A Foot in the Door: Networking Your Way Into the Hidden Job Market

At age 24, with a degree in Finance and International Business and one year working for a major accounting firm in London, I came to Los Angeles with dreams of landing a financial position in the entertainment industry. Smart enough to know that THE FRONT DOOR was being used by everyone, I invested a couple grand with a career coaching firm that taught me how to get in THE BACK DOOR. Within a couple months, I met with 7 CFOs of the top studios and landed a job with MGM/UA. TOO BAD I didn't have Katharine Hansen's "A Foot In The Door" then!Now, as a 15-year recruiting veteran, career coach, and careers author, I teach this backdoor method myself. For both beginners in the job market, or beginners to the idea of informational interviewing and backdoor job search (which many of my 40-50 year-old clients are), this is a great career manual. Katharine walks the uninitiated through the entire philosophy, psychology, and practical steps of non-lemming job finding--doing it differently. Since 80% of all jobs are filled BEFORE being advertised, the technique of tapping the "hidden job market" as Katharine describes is crucial to long-term career management. Plus, experts say we are moving away from the traditional "permanent job," so knowledge of formalized networking will be a REQUIRED SKILL in tomorrow's economy.I did well in college because 4 months earlier I found a little book called "How to Make Straight A's in College by Beating the System". "A Foot In The Door" is the same type of book to read after college and before any career change...because this is about beating the job search system.Thanks for spelling it all out Katharine!