Bryan Power is a People Operations Manager at Google, where he manages recruiters for the North and South American sales organizations. He has worked at Google for over 6 years and is an expert in recruitment and staffing management and he has seen thousands of resumes.

He shared eight job-search secrets. Whether you’re unemployed, a recent college graduate, or unhappy at your current position, you can learn what it takes to get hired with these job-search secrets. The first two secrets are:

Secret #1: How to stand out from the crowd

Share with us some of the things that you’ve seen job applicants do to break through the noise. You always hear about a company posting a job, and they get thousands and thousands of resumes. So how does that person stand out from the crowd? What have you seen that worked in the past?

Bryan: It’s a great question. One thing that has changed a lot with the Internet is you feel much closer to a lot of information that’s out there about jobs. If you just look at how things have changed with companies that have been able to post all of their openings online, this was information that was much harder to come across 10 to 15 years ago. And so there’s this idea that you can send your resume out to a thousand companies in one day where, again, 15 to 20 years ago you would have been sending a thousand envelopes.

It’s a different feeling today — it’s very easy to click “send” and get your resumes out. People can spend a lot of time doing that over and over and over again, sending their resumes to every job that is posted on the Internet. I think that’s a very difficult strategy.

People who I’ve seen “break from the crowd,” as you put it, focus far more energy around a smaller set of opportunities. The way to think about it is that there’s a certain group of companies or specific roles that you’re probably really good for, and you want to spend more energy around that smaller group of roles and companies than on trying to make yourself attractive to a wide range of people.

To take it back to the real world if you take it offline, I live in downtown Manhattan. If I were a job seeker and I knocked on a thousand doors, I don’t know if that would be a good strategy to get my foot in any one of those doors. But if I identify 10 to 20 companies that I could inform myself about — roles I felt strongly that I would be a good fit for — and spend more time trying to get in just those organizations, that would be a much better and more efficient use of my time than trying to cover as many companies as I can.

Secret #2: How to network

A company like Google or other large enterprises have entire departments of job recruiters. But let’s say I’m interested in working for a smaller company, and through my research I learn that they are not currently hiring and that they even lack a recruiting department. Would it make sense for me to reach out to someone within that organization — take them to lunch, say — to develop some kind of a relationship even though they’re not hiring?

Bryan: You want to be thoughtful about people’s time and attention. People who are at a company that might not be hiring are probably busy doing things. If you can get a lunch or connection through your personal network, that will be much better. The challenge is if you don’t know anybody there, how do you develop that personal relationship? That’s a common question.

Thankfully, with the Internet today there is a lot of information out there. It’s rare these days that an organization isn’t going to be involved in some type of industry event. You can go there, meet people in a different setting, make that first connection, and follow up from there.

Generally, you also want to focus as much energy as possible on the things you can control. When people start networking, a common mistake is to say, “I don’t know anyone who’s going to get me a job,” so why bother? The problem with that thinking is that it’s typically not that one person you know who is going to help get you a job — it’s going to be someone connected to them in a way that you can’t anticipate.

For example, say your neighbor is a professor and you say, “I don’t really want a job at a university, so why would I bother telling him the type of opportunity I’m looking for?” In fact, though, that professor’s spouse or their neighbor might be just the connection you’re looking for. You don’t know where that connection is going to come from. So as a job seeker you really want to make sure to talk specifically about the type of opportunity you’re looking for and put it to all your connections. Because they’re going to take that sound bite or that snippet of what you’re looking for and give it out to their networks, and that’s where the opportunity will come from.

Get the rest of the secrets by listening to the full Google job search secrets interview here.