Millions of job hunters execute a job search by updating an old resume, responding to job postings, and uploading their ineffective resumes into the job site databases where they sit undiscovered and ignored. Some of them create a half-hearted LinkedIn profile and, believing in the LinkedIn job fairy, sit back and wait for the job offers to pour in.
These millions of job hunters who do nothing to educate themselves about modern job search and career strategy constitute that body of otherwise competent professionals who make up the long-term unemployed. You don’t want to become part of this club.
Career professionals estimate that a distinct minority educate themselves in modern career management strategy, invest themselves in creating a resume that will be discoverable in databases, create social media profiles that are similarly visible, and then engage in activities to make themselves even more discoverable by corporate recruiters.
Nevertheless, most of these activities are still essentially passive, because they depend on your being found and approached by recruiters. Job search in these increasingly insecure and competitive times isn’t a contemplative sport like fishing. It has much more in common with contact sports like football. In the world of work, if you want something to happen, you have to fight for it.
Now it is time to tie all the threads of a network-integrated job search together and lay out a practical strategy for increasing the number of interviews you can generate. The foundation for this, and the overarching goal of your job search every day, is to identify and get into a conversation with anyone who holds any of your identified high-value job titles at any and every company within your target location, using the many proven tactics that we have discussed throughout the book.
The more ways you approach the hiring managers within your target companies (and failing that, the people who know them), the faster and more frequently you will get into conversations with the people who can and will hire you. While most job hunters respond to a job lead by uploading a resume into the required database, such an approach gives you only one chance of getting an interview. Although responding to job postings is a big part of most job searches, you can double, triple, and quadruple your chances of getting interviews by making direct approaches to the people in a position to hire you with a sequence of different approaches.
You might have heard that the resume is outmoded as a job search tool, and that all you need now is a social media profile. However, running your life without a resume is like running an office without paper: It may sound nice, but it isn’t going to happen.
The technology advances that birthed the Internet have likewise changed the way companies recruit and working professionals find jobs. Social media sites have given recruiters a truly great resource for finding candidates, and job seekers another great way to make themselves visible. This does not mean the end of the resume, however, because there are distinct differences between these communication tools. As my most esteemed friend and colleague, and America’s leading career columnist, Joyce Lain Kennedy says, “Your online profile is not a customized document, but is more like a one-size-fits-all pitch posted on a digital billboard that’s located on a busy information superhighway and seen, hopefully, by hordes of unknown viewers.”
For recruiters, social media sites essentially constitute another vast resume database that they search with keywords. It’s no accident that social media sites want you to upload your resume as part of your profile development, because this is the document recruiters take away with them to show to management. If you have ever spoken to a social media profile writer, you’ll also have noticed that the first thing they want from you is your resume as a foundation on which to build the social media profile. A resume remains relevant because it is useful:
However, we now live in a world where your resume is no longer the only job search document you need; maximum job search effectiveness now demands that your resume and social media profiles work in harmony to hasten the successful conclusion of your transition.
Your resume is the most succinct summary of your career, often forming the foundational document of your social networking profiles, and for recruiters who discover you through resume bank searches and social media database searches, it is the document they pass on to hiring managers. Quite simply, it is the single most valuable financial document you will ever own—ignore it at your peril.
Obviously, if you are on this journey with me, you are paying attention to the changes in job search and career management brought about by improvements in technology. You have built or are building a productive resume and a social networking profile that you can adapt and upload on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps other social networking sites. You’ve become a reasonably active member of profession-related groups on your social networking platforms, steadily building a network of contacts who also work in your profession and ideally hold one of your target high-value job titles. You have joined professional and alumni associations and become involved with their online and local activities.
When you’ve seen interesting jobs posted on job sites or through your social networking apps and dashboard, you’ve uploaded your resume according to the job posting instructions, and where appropriate loaded your resume into resume banks. And you’ve attended virtual and local job fairs whenever they occur, all the time working back through your social networks to get names and introductions from these activities. Now it is time to weave all the information you’ve gathered through your networking and other job search activities into an approach that increases the number of job interviews you land.
Whenever you see a posting for a job you can do, respond in the requested way, flagging all contact information for the company: website, mailing address, telephone, and any names and e-mail addresses available from the website.
E-mail your resume directly to a hiring manager with a personalized cover letter.
This usually presents a big problem: You have many tools and tactics with which to find names that go with high-value job titles, but often you don’t have a given manager’s e-mail address or any obvious way to get it. Until now.
If you don’t have an e-mail address, don’t worry; I’m going to share a sequence of tactics that pretty much guarantees you will find it.
First check the company website. Often companies have e-mail addresses for certain staff members listed publicly. This is useful because companies always follow the same format for all employee e-mail addresses, and once you have one, you can be pretty sure that all other e-mail addresses for that company will follow that same format. Additionally:
Even if you cannot find an example of a company’s e-mail address format, there are only six or seven variations in use; for example, it could be:
. . . and perhaps a few others. To prove this to yourself and to establish a comprehensive list of e-mail format variations, check the business-related e-mails you receive over the next few days for their addresses.
Once you have a name and a list of e-mail address variations, you can send your e-mail cover letter pitch with resume attached to each of your e-mail format variations until one goes through rather than bouncing back.
As the primary result, you have established communication with a hiring manager or recruiter as a first step toward getting into conversation. The secondary result is that you have sidestepped the problem of your resume languishing in databases or your social media profile getting overlooked. And as if this weren’t enough, you now know how to find the e-mail address for anyone else you want to contact at this or any other company.
When sending e-mails—not just job-related e-mails but all e-mails—it is a professional courtesy to provide a revealing and concise subject line that immediately tells the receiver who you are and what you want.
Using a revealing subject line can mean the difference between your e-mail getting opened and getting trashed. The purpose of a good subject line, like a blog headline or tweet, is to grab readers’ attention and draw them into the story. With e-mail, a powerful subject line draws readers in, telling them what they are going to be reading about. This means your subject line has to be intriguing and professional. For starters, don’t use a subject line that states the obvious, like “Resume” or “Jim Smith’s Resume.”
If you are responding to a job posting, the job title and job posting number are necessary, but just a start. Combine this factual information with a little intriguing information that reflects the priorities of the job posting. For example:
If you don’t have a job posting to give you employer priorities, you can use employer priorities established in your TJD work (see Chapter 5). For example:
You can also try subject lines, for example:
A message in an e-mail inbox will typically reveal a maximum of sixty characters; the above example is just fifty-two characters. An opened e-mail will show a subject line of up to 150 characters that can give a reader further focus and added incentive to read. If you use longer subject lines, make your headline short to ensure visibility in an unopened e-mail. For instance:
Then use the available extra space in an opened e-mail for added detail, for example:
If the first forty-one characters help get the e-mail opened, the full subject line can only give the recipient further incentive to read your message. There are other uses for extended subject lines, too. You can use them:
Send a resume and personalized cover letter to that manager through traditional mail. I know this sounds crazy, but it works. In a digital world, no one gets much traditional mail anymore, which makes receiving it a welcome break from the screen most professionals seem to spend their days staring at, and with this third angle of attack you triple your chances of getting a response and starting a conversation.
I suggest putting your resume in a large flat envelope to stand out, and if you can afford priority mail, you’ll guarantee its getting opened almost immediately.
If you do searches of news media, blogs, and communities, etc. using the names of your target companies, you will frequently find information that you can use as an icebreaker in your e-mails or letters—or conversations for that matter. You can open your e-mail with a mention of the media coverage. This guarantees the rest of your message will be read: Who doesn’t like hearing about how wonderful they are? You can also add a link to the information in an e-mail (with a traditional letter, enclose a copy).
It is also very effective when you use the information you’ve gathered to open a telephone conversation: “I’ve been meaning to call you ever since I saw the article in . . .”
With larger companies, you may find it worthwhile to make a number of contacts and approaches (as we discussed earlier) to ensure that all the potential players in the recruitment and selection cycle know of your existence.
You won’t necessarily send all these communications out at once, but rather spread them over a couple of weeks. Keep a log of your e-mail (and mail) activities so that you can follow up with a phone call.
Making a follow-up telephone call will quadruple your chances of getting into conversation with a hiring manager. With e-mails, connect within twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and with traditional mail recipients make the follow-up in three to four days. Making calls first thing in the morning, at lunchtime, or at 5 P.M., when gatekeepers are less likely to take your call, will further increase your odds of making the connection; I’d advise excluding Monday morning as everyone is busy getting up to speed for the week. How to deal with gatekeepers is handled in the most recent edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.
If you repeat this sequence of approaches with two other high-value management hiring titles, you will have twelve times better odds of getting a job interview than the person who just responds to a job posting by uploading a resume and patiently waiting for something to happen.
The more frequently you get into conversations with managers who have the authority to hire you, the faster you will land that new position, because you have skipped right over the resume database hurdle, sidestepped the recruiters’ evaluation process, and made a direct and personal pitch to the actual decision maker.
This is never more important than when the economy is down or in recovery. At such times, your competition is fierce and employers actually do recognize and appreciate the initiative and motivation you display by doing these things, especially picking up the phone and initiating a conversation. We will discuss exactly how to structure these calls and how to handle the flow of question and answer in the next chapter.