How to Tap the Hidden Job Market

As talent acquisition grows more competitive, employers are looking beyond job boards to find high-quality candidates.

Summer Delaney, founder and CEO of CollabWORK, a hiring platform based in New York City, argues that the most valuable talent often comes through trusted professional communities, AI-driven discovery, and existing candidate databases rather than traditional recruiting channels.

She refers to these channels as the hidden job market.

Delaney discussed with SHRM how organizations can build stronger recruiting relationships within the hidden job market, improve hiring quality, and ensure their employer brand stands out to both candidates and AI-powered search tools.

Specialty Credential: Talent Acquisition

SHRM: Describe what you mean by the hidden job market and how employers can shift their talent acquisition strategies to source from these alternative and niche communities.

Delaney: The hidden job market means different things to different people, but I think of it as the places where careers actually happen, not just where jobs are posted.

For years, recruiting has been centered around publishing jobs to an applicant tracking system (ATS) and distributing them to job boards. But candidates don’t make career decisions in isolation. They ask peers in Facebook groups, Slack communities, Discord servers, Reddit threads, industry newsletters, alumni networks, and professional associations. They’re asking what it’s really like to work somewhere, what compensation looks like, and whether a company is worth joining. When a job is shared in that context, it carries far more credibility.

I found my first job producing for Katie Couric through a community for women in journalism. Her team wasn’t posting that role on LinkedIn. No matter the industry, the people you want to hire are already having conversations with peers they trust.

What’s interesting is that AI is reinforcing this trend. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity increasingly rely on many of these same trusted sources to understand employers and recommend opportunities. At the same time, employers are sitting on another hidden talent pool, thousands of former applicants, finalists, interns, and passive candidates already in their ATS or candidate relationship management (CRM) system who have simply gone cold.

To me, the hidden job market has three layers: trusted professional communities, AI-powered discovery, and your own existing talent database.

The biggest shift employers need to make is moving from chasing volume to building presence. Instead of asking, “Where can I post another job?” they should ask, “Where are the conversations already happening, and how do we become part of them?”

SHRM: What types of roles are most likely to be filled through the hidden job market, and which still depend on traditional job postings?

Delaney: Traditional job boards still play an important role, particularly for high-volume hiring where organizations need broad reach.

Where the hidden job market becomes especially valuable is when trust, specialization, or geography matter.

At CollabWORK, we categorize communities by industry, function, and location. What we’ve consistently found is that the more specific the hiring need, the more community matters.

Travel nurses exchange advice in nursing groups. Engineers gather in technical forums. Local professionals participate in city-specific communities where they discuss employers and opportunities. Some of the best hires never begin with a formal application. I hired one of our engineers simply by describing the problem we were trying to solve in a niche AI community. There wasn’t even a formal job description yet.

For highly specialized or difficult-to-fill roles, candidate experience becomes a competitive advantage. If two hospital systems are recruiting the same travel nurse, the employer that consistently shows up in the communities that nurse already trusts has a significant advantage over the one relying solely on sponsored job ads.

Specialty Credential: AI+HI

SHRM: What metrics should employers use to measure the value of community-building and relationship-based recruiting?

Delaney: Recruiting has traditionally been optimized for clicks, applies, and cost-per-apply. Those metrics still matter, but they’re becoming less complete.

We’re entering a zero-click world. A candidate may discover your organization in an industry newsletter, hear about you in a community discussion, ask ChatGPT about your culture, and only weeks later visit your careers page directly. That journey is increasingly invisible to traditional attribution models.

Community visibility, and now AI visibility, is much more like billboard advertising. The goal is consistent presence where your ideal candidates already spend time.

Rather than focusing solely on clicks, I’d encourage TA leaders to ask: Where are our best hires coming from? Which sources produce the highest offer acceptance rates? Which hires stay the longest? Those are the quality metrics that community-based recruiting tends to improve.

SHRM: What are some practical ways organizations can maintain relationships with former finalists and passive candidates without making those interactions feel purely transactional?

Delaney: The biggest mistake employers make is only reaching out when they have an opening.

Nobody wants another generic job alert. I’ve been receiving job alerts for local television anchor positions in West Virginia since I interned there in college. I’m now the CEO of a hiring technology company in New York. That’s not relationship-building.

Instead, employers should think more like publishers than recruiters. Most organizations already have years of valuable content, employee stories, career advice, recognition posts, leadership insights, videos, and community initiatives. AI can help personalize and deliver that content to the right audiences at scale, but there still needs to be a human behind it.

We’ve seen this firsthand with our nursing newsletter, Nurse Ascent, which averages around a 60% open rate because it leads with value: industry news, career resources, humor, and then relevant jobs.

Relationships are built by consistently providing value, not by repeatedly asking someone to apply.

SHRM: As AI tools become the first stop for candidates researching employers and searching for jobs, how should organizations adapt their employer branding and talent marketing efforts to ensure they are discoverable and accurately represented in AI-generated recommendations?

Delaney: The first step is surprisingly simple: ask the AI. Search for your organization in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity the same way a candidate would. Ask what it’s like to work there, what benefits stand out, or how your culture compares with competitors.

Then click the citations. Many employers are surprised to discover that AI is learning about them from Reddit discussions, employee LinkedIn posts, news articles, community conversations, and third-party websites, not just their careers page.

Next, audit your own content. Generic messaging like “we’re like family” or “we offer work-life balance” won’t stand out. AI rewards specificity and credibility. If your parental leave is exceptional, say so. If your team works asynchronously, explain how. Be clear about who succeeds at your organization and why.

Finally, participate in the conversations already shaping your reputation. Encourage employees to share authentic experiences, contribute to industry discussions, and engage in the communities where your future candidates already spend time.

The employers that stand out over the next several years won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most on job advertising. They’ll be the ones consistently showing up where both people and AI go to find trusted information.