Great cover, broadcast, and follow-up letters won’t get you a job if they sit on your desk like rare manuscripts. You have to do something with them.
In Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide, I spend more than 150 pages showing you the best ways to execute a job search, including a dozen different networking strategies. I’m going to dip into just a few tactics from that book to show you some of the ways to find names and titles of hiring authorities so that you can contact them directly.
Responding to job postings is a big part of most job searches, so while there are many other effective job search strategies, this chapter will focus on tactics that can double, triple, and quadruple your chances of getting interviews from job postings by identifying and approaching the people most likely to be in a position to hire you.
Whenever you see a job you can do, respond to the posting in the requested way. In addition, compile all contact information for the company, including website and mailing address. Whenever you can find the names and titles of managers likely to hold authority over the ultimate hiring decision (I’ll show you how), you can approach them directly in three different ways, each approach increasing your chances of getting an interview:
1. E-mail your resume directly to that manager with a personalized cover letter, doubling your chances of an interview.
2. Send a resume and personalized cover letter by traditional mail to that manager, tripling your chances of an interview.
3. Make a follow-up telephone call to that manager first thing in the morning, at lunchtime, or at 5 P.M., quadrupling your chances of an interview.
The more frequently you speak with managers whose job titles signify that they have the authority to hire you, the faster you will land that new position. By approaching hiring managers directly, you skip waiting to have your resume pulled from a resume database, you sidestep the recruiter’s evaluation process, and you have the attention of a hiring manager and can make a direct and personal pitch.
Your target for direct approach is always someone who can hire you, although any management title offers opportunity for referral. For example, while HR people won’t have the authority to hire you, the pivotal nature of their work makes them aware of all areas within a company that could use your skills.
Getting a resume to the “right someone” by name and making a personalized pitch gives you a distinct advantage; this is never more important than when the economy is down or in recovery. At such times, your competition is fierce, and employers always recognize initiative and motivation as differentiating factors in your candidacy.
I am going to tell you the hiring titles to target during your job search. As you read, make a list of the specific titles that apply in your professional world, because if you have a list of the high-value titles that specifically apply to your opening, you will be more likely to find the names that go with them.
1. Those titles most likely to be in a position to hire you are usually the management titles one, two, and three levels above you.
2. Other titles likely to have knowledge of an opening include:
3. Titles of people who are most likely to know those involved in the selection process, and are able to refer you. These titles might be employees of a target company, or employees of a company or organization that does business with such a company.
Any name is better than no name, and with the Internet at your fingertips, there are endless opportunities to identify the names of people who carry the appropriate hiring titles for your needs.
With a little work you can find the names, titles, and contact information for a lot of the people who have the ultimate authority to hire someone like you. I’m going to start you on the right road in this chapter, but for a thorough guide on how to do this, study the job search chapters in the first 150 pages of the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.
For a start, try keyword searches for your target hiring titles on Google, Bing, and other search engines. They are all likely to deliver names, and they’ll all get different results.
For example, a professional in pharmaceutical sales looking to make direct contact with potential hiring authorities for a job at a specific company in the Pittsburgh area could try all the following keyword searches and gather new useable information on each search.
Now take these additional steps:
Drill down, and you will come up with people holding these titles at this and other target companies in your area.
When you have completed each of these searches first as a standard Google search, redo each one as a Google News search; this looks for mentions of your keywords in media coverage. Click on “News” above the standard Google search box.
When you do a Google news search for news about a company or a title within a company and find relevant intelligence, you can use it as an opener for your cover letter. Refer to the article and its relevance in your letter. Then copy and paste a URL to the reference if you’re sending e-mail, or enclose a copy of it with a traditional letter.
Try all the keyword combinations of job title, profession, location, and company phrases. You will come up with more job openings and job sites with most of them. When you drill down beyond the first couple of pages of results, you will come up with names to go with your target hiring titles for both your target company and for other companies.
Also check out the following resources:
The following online resources are also useful for compiling a list of contacts to whom you can send your letter and resume:
www.onesource.com/businessbrowserus.aspx
Twelve major resources for locating executives by name.
www.knowx.com
Lists company owners, officers, and affiliations. Find out almost anything for about $60 a month.
www.jigsaw.com
An extensive database of contact information. It charges $1 a name, but give them two names they don’t have and you get credited a dollar.
www.privateeye.com/?from=p31702&vw=background&Input=Name&piid=44
Offers personal details and contact information.
www.lambresearch.com/CorpsExecs.htm
Provides lots of links for finding names and titles. An excellent research site.
www.business.com/directory/advertising_and_marketing/sales/selling_techniques/lead_generation/
This page has links for lead-generating tools.
Sometimes, to alert all the right people at a target company that you’re available, you might approach half a dozen different managers. For example, let’s say you are a young engineer crazy for a job with Last Chance Electronics. It is well within the bounds of reason that you would submit a cover letter and resume to any or all of the following people, with each letter addressed by name to minimize its chances of going straight into the trash:
Think through all the titles likely to be of use to you based on the above criteria, and keep all these titles in mind when you go looking for names to attach to them: The more options you have, the more results you will get.
One of the best ways to find names and get introductions to hiring authorities is to talk to people. And because speaking with the people who can actually offer you a job is the only way you are going to get hired, the more ways you have to get into these conversations, the more successful you are going to be.
When they are integrated into your job search, networking strategies deliver incredible results. Here are some effective ways to build relevant professional networks almost instantly.
Social networking has now become an integral part of cutting-edge job search and career-management strategies. It revolves around social and/or professionally oriented online networks that help you reach out to people you know, once knew, or would like to know. You can leverage your professional reach through connecting with others in your field, as well as through people with whom you share common experiences or interests.
Here’s an example: A soldier who was cycling out of the military sought my help in her search for a new civilian career. First, to find other individuals with a similar background, I plugged in the word army at www.linkedin.com, perhaps the premier professional online networking site. I got more than 4,000 profiles of people who shared her military experience. (That was six years ago; with the same search today, I got 539,000: This growing connectivity is a big argument for joining LinkedIn.) We then tried a search using the phrase “information technology” (for her desired career change) and got 39,000 profiles (today it is well over one million). Both these potential networks would have relevance to her job search, but it got even better when we combined both the keywords: “information technology and army.” This pulled up 908 profiles (today over 26,000) of people who shared her life experience and who had already made the transition into her desired profession. Such a degree of initial connectivity ensured she could hold helpful conversations with an enormous number of people, each of whom is relevant to her job search.
Corporate recruiters and headhunters often visit social networking sites, so you should shape the information you make available about yourself. For the professional in a job search, this will start with your resume (simply cutting and pasting your resume into your official profile) and possibly end there too. You make yourself visible, but because this is a social networking site and not a resume bank, you do it without an “I’m for sale” sign, which is useful when you are employed and looking for a new position.
There are just too many social networks to list, and the more these sites proliferate, the more specialized they become. It is probably a good idea to have a presence on two of the biggest, LinkedIn and Facebook. Beyond this, go to www.wikipedia.org and key in “social networks” for a complete listing. You’ll find networking sites by special interests, languages, sex, race, and more.
Social networking can get you useful introductions to people throughout your profession, the country, and the world—people who might know of jobs at their own companies or who can introduce you to people at companies that have openings. This new application of technology enables you to reach out into an almost limitless community of like-minded professionals.
It works simply: You join a social networking site and find people you have worked with in the past. Then expand your network by joining the discussion groups that exist on all social networking sites and connect with other members of those groups.
For employers and recruiters, networking sites constitute a reliable pathway for recruiting qualified candidates, while for a job hunter they constitute a reliable pathway to jobs through the people connected to them. You can search a site’s database by zip code, job title, company, or any keywords of your choice. The database will pull up the profiles of people who match your requirements and allow you to initiate contact directly, through your common membership in groups, or through the chain of people who connect you.
You will find social networking sites especially important when you are involved with or are planning a career transition. If you know you are cycling out of one profession and into another, you can use social networking sites to build a network of people who do the target job in your chosen profession and, whenever possible, people who have made a similar transition. If you are involved in a job search that involves career change, go to www.knockemdead.com and read the “Stepping Stones” article.
One of the best things you can do for this job search and your long-term career success is to become an active member of one or two professional associations. You’ll get job leads and an awesome network immediately, and such organizations provide great vehicles for increasing your credibility and visibility in the profession. In fact, if you have heard disgruntled job hunters mutter, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” it probably means they don’t understand networking, and are probably not members of a professional association.
Associations have monthly meetings in most major metropolitan areas, plus regional and national get-togethers every year. The local meetings are of immediate interest, and unless you work on a national level, membership in the local or state chapters of a national association will be quite adequate for your needs—and cheaper, too. When you join a local chapter of a recognized national association and attend the local meetings, you get to know and be known by the most committed and best-connected people in your profession within your target marketplace. Your membership will help you stay attuned to what is going on in your profession, as associations offer ongoing training that makes you a more knowledgeable and therefore a more desirable employee.
The professional association is a new “old boy/old girl” network for the modern world. Your membership becomes a link to millions of colleagues, almost all of whom will gladly talk to you, based on your mutual connectivity through the association.
All industries and professions have multiple associations, any of which could be valuable depending on your needs. For example, if you are in retail, you could join any of some thirty national associations and fifty state associations. Together these associations represent employees of more than 1.5 million retail organizations, which in turn provide employment for more than 14 million people. Most other associations offer similarly impressive networking potential.
If you fit the profile of a special interest or minority group, you will also find professional associations that cater to another dimension of the professional you. These include—but are by no means restricted to—associations for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, professionals with disabilities, and women. If you can find a niche association that’s a fit, join it: It represents another, even more finely tuned network.
A good place to start online is the Wikipedia professional associations page, or the library, where you can check out the Encyclopedia of Associations (published by Gale). Alternatively, you can try a Google search for relevant keywords. For example, “legal association” will generate listings of associations for the legal profession.
If you belong to any identifiable minority, use that in your Google searches as well. For example, “Asian legal association” will generate a listing of local associations for Asian professionals working in the legal field.
When you join an association, you’ll benefit greatly from attending the meetings, because this is where you will meet other professionals in your field. But don’t just attend the meetings; get involved. Associations are largely volunteer organizations and always need someone to set out chairs or hand out paperwork and nametags. The task itself doesn’t matter, but your visible willingness to be an active participant most certainly does, and will get you on a first-name basis with people you would probably never meet otherwise. Given the nature of association membership, you don’t have to go straight from introductions to asking for leads on jobs. In fact, it can be productive to have initial conversations where you do not ask for leads or help in your job search, but where you make a contribution to the group; this is always preferable, because others are more likely to help you when they see you making an effort toward the common good.
It is easier to get to know people than you might think, because all professional association members are there, at least in part, to advance their careers through networking. Once you have the lay of the land, volunteer for one of the many committees that keep associations running. It’s the best way to meet people and expand your sphere of influence, as you can reach out to others as you engage in your volunteer association activities. Committee involvement doesn’t take much time because they invariably employ the “many hands make light work” approach; they are structured to function with the help of full-time professionals like you, with mortgages to pay and families to support.
There is a good argument that, from a networking point of view, the bigger the committee, the better. Membership and program committees are among the best to join. However, involvement in any committee will serve your needs, because being on one will enable you to reach out to those on other committees. If you join the conference or event committee, you can initiate contact with just about anyone in your professional world: “Hi, Bill Parsons? I’m Becky Lemon with the conference committee of the local association. I’d like to invite you to a meeting we are having next week on ….”
Don’t join committees for which you lack the experience to be a productive member, unless you make it clear that the reason you want to become a part of that team is for professional development—if this is the case, expect to become the designated water carrier, at least initially.
If you volunteer and become active in an association, the people with whom you come into contact will begin to identify you as a team player, and this perception can be instrumental in landing that new job and surging ahead in your career.
The association directory, which comes with your membership package, provides you with a superb networking resource for telephone and e-mail networking campaigns. You can feel comfortable calling any other member on the phone and introducing yourself: “Hi, Brenda Massie? My name is Martin Yate. We haven’t spoken before, but we are both members of the Teachers’ Federation. I need some advice; can you spare a minute?”
Your mutual membership, and the commitment to your profession that it bespeaks, will guarantee you a few moments of anyone’s time, a courtesy you should always return.
You can also use your association membership directory to generate personal introductions for jobs you have heard about elsewhere. For example, you might have found an interesting job posting on www.careerbuilder.com, or perhaps on a company website, with the request that you upload your resume. This is where your networking can pay big dividends. Apply just as the website where you found the job requested, then return to your membership directory and find people who work for that company. A judicious call or two will frequently get you a personal referral and some inside information on the opening: You have just doubled your chances of landing that interview. Once you have an interview scheduled, these same contacts can help you prepare for the interview with insider knowledge about the company, the department, and the hiring manager.
Professional associations all have online newsletters, and many have a jobs section on the website linked to the newsletter, where companies advertise because of the always qualified response. So you will see job postings here that often don’t appear anywhere else. In down economic times, a savvy corporate recruiter will use an association website to skim the cream of available talent while screening out the less committed. You will also notice that association members write all the articles in the newsletters; as everyone likes to have their literary efforts appreciated, telling a member you have read an article that he has written gives you a great introduction to a networking call or letter.
Active association membership puts you on the radar of all the best qualified and best connected professionals in your area. You can also list it at the end of your resume under a Professional Affiliations heading. This is guaranteed to get a second glance, as it signifies professional awareness. Employers and headhunters will sometimes use words like association, club, and society in their keyword searches, so association membership will also help get your resume pulled up from the databases for investigation by human eyes.
Professional associations are just one of a dozen approaches to networking, all of which can be tremendously beneficial to your job search and overall career success if you nurture them.
Think of networking as professional connectedness, because becoming properly connected to your profession is the activity that will generate the widest range of relevant contacts for your job search.
You may well discover that your network is not as comprehensive as you might have wished, and that to be effective, your networking requires more than shooting the breeze with old cronies on the telephone. A successful outcome demands you move beyond the comfort level of inadequate personal networks.
Besides, just because you worked with someone five years ago doesn’t mean she still regards you as a friend, especially if you haven’t spoken to her since then. Surveys show that we all respond in these understandable ways:
Nothing works like a personal recommendation from a professional colleague—and you get that by being a colleague, by being connected to your profession and the professionals within it, and by being known as someone who cares and who shares. It is no accident that successful people in all fields know each other; they helped each other become successful because they stayed in touch, through good times and bad, and helped each other whenever they could.
If you are going to use business colleagues and personal friends in your job search, don’t mess up and do it halfheartedly. We live in a mobile society, so in addition to family, friends, and the colleagues you naturally know, it is a smart long-term career-management strategy to establish yourself as a member of your professional community.
Intelligent networking encourages you to form relationships with people in your profession and industry at many levels. Almost anyone in your industry or location can be useful regardless of title or experience, but the people of most interest will likely fall into these categories:
1. Those who are 1–3 title levels above you and who might hire you, now or in the future. With this group, you can initiate contact by sending an e-mail to introduce yourself and ask them to look at your profile. If this proceeds to a conversation and interviews, fine; if not, you can ask your contact to connect you to others.
2. Those at or below your level but with similar professional experience.
3. Those who work in related areas within the same profession or industry.
It’s best to build a relationship by finding common ground. You can initiate relationships by asking for advice; many people will give you a few minutes of their time. You will develop the best relationships, though, by reaching out to others with help and advice, because when you offer good things, forging a relationship with you becomes important to the other person. It is easy to do this by taking an active part in special-interest groups and searching the social sites for people in your profession who are actively looking for jobs.
The challenge then becomes how to help, advise, or make a gesture that will encourage a relationship that shares introductions and job leads. The answer is logical and painless: Use the job leads you hear about that are inappropriate for your own use.
It’s a not-so-funny thing about the job search: When you are fresh out of school, no one is hiring entry-level workers; they all want you to call back in five years. Five years later, when you are once again looking for a job, they now only want someone fresh out of school or with ten years’ experience.
In your job search activities, you are constantly coming across positions that aren’t right for you, but that could be just what someone else is aching to hear about. Offer these leads to others as part of your introduction. Here’s how it can work: Sometimes you have to send an e-mail stating why you want to make contact, and sometimes you can communicate immediately—it depends on a number of variables. In the first instance, you send an e-mail simply stating that you have a job lead that the contact might find interesting. This is a nice gesture and will get you lots of introductions.
In the second instance, where you are actually in direct e-mail communication, state your business: “I am involved in a strategic career move right now, and I have come across a job that isn’t right for me, but that could be perfect for you. If you’d like to talk, let’s exchange telephone numbers. I’ll be happy to pass the lead on, and perhaps you have heard about something that would suit me … I am cycling out of the army and into the private sector and have been looking for jobs in IT in the South ….”
If you are serious about getting back to work quickly, never talk about what you want in that ideal next job when you are networking. It reduces the odds of someone telling you about an opening. Instead, talk about what you can do.
Your job search has you scouring the job sites for job leads, and now you have a use for all those positions that aren’t quite right for you. Build your own database of the jobs that are not suitable for you and pass them on to all those people above and below you in your profession who will make perfectly symbiotic networking partners.
When you find suitable job postings, you are usually faced with uploading your resume into a corporate or headhunter database, but now, along with your professional association memberships, social networks give you additional approaches.
On your social networking sites, look for people who work at that target company now or have in the past. Search for them, using the target company name in your keyword search, then look for job titles one, two, and three levels above your own, and then those at the same level or one or two beneath you.
All the social networking sites—LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.—have special-interest groups that are used by recruiters (be sure to connect with me). It is becoming increasingly common for job hunters to post pitches about themselves in the discussion groups. This helps you become visible to recruiters. This is done very effectively with the Subject Line technique we discussed in Chapter 7. At 133 characters, this subject line does double duty as a “signature resume” for group discussions:
Reg HR Manager—EEOC, FLSA, ADA, OSHA. 10 years’ exp includes arbitration, campus, executive recruitment, selection, compensation, T&D
The more you reach out, the better your reputation becomes and the more others will reach out to you. You will find much more on social and other networking approaches in the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.
When you write networking e-mails and letters, use these guidelines for your structure; you can also use the same guidelines as frameworks for networking conversations:
1. Establish connectivity: something or someone in common, or information likely to be of interest.
2. Use your common membership in professional associations as a bridge builder to other members.
3. Let contacts know what you can do. They will invariably want to help, but you have to give them a framework within which to target their efforts. DO NOT tell them about your dream job, or the promotion you always hoped for; don’t get too specific, or allow your ego to get in the way of leads for jobs you really could do. You want to be specifically vague: “I’m looking for something in operations within the medical devices area” gives the listener the widest possible opportunity for coming up with leads.
4. Tell whomever you are writing or calling, “It’s time for me to make a move” or “My job just got sent to Mumbai, and I’m hoping I could pick your brain.”
5. Don’t ask specifically, “Can you hire me?” or “Can your company hire me?” Ask for advice and leads. Then ask for guidance: “Could I send you my resume?”
6. By all means, ask for leads within specific target companies, but don’t rely on a contact with a particular company to get you in.
7. When you do get help, say thank you. And if you get the help verbally, follow it up with a thank-you note in writing. The impression is indelible, and it just might get you another lead.
When you write networking letters and make the follow-up calls, you might be surprised to find who your friends are: Someone you always regarded as a real pal won’t give you the time of day, and someone you never thought of as a friend will go above and beyond the call of duty on your behalf.
Most people have horribly inadequate networks. The professional association strategy is just one of a dozen approaches you can learn to begin building and expanding them. You can learn much more about networking for referrals, finding names and titles of hiring authorities, making verbal presentations, recognizing and responding to “buy signals,” and overcoming objections in the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.