO, which is a great measure for the quality of the company’s leadership.

And given that you may still need to engage a headhunter for the top-ranking jobs, it is helpful that it’s also easier to find who the relevant search firms are in the recruitment world, and to track down the industry mover and shakers.

Get yourself out there selectively and thoughtfully

If we recognize that there is much more passive recruitment activity taking place online, then the question is how best to ensure that companies and recruiters which are most relevant pick you up? It is important to have a North Star in mind of the likely industries, types of company, range of roles you would be interested and important that positioning and tone is reflected in your own line profiles.

Also how do you best set yourself apart, now that you’re competing in a global market of both active jobseekers and those who are not even looking for a job? Did you know that there are now 2.6 million people on LinkedIn who mentioned the phrase CEO somewhere on their profile, and 124,000 people globally who claim to be a current CEO or member of the executive team? So the key is to ensure that you optimize your online profile to get near the top of searches, and then that you find a way to stand out amongst the other potential candidates. The more LinkedIn connections you have to senior executives and recruiters, you higher you will appear on the list. Garnering “endorsements” from previous employers and other members of your network will also work in your favor.

Get a better radar – target corporations with job gaps

With lots of CEO vacancies not publicly advertised, how to read between the lines and work out where the upcoming opportunities might be in your industry before they are advertised? In the past, unless you were a recruitment professional, it was impossible to keep track of everybody who’s in and who’s out. But there are business intelligence services such as BoardEx that can effectively give you a radar on listed opportunities globally. This identifies possible vacancies in 5,000 of the world’s top companies, where a CEO is departing, but no successor has been announced yet.

You can then use login with LinkedIn to see who you know at the target firm, or find somebody in your network who can make you an introduction.

How Do I Magnify My Personal Brand?

LinkedIn is now pretty much an indispensable job-hunting tool, with some firms requesting that candidates apply with a link to their LinkedIn profile rather than providing a CV. Also consider getting active on Twitter, which can allow you to connect with real-time industry discussions and get known as a thought leader in your sector. Twitter is also a great leveler, enabling you to send an @reply directly to any registered user and start a conversation.

To avoid the risk that something you say on social media will limit or work against you, ensure that your contributions are always value-added and consistent with your North Star position and tone. Build your personal brand by commenting on stories of interest, by offering to write guest blog posts (or by starting your own), and also by building your profile in the physical world by attending industry conferences. Over time, as you succeed in your goal to become a “talent magnet”, more opportunities, such as unsolicited approaches, conference panel sessions and public speaking appearances will start to come your way.

One way to measure your sphere of influence is through ‘Klout’, which tracks engagement with your posts and comments across multiple social networks. Your ‘Klout Score’ out of 100 may become increasingly important in the future, particularly in marketing-related roles or CEO positions where you are expected to maintain a high public profile. A recent job posting for a community manager at Salesforce has already stipulated than anybody with a Klout score of less than 35 need not apply.

Over To You

It’s great that world of recruitment and talent acquisition is changing so quickly. While the headhunters still hold sway and many top CEO vacancies are still not listed online, the quantity and quality of the vacancies which are is fast increasing. The combination of more transparency and more searchability is not just opening up for professional recruiters and active jobseekers, but it is also creates massive opportunities for the savvy online passive candidates to play the longer game, and become a magnet for killer job opportunities over time. Good luck.

I’d also be interested to hear your stories about how you used an innovative approach to find a job, and the smart ways you are using to position yourself as a talent magnet.

Do follow me here on LinkedIn to get weekly updates on CEOs and the latest leadership insights.

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By Steve Tappin

Chief Executive, Xinfu, Host BBC CEO Guru & Founder, World Of CEOs

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Steve is a personal confidant to many of the world’s top CEOs. He is the host of BBC ‘CEO Guru’, which features in-depth, on-the-record interviews with the CEOs of General Electric, Lenovo, WPP, China Vanke, Wholefoods and Unilever.

Founder Of WorldOfCEOs.com, Steve is the author of ‘The Secrets Of CEOs’, which interviews 200 CEOs on business life and leadership. His latest book, ‘Dream to Last’, was published in Mandarin in December 2012, by Beijing University Press, and will be released in English later this year.

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