80% of jobs aren't advertised.

I'm thinking more and more about my upcoming job-hunt in June. I'm a bit worried about finding a job in this economy. It took me almost a year to find my current crappy job. I don't have a year to spare this time around.

Anyway, I've read a lot of books about how to find a job and they all say this in one form or another. 80% of jobs aren't advertised. I find this, literally speaking, to be very false. In every place I've worked, every position has been posted - either internally, externally or both.

The trend nowadays where I live is to no longer promote someone within. The human resources trend is to post the job internally and externally and have the public and the employees apply for it.

(Another trend is, instead of internally promoting your employees, you hire someone from outside your organization to fill the roll. That's why it's often better to leave a company and come back, rather than stay in the same old job hoping for a promotion.)

Many not-for-profits and union contracts have it in their bylaws that they have to post a job. Also, any company big enough to have a human resources department almost always posts their jobs because that's standard industry practice.

I will say this, however:

1) Even though a position is posted, many managers and companies already know who they're going to hire. By posting it, they're just going through the motions.

And it's for this reason that "networking" is important. And that's why all the books say "80% of the jobs aren't posted." Because they want you to network and it's easier to say this then to explain it the way I did right here.