Finding the person with the authority to hire you

Finding a job can be a very challenging endeavor, and you have to compete with, in some cases, hundreds of people for advertised positions. Because the competition can be stiff, you have to be more proactive and more persistent than other job seekers.

Although many people spend – or we sometimes say waste – their time on job boards like Careerbuilder.com or monster.com, your efforts could be better focused on going directly to the hiring manager, the person who has the power to offer you a job. The best approach is to contact hiring managers in the department of companies where you’d like to work. Or in small companies, you might need to contact the owner.

Contact them by cold calling them even if there’s no open position, because when one does open up, you might be the first in line. Or if they like you enough, they might create a position just for you. Although this is unlikely, it has happened.

How do you find the hiring manager?

In order to get to the hiring manager, you must learn to think like a detective and gather clues to discover who in a certain company might be able to hire you. And here’s how you do it. Maybe only some of these techniques will work, but they’re all well worth trying.

Search the Internet. Take your list of 100 companies, sit down at a computer, and start to research. Begin by searching the internet with the name of a company and the hiring manager title of the department where you think you’d like to work. For example, XYZ Company, warehouse manager.

Check out company websites. They often include a list of managers, and if nothing else you can learn about the company. And don’t forget to check the “in the news” section or whatever it is called. There are often articles about the company that quote various managers.

Call the company and ask. Pick up the phone and contact the company. Ask the reception who is the manager of whatever department you’re interested in. And don’t forget to ask for the proper spelling of the person’s name and their official title. Say to the person who answers, “I am trying to find out the name of the person who hires in (department). I want to send them an email. What is their email address please? How do you spell their last name? What is their official title?” If they are not sure, ask if they have a company directory handy and can look it up.  

Open a LinkedIn account.  Make sure you have a LinkedIn account and invite as many people as you can into your network. Search LinkedIn for the companies you’re interested in, and check to see if anyone in your network works there. Then contact them to learn more about what it’s like to work there. And find out if they can introduce you to people in the department you might be interested in.