Hidden Job Market in New Zealand? How Your Personality Type Determines Your Networking Style

If you’ve been applying for jobs in New Zealand and wondering why it feels like shouting into a very polite void, here’s a statistic that might reframe your entire job search strategy: roughly 70% of roles never get advertised at all.

Not 7%. Seventy.

That number lands differently depending on where you are in your career, but for most people it produces some version of the same reaction – a slightly sick feeling followed by the dawning realisation that the job search strategy they’ve been executing with considerable effort (polish the CV, write the cover letter, hit apply on TradeMe, refresh inbox, repeat) is only ever going to reach about a third of the available market. The other two thirds are being filled through conversations, relationships, referrals, and the kind of quiet professional reputation that gets you a phone call before a role even exists publicly.

This is the hidden job market. And navigating it well is one of the highest-leverage career skills you can develop – particularly in New Zealand, where the professional communities in cities like Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch are genuinely small, and where word travels fast in most industries.

The catch – and there’s always a catch – is that “networking” means something completely different depending on who you are. The advice to “just put yourself out there” is about as useful as telling someone to “just be confident.” It ignores the fundamental reality that people are wired differently, and that the approach that feels natural and effective for one person can feel excruciating and counterproductive for another.

So let’s actually make this useful, by mapping networking strategy to personality type.

First, a Quick Word on What Networking Actually Is

Because I think a lot of people are walking around with a mental image of networking that’s putting them off before they’ve even started.

If “networking” makes you picture a room full of people in lanyards exchanging business cards with the aggressive sociability of a 1980s sales conference – you’re thinking of the wrong thing. That version of networking exists, and it’s genuinely terrible. It’s also not what fills the hidden job market.

What actually fills the hidden job market is much quieter and much more human. It’s a former colleague mentioning your name when their new company is about to create a role. It’s a LinkedIn comment you left six months ago that a hiring manager happened to see. It’s a coffee conversation with someone in your field where you asked good questions and genuinely listened. It’s showing up consistently in the same professional community – online or in person – over a long enough period that people just know you.

None of that requires you to be an extrovert. It requires you to be intentional, consistent, and genuinely interested in other people. And the best version of it looks different for every DOPE type.

Peacocks: You Were Made for This – Now Add Some Strategy

Peacocks in a networking context are a bit like Labrador puppies at a park – naturally enthusiastic, immediately likeable, and very good at making everyone feel like the most interesting person in the room. If you’re a Peacock, social situations that make other types anxious are often the professional contexts where you shine most brightly.

The hidden job market, in many ways, was designed for Peacocks. The ability to walk into an industry event and leave with three new genuine connections, to make a LinkedIn post that actually gets engagement, to pick up the phone and have a warm conversation with someone you’ve never met – these come relatively naturally to the Peacock type, and they are precisely the skills that get you into rooms where opportunities live before they become job ads.

The strategic move for Peacocks isn’t to network more – it’s to network with more intention. Peacocks can sometimes spread their energy across so many connections and conversations that they never build the depth with any one person that actually leads somewhere. A broad network is an asset. A broad network where nobody knows specifically what you’re looking for or what you’re great at is a much smaller asset than it looks like on paper.

Peacocks should identify ten to fifteen people in their field or target field whose careers they genuinely admire, and invest in those relationships specifically. Not transactionally – Peacocks are genuinely good at relationship-building and shouldn’t fake it – but with the added layer of clarity about what they bring and what they’re moving towards. A Peacock who can articulate their direction clearly is a Peacock who actually gets referred.

Eagles: You Have the Confidence – Now Do the Follow-Through

Eagles don’t usually struggle with the initiation side of networking. Reaching out to someone senior, asking for a direct conversation, making a strong first impression – these are well within an Eagle’s comfort zone. Eagles tend to project the kind of confidence and directness that senior people in organisations respect and remember.

What Eagles sometimes underestimate is that the hidden job market runs on sustained relationships, not single impressive interactions. An Eagle who makes a great impression at an industry event and then never follows up has done most of the work for none of the reward. The person who gets the call when a role comes up isn’t always the most impressive person the hiring manager has ever met – it’s usually the person they’ve heard from most recently and most consistently.

The practical move for Eagles is to build a very simple follow-up system. After any meaningful professional interaction – a good conversation at an event, a useful online exchange, a coffee with someone in their target industry – Eagle should have a lightweight habit of following up within a week, connecting on LinkedIn with a specific reference to what was discussed, and checking back in every three to six months with something genuinely useful (a relevant article, a congratulations on a promotion, a specific introduction). This is not complicated. Eagles just need to actually do it, rather than moving on to the next thing the moment the conversation ends.

Eagles in New Zealand should also think carefully about the seniority of the relationships they’re investing in. Eagles naturally gravitate towards other Eagles and towards people at or above their level – which makes sense for ambition, but misses the reality that referrals and recommendations often come from peers and from people slightly below you in seniority who’ve seen your work up close. A 360-degree network beats a top-of-the-tree one every time.

Owls: Depth Over Breadth Is Your Superpower

For most Owls, the word “networking” produces a specific kind of quiet dread. The image of forced small talk with strangers, of performing sociability in a room full of people doing the same, of having to sell yourself to someone you’ve just met – it goes against almost every instinct an Owl has.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to do it that way. And the networking approach that actually works for Owls is, arguably, more effective in the New Zealand hidden job market than the Peacock version anyway.

Owls build trust through demonstrated expertise. They’re the person who writes the genuinely insightful LinkedIn article that makes industry people stop and think. The one who gives a careful, well-researched answer to a question in an online professional community. The one who shows up to a small industry working group or a specialist conference and asks the question nobody else thought to ask. None of this requires performing extroversion. It requires doing what Owls already do – thinking carefully and sharing what they know.

The concept of what some people call “asynchronous networking” was basically invented for Owls. Written communication – whether that’s a thoughtful LinkedIn post, a considered comment on someone else’s article, or a well-crafted email to someone whose work you’ve genuinely engaged with – lets Owls build professional presence and reputation on their own terms, without the performance pressure of real-time social interaction.

The watch-out for Owls is perfectionism as a form of avoidance. The LinkedIn post that never gets published because it’s not quite right yet. The email draft to a potential connection that sits unsent for three weeks because you’re not sure it’s worded perfectly. Progress in the hidden job market requires actually showing up, and an Owl who’s invisible because they’re waiting until they have something perfect to say is missing the window. Imperfect and present beats perfect and absent every time.

Doves: You’re Already Networking – You Just Don’t Call It That

Here’s something most Doves don’t fully appreciate: the thing they do naturally in every professional environment they’ve ever been in – genuinely caring about the people around them, remembering details, checking in when someone seems off, celebrating other people’s wins quietly and consistently – is networking. It just doesn’t look like the version they’ve been told to do.

Doves are often extraordinarily well-connected without realising it, because they’ve spent years being the kind of colleague, collaborator, and professional community member that people genuinely like and trust. The hidden job market runs on trust. Doves have usually been building it for years without keeping score.

The strategic move for Doves is to get conscious about a process that’s been largely unconscious. Start noticing the professional relationships you already have – former colleagues, people you’ve collaborated with, professionals in your field who you follow and engage with online – and recognise that those relationships are assets. Not in a cold, transactional sense, but in the sense that people who like and trust you are people who will think of you when they hear of something relevant.

The specific development area for Doves in the hidden job market is learning to articulate what they’re looking for. Doves can be so focused on not imposing or not making it awkward that they never actually tell the people in their network what kind of opportunity they’d be interested in. But nobody can refer you for something if they don’t know you’re open to it. Practicing a simple, warm, one or two sentence version of “here’s where I’m at and here’s what I’m open to” – and getting comfortable dropping it naturally into professional conversations – is one of the highest-return things a Dove can do for their job search.

Doves should also lean into the one-on-one coffee or video call rather than group events. The setting where Doves thrive is an intimate conversation where they can be genuinely present with one person – and that setting is also, it turns out, where the most meaningful professional relationship-building actually happens. The big industry event is less important than you think. The fifteen coffee conversations are what actually moves things.

The New Zealand Specific Layer

One thing worth saying explicitly about the NZ context: the market is small in a way that genuinely changes the dynamics.

In a city like Wellington, the professional community in most industries is compact enough that most people are two or three connections away from most decision-makers. That’s an advantage if you’re actively building your presence and reputation – things move faster and referrals carry more weight. It’s a disadvantage if you’ve burned bridges or left a role badly, because that information also travels fast.

The practical implication: in New Zealand more than in larger markets like Sydney or Melbourne, your reputation is your network. How you show up in every professional interaction – how you treat the intern, how you behave when a project goes wrong, whether you deliver what you say you will – compounds over time into something that either opens doors quietly or closes them.

Your DOPE type affects how you build that reputation and how you leverage it. But every type has a genuinely viable path into the hidden job market – it just looks different depending on who you are.

Where to Start

If you’re not yet sure which DOPE type you are – or if you’ve been reading this wondering whether you’re more Peacock or Eagle, more Owl or Dove – the free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment at richardstep.com is a quick and genuinely useful place to find out. It takes about five to ten minutes and gives you a framework that’ll make the networking advice above a lot more immediately applicable to your actual situation.

And if you want to explore further, richardstep.com’s full library of self-tests has plenty more to work with.

The hidden job market isn’t a secret club. It’s just a set of relationships that exist before the job ad does – and you can start building yours today, in whatever way fits who you actually are.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: when did you last reach out to someone in your professional world just to see how they were going, with absolutely no agenda? Because that’s usually where it starts.

Find out your DOPE personality type and start building a networking strategy that actually fits you: take the free DOPE Bird Personality Assessment here.