So you found a job opening and this company looks just right, you went ahead and submitted your resume on the job portal. You are pretty confident that when hiring manager looks at your resume she wouldn’t waste a single minute before she picks the phone and calls you. This is all good except that your resume will have to probably go through a “valley of fire” before it gets in to the hands of hiring manager. Even if you got a call for interview, chances are that you will have to make your way through several roadblocks and gatekeepers. These roadblocks and gatekeepers act as a firewall between a jobseeker and the hiring manager. It would certainly be much easier if you could by-pass all of that and, well, get to the hiring manager directly.

Getting to the hiring manager is going to require some hard work. So if you are ready I will shortly present four ways that could help you in this pursuit. All of these are simple tactics but they do require work . In many cases, strategies below will help you make the first contact in your target company. While in other cases you might be able to shortcut your way to hiring manager directly. Don’t worry at the end of this series we will give you some tips about how to move beyond the first contact as well.

Let’s make sure you have name of your target company, your target position title and reasonable guess about your prospective manager’s title.

Suppose you are applying for “Operations manager” position at “Widgets and company” based out of “Boston, MA”. We make a reasonable guess that this position will be reporting to the “Director of operations” or “Vice President of operations”.

Step 1: Google.com

Step 2: Type in Widgets and company Boston, MA

Step 3: From the bottom of the Page click on “Advanced search”.

Google gives you several fields but here are the top five fields.

All of these Words                     :       Widgets and company Boston MA

This exact word or phrase   :      Director

Any of these words                    :      Vice President

None of these words                 :

Numbers ranging from           :        to     :

Step 4: Click on Advanced Search at the bottom of the page.

Try variations of what we have filled above with specifics for your company. Search results may eventually lead you to a contact email, contact phone number, company twitter account or elsewhere.  The Key here is to be creative but at the same time make sure to keep your focus right – come back if you end up in places that add little value.

Tip: In the fields above “number ranging from” try to use phone area code for the local area where company is situated.