How to doorknock

Greg Wyatt • June 11, 2026

What follows is Chapter 43 from A Career Breakdown Kit.

Is it a magic salve guaranteed for success? No of course not.

But much like anything in a job search, nothing is guaranteed. What we do is identify which avenues can be effective for your context, and form an appropriate strategy.

LinkedIn optimisation is great if people search for you on LinkedIn. Except speaking to my recruitment peers, fewer and fewer rely on it. Would it surprise you if I told you I rarely invested in at all before 2019? I've been working in recruitment since 1996 including at CEO level.

Applications, networking, referrals, content, CV databases. All have a place and a purpose.

Doorknocking on the other hand - some would tell you it has no place in the modern job search.

If my daughter*, her friends and other 18 year olds can get a job from an old school technique, while those employers say "only through Indeed" then that might be a hint it still works. Some of whom are socially anxious, but then it's a replicable process, not a cult of personality.

Or the periodic messages I get from CxOs who made their own jobs from direct outreach.

Not forgetting Granovetter's seminal research and recent LinkedIn-specific studies in Science journal showing weak ties drive more job mobility than strong ties.

And why wouldn't doorknocking work on LinkedIn, when you have a weak tie that suggests a viable employer?

But no, it's not a guarantee. It's just an arrow in the quiver of a multichannel job search.

43 - How to doorknock

 

Doorknocking is an old-school sales approach you may well have experienced, such as when a salesperson with a clipboard rings your doorbell and asks you to change electricity provider.

My wife even once bought from exactly this scenario.

While it’s not uncommon in a business-to-consumer situation it can also work business-to-business… if you can get past security.

Although technology has moved on, the principle is the same whether in person, by phone, email, letter or LinkedIn:

You approach someone cold and create your own opportunity.

This isn’t an approach for everyone and requires chutzpah. If you are used to a high failure rate in applications - what do you have to lose by being proactive?

More than that - look at all the advice on LinkedIn on how to improve your odds in a job search.

It’s all transactional and applicable, available to everyone - if you all follow it, everyone takes the same step forward.

While taking steps others are less prepared to do means the approach alone may stand out.

If you encounter the equivalent of a sign which says, ‘Trespassers will be shot!’, pay attention.

My own career of looking for work includes many non-transactional approaches:

  • Walked into the local Cinema and asked for a job
  • Walked into Office World and asked for a job
  • Worked for Dad
  • Talked to one of my ex-colleagues and gained some by-the-call phone research work
  • Temped through an agency
  • Walked into an Inn and asked for a job
  • Referred to a publishing, training & consulting company
  • In managing their small-scale recruitment alongside my day job I got to know the MD of a recruitment firm as a supplier. I went to work there
  • Tapped up to return to a more senior role
  • Started my business upon being given the boot - thanks Dave!

It’s true I did apply through job boards and agencies. It’s mainly through my own means that I have secured my employment.

*My daughter even tried doorknocking for her first job in our local town last summer. It didn’t work for her - she found a nice retail job through an application on Indeed. Her experience was positive enough that she helped a friend do the same - who got a job at the first shop they tried.

Doorknocking is about approaching companies by category not because they are recruiting. These categories can be:

  • All the employers in your local business park (often they have websites, with directories and job adverts)
  • Companies listed in local newspapers, directories or platforms (local to me this could be Cambridge Evening News, Bury Free Press, Cambridge Network or Business Weekly)
  • Top 100 employers in your domain
  • Companies that have recently had funding and are about to scale
  • Doorknocking companies you’ve come across through networking and its resulting market map

Make contact and make a case for yourself on the principle of the right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price.

There’s an element of luck involved for these elements to all come together.

A disadvantage is that they may not be recruiting or ever have a need to employ you and even if they do have a vacancy, you still have to establish the right fit.

That means a logically low hit rate.

Your threshold for an acceptable failure rate will inform whether this is the right approach for you.

The difference is the anonymous rejection of a volume-based application versus the ‘personal rejection’ from your direct outbound approach.

Right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price.

Let’s reorder and examine this marketing principle:

Right Place

Those Categories above. The place is the Company, and how you contact them. You can go in blind if you are a bold prospector or research them in advance.

‘site:’ is a useful command in Google.

You can search on specific websites: ‘site:linkedin.com ACME jobs’

Right Person

Typically this will be the ‘next one up’ - Head of department, Director, CxO or Owner.

Who would be the budget holder at work? Those are prospects. Look them up on LinkedIn, PR, news, video platforms. What can you find out?

Right Time

While time can be happenstance, can timed factors create opportunity? What might be a hiring trigger?

Perhaps you could contact a list of companies that have recently announced funding or a big win - news that may lead to hiring additional people.

Or maybe you hear through the grapevine that Janine is about to go off on maternity leave.

If their process isn’t time-bound, can you make it time-bound?

‘We aren’t hiring right now’ might mean they’ve run out of headcount in the January to June period and may have a new budget in July. What can you learn that helps you both?

If you have radio silence, why not try again in a month or three months?

Think about how you buy. If you don’t need something how likely are you to respond to a message no matter how well crafted?

If you do need something you might think first of someone who keeps in regular touch.

Right Offer

You have more opportunity for career creativity in being unemployed than someone entrenched in a 9 to 5 permanent job.

What problems can you fix for a company in a non-traditional employment capacity?

Let’s say an employer has a problem that needs fixing. They don’t have capacity to do it right now. It isn’t burning enough to seek professional help and there isn’t sufficient work in view to make it a job.

What if you caught them at the right time?

An out-of-work TA Manager who offered to revamp an onboarding process.

A web designer who notes lots of issues with their website.

A strategic operational issue that is their unknown unknown identified by your expertise.

A swamped team that could benefit from their admin burden being reduced.

An orchard that needs pickers at harvest time.

What starts out as a short-term, project, or part-time piece of work can become proof of concept. While rare, I know a few people whose permanent full-time jobs have come about this way, including at a senior level.

Right message

This is both specific and crude.

It’s specific because nailing the message CAN create an opportunity a poorly written message may miss.

It’s crude because sometimes you can catch people at the right time, no matter how cruddy your message is.

This is the case in recruitment - I’ve picked up several senior appointments by calling at the right time.

‘I’m glad you called Greg, I’m starting to think about my maternity cover in June.’

Had I not called, that HR Director may well have gone to the specialist HR recruiters she is also in touch with.

If you have a strong hook in your message - such as a key area of rare expertise or a clear issue you’ve identified which companies may have - go in with that.

If you don’t - done is better than procrastinating:

‘Hi Greg, I live locally to Bircham Wyatt Recruitment. Love what you do. I wondered if you might be recruiting for an apple picker at any point. If you can’t help, could you point me in the right direction?’

Right price

I’ve left this until the end because much of this is variable and subjective.

What are your needs? What can they afford? What does the market say? How flexible can you be?

Research will help if you can get a sense of what they generally pay through Indeed, Glassdoor or others. Or maybe what comparable companies that are advertising will pay.

One approach might be to pro-rate your salary over the period you’ll work there.

Doorknocking can sometimes give you access to jobs that are being actively recruited. It’s a happy byproduct of your work, if you find yourself in this situation.

It’s worth persevering. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think after 10, 20, or 100 unsuccessful efforts that the approach itself is at fault.

There is always an element of luck in any activity.

This may be out of your comfort zone, in which case it’s an opportunity to grow.

The only certain thing is that if you don’t try you definitely won’t benefit.

A standard diagnostic

By Greg Wyatt • October 22, 2026
The other day I read a LinkedIn post about the iron triangle as it relates to recruitment. That you can be fast and good, but it will be expensive. That you can be fast and cheap, and it will be bobbins. Or that you can be cheap and good, but it will take longer than the heat death of the universe. At first glance it’s always made sense, with caveats, though that sense has been ablated with the promise of AI. Something that promises to be quicker, cheaper and better than people can manage. The only thing this triangle lacks is judgement-with-responsibility, something AI-style LLMs are currently incapable of, which is why they can be such problematic technology for recruitment. Though if your priority is speed, saving money, and filling jobs, the lack of judgement in even those algorithms that promise black box bias freedom might not be a problem you’d think much about. And when the top is spinning in an elegant way this might seem a standardisation you can apply everywhere, while you get on with your day job. Sadly the only place a spinning top doesn’t stop is when you were dreaming all along. AI has made me think about why the fundamentals of recruitment are so important, using judgement before we launch our projects. Which is why I like the 5Cs of project management as a way to look at recruitment: complexity, criticality, compliance, culture, compassion. With an adaptation and an additional C to be fit for purpose. It’s a great way to consider what approach to deploy: Complexity: the number of moving parts in a role, supply and demand in the candidate market, resources required to engage and bring forward the right people Criticality: the impact a vacancy has on the organisation. The opportunity a great hire brings. The damage the wrong hire can cause. And everything in between Channels: we go where the candidates are, whether at the end a headhunt, from an advert, from sourcing across LinkedIn Recruiter/equivalent tools, CV Databases, ATS records, other platforms, internal applicants, suppliers, consultants, temps, networking, referrals or even from a little black book, which I suspect will become more relevant again when data becomes noise Compliance: not just employment law, but how technology is used to find, engage and assess candidates in a fair, equitable and inclusive way Context: the full picture of the company – its organisational and local cultures, principles and values, mission, vision, goals, challenges and trajectory. The nuts and bolts, what that means for your candidates, and trying to understand the same in them Compassion: recognition of the impact a vacancy has on the employer and its team, balanced with how everyone can be brought together. And compassion for everyone that interacts with our recruitment, in process or invisibly Yes, I swapped context for culture. Hiring for context necessarily includes culture, and goes much further. And I've added Channels, which should always be established before going to market. I like these because they’re a way to ensure that how you recruit is proportionate and appropriate. They may even highlight you shouldn’t hire at all. But what you shouldn’t do is assume one recruitment process is the same as the next, nor that the investment made in reaching desired outcomes should be. What may seem expensive to you might bring an unexpected return on investment. What seems slow at the outset might bring a starter quicker than hoped – proper planning and all that. What seems good quality might fall apart, when the promises prove inadequate. That’s why it’s so important to diagnose first, before standardising. Greg p.s. You're welcome to try my free Hiring Diagnostic & Plan . It's not based on the 6Cs, which I think require more depth than a free tool can reasonably provide. Instead, it draws on principles from other disciplines: True and Fair from accounting, and Suitable and Sufficient from health and safety. It's free and private. Give it a go, and let me know if you'd like to chat through how the 6Cs might apply to your recruitment and enhance the resul 

Introduction to the hidden jobs market

By Greg Wyatt • October 14, 2026
On Wednesday 21st, I'll be doing a LinkedIn Live on The Hidden Jobs Market, joined by Paul Woodhouse. Paul is a marketing leader who has been looking for work in our challenging market. A previous role was a Hidden Job, and has also hired people himself. We'll be looking at his experiences to give a little substance to what can be a nebulous term. I'll show the steps anyone can take to become available for unadvertised vacancies, and for advertised vacancies that are filled by other means - after all employers consider more than only applications when taking a standard approach to recruitment. As a recruiter I don't advertise around half my vacancies, which might be for reasons of confidentiality, a lack of definition in the brief, a on the QT replacement for someone about to be dismissed, or mass availability of candidates. I'll use LinkedIn Recruiter to look for potential candidates, CV databases that can be more effective for immediate hires, my network for referrals and recommendations. My previous candidate pools for other vacancies - some of whom might have once open a time been applicants. Indeed, that last point shows the absurdity of much job search advice. If you apply for a vacancy on an ATS, you might be rejected, yet still be considered for future vacancies in the same employer. A hidden job hidden by an advertised job, where tailoring your CV with AI might make you less likely to be considered. Join us on Wednesday, or if you aren't free, the recording will be available immediately. Both can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7516049669924225027?viewAsMember=true . The chapter below from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) shows a simple metaphor for the hidden jobs market, why it's such a silly term, and a better way to think about your own job search. 3 - The hidden jobs market In most of the calls I have with job seekers they will ask me about The Hidden Jobs Market. What is it? Is it real? How can I access it? Before we get into that, we should talk about tomatoes. As you read this next section, imagine a tomato is a job. So, you want to procure some tomatoes. How would you? Your local farm shop. The supermarket. Wednesday’s stalls. Maybe you subscribe to a weekly box of veg. Maybe you grow your own. Maybe you trade for the tomatoes from Tim’s allotment. Maybe you look at people funny when they ask for an intro to Tim because his tomatoes are wonderful. You likely wouldn’t buy some from Amazon - they don’t sell fresh food. Not to me anyway. Though you might buy tomato seeds from Amazon if you grow your own. Maybe even cans of crushed tomato, sauce, puree, or whatever meets your needs. As the channel you use to source tomatoes isn’t the only consideration, so too is the configuration of what you need. While you and others all access tomatoes in different ways, some of which overlap, and some of which are mutually exclusive - none of these channels are hidden. It’s just that you may not know how to access some channels, while others won’t be available to you. Now I want you to read that section again. Instead of being your desired job, you are an employer whose desired tomato is a candidate of choice. While recruitment is the inverse of a job search (more on this later), the analogy is better from the employer perspective because they are on a buyer’s journey where you are the product. Employers want to fill their vacancies through the best means. Some vacancies are easy to fill, others not so, and they will access the channels necessary to find the right people. In many situations, they won’t advertise a vacancy, which might be for reasons of confidentiality or convenience. Some say this is as much as 80%, a flawed figure which comes from a flawed survey, or perhaps it comes from a newspaper article in 1974 before computers were a thing. In my recent small-scale research, it was indicated more than 62% of vacancies are advertised. 53% responded they advertise more than 75% of vacancies. Many of the respondents were headhunters, whose business may be based on not running public adverts. I expect this will have skewed the results lower than the true figure. What employers don’t do is hide vacancies systematically. To access these vacancies, you need to understand the channels through which employers hire and invert these channels to form your strategy. Much like how tomatoes are sold through channels which consumers buy from. Is the hidden jobs market real? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that not all jobs are advertised. Some are confidential, some for reasons as mundane as not wanting to deal with hundreds of advert applicants. No, because it isn’t a term that has inherent meaning. Speak to people who advocate for it, often a career coach, and they’ll tell you it’s anything from personal branding and networking to going direct and being referred in. When vacancies aren’t advertised by employers, they often fill them through sourcing - this is a specialist skill related to finding people where they may be found: LinkedIn, CV databases, corporate databases, GitHub, Facebook, YouTube. These are all channels you can access as part of an appropriate multichannel strategy. Which means if you have the right multichannel strategy (I call this Through-the-Line, which we’ll cover in parts 2 and 3), you access all jobs available to you, including those which are hidden and those which are in witness protection on another continent. Who are the headhunters that specialise in your domain? Who are the people who can refer you to jobs? How can you be more discoverable on LinkedIn and CV databases? How can you gain an understanding of the ways in which your ideal job is recruited, so you can take advantage of those channels? Those are better questions to answer to allow an effective through-the-line, multichannel strategy involving outbound and inbound leads. Despite me being vocal about why Hidden is a flawed notion, two people have thanked me for advice that led to their new roles claiming they’d accessed the hidden jobs market. As I gritted my teeth in hidden rage and congratulated them on their success, they unveiled the truth. What they actually did was map out their real life network of people they’d worked with and got in touch. If the people you know don’t know that you are looking for a role, what reason would they have to tell you about a vacancy? It’s simple marketing - right place (LinkedIn), right person (ex-colleague), right message (looking for work), right time (we’ve a vacancy). Of course, that takes a bit of luck to achieve the right congruence. Odds you increase through volume and follow up. And when you do find those opportunities, they are easier to win because you are a known name, not another unknown CV. There it is, the hidden tomato market.