A successful job search needs an integrated overall plan that includes all the most practical job search strategies.
On a call-in radio show during this last recession, I took a call from a woman who had “done everything and still not gotten a job.” She explained that she had sent out almost 300 letters and still wasn’t employed. After I asked her a couple of questions, I learned that she had been job-hunting for almost two years and had responded to two or three job postings a week. When I asked, she told me that as an accountant, there were probably some 2,000 companies for whom she could work. This means she was engaged in a job search that used only one largely passive approach to finding a job (responding to job postings) when there are at least five practical ways to find jobs, and where she only managed to approach about 15 percent of her customers in two years. Two employer contacts per week will not get you back to work—or even on the right track with the kind of job that can help you advance toward your chosen work-life goals.
Just sending out letters and resumes in response to job postings, without integrating them into more productive job search approaches, is a sad excuse for a job campaign. E-mail and traditional mail initiatives should be integrated into every aspect of your job search. They should be a vital part of your job search strategy. You will then need to maintain a balance among the number of e-mails and letters you send out on a daily and weekly basis, the types of e-mails and letters you send out, and how you follow up on them by making telephone calls to initiate the conversations that must take place to win job offers.
A professionally conducted campaign will include the ongoing identification of the names that go with “most-likely-to-hire” target job titles at target employers and use both e-mail and traditional mail for initial approach, and then follow up with a phone call. This approach really works; you’ll find step-by-step tactics laid out in the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.
As you discover names to go with the priority job titles, send a personalized cover letter and resume via e-mail and traditional mail and schedule a follow-up telephone call in your week’s agenda.
Subsequently, send further resumes and personalized cover letters through e-mail and traditional mail as you come up with the names of people who hold other “most-likely-to-hire” target job titles within that company. You might also consider bookmarking desirable companies so you can regularly check in on their job openings.
This is probably not the first or the last job search you will ever do, so save all your job search letters within a career management folder where you can find them again when you need them.
Develop electronic documents or paper file folders containing all the relevant information for each company. You’ll want to keep the company’s website and a list that includes the names of the company’s executives and all other management names and titles that you have identified as relevant to your job search. Whenever you find other interesting information, copy it into the company folder. For instance, you might come across information on growth or shrinkage in a particular area of a company, or you might read about recent acquisitions the company has made; you can use the website, Google, and Google News to these track company activities.
All this information will help you target potential employers and stand out in different ways. Your knowledge will create a favorable impression when you first contact the company: that you made an effort is noticed and sets you apart from other applicants who don’t bother. The combination says that you respect the company, the opportunity, and the interviewer; combined, these perceptions help differentiate your candidacy.
All your efforts have an obvious short-term value in helping you generate job interviews and offers. Who would you interview and subsequently hire? The person who knows nothing about your company, or the person who knows everything and shows enthusiasm with that knowledge?
Your efforts also have long-term value, because you are building a personalized reference library of your target industry/specialty/profession that will get you off to a running start the next time you wish to make a job change.
Although you will get calls from your mailing, if you sit there like Buddha waiting for the world to beat a path to your door, you might wait a long time.
A pal of mine placed a posting for an analyst. Within a week, he had received more than 100 responses. Ten days later, he’d received 50 more and was still plowing through them when he received a follow-up call (the only one he received) from one of the candidates who’d tracked down his name. The candidate’s resume was “in the tank” with all the others, but the follow-up phone call got it discovered. The job hunter was in the office by the end of the day and returned the following morning, and she was hired by lunchtime. This is not an isolated incident: Candidates who make themselves visible get hired.
If you are not already successful in management, you need to know one of the success principles outlined in my book for managers titled Hiring the Best: “The first tenet of management is getting work done through others.” Managers are always on the lookout for competent professionals in their field for today and tomorrow. BUT, they hate recruiting and interviewing; they just want to find the right person, hire her, and get back to work. All you have to do is help them by packaging yourself professionally and using the strategies and tactics learned in this book to make them aware of your existence.
You’ll notice that examples in the following letter section mention that the applicant will follow up with a phone call. This allows the writer to explain to any inquisitive receptionist that Joe Schmoe is “expecting my call” or that it is “personal,” or, “it’s accounting/engineering/customer service business.”
It’s surprising that so many people are nervous about calling a fellow professional on the phone and talking about what they do for a living. Don’t worry so much. In this unsettled world there is an unwritten credo shared by the vast majority of professional people: You should always help one another if it isn’t going to hurt you in the process. Everyone out there has been in your situation and knows it can happen at any moment. Because of this, almost everyone you speak to will be sympathetic to your cause and help you if they can and, of course, if you ask the right questions.
No manager will take offense at a call from a professional colleague, and this is what you are. To know exactly how to make the call and what to say, look at the chapters on making contact and telephone interviews in the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.
To ensure that you keep track of your mailings and the follow-up phone calls, I recommend that you create a Contact Tracker on a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. Create columns for the company name, telephone number, e-mail address, and contact name. As a rule of thumb, an e-mail sent today is ripe for follow-up within twenty-four to forty-eight hours; a mailing sent today is ripe for follow-up three to five days later.
Nine out of ten hiring managers prefer a cover letter with a resume, so a great cover letter will guarantee your resume gets read with serious attention. It will set you apart from other candidates and increase your interviews. You’ll even have more productive and successful interviews, because the hiring manager will have a better idea of who you are professionally and who you are as a person.
The sample section that follows includes many types of job search letters that you can use throughout your search to help your candidacy stand out. Hope to see you soon at www.knockemdead.com, and join me every day on the Secrets & Strategies group on LinkedIn for more discussion and live workshops.