One of the most frustrating aspects of a white-collar job search in 2015 is that you can respond to job ads all day long and never hear a word back.
Many medium-sized and large employers think nothing of leaving job-seekers to wonder whether their application was received or not.
We'd never treat our customers so shabbily, but job-seekers are used to being treated like dirt by employers. It's become standard.
As an HR leader myself I am horrified at the way we treat the talented people who take the time to reply to our badly-written and insulting job ads, but that is the reality that job-seekers know all too well.
If you've sent out forty or fifty resumes or responded to dozens of job ads and you're not getting interviews, something is wrong. We all know that the corporate and institutional recruiting process is broken, but there is way to crawl through the wreckage of the broken recruiting system to get a good job despite the sad state of what's often called the Talent Acquisition apparatus.
Your best bet when you spot a job you're interested in is to ignore the instructions in the job ad -- the instructions that tell you to go to a certain website and fill out an endless online job application there.
If you do that, no one will ever see your application, which will reduce you to a list of keywords.
Instead of completing an online job application, take these steps to get your resume in front of the hiring decision-maker (who is not, of course, an HR person unless you're interested in a job in the HR department):
- Jump to the employer's website (not the Careers site, but the company's website).
- Read the About Us or Investor section of the site carefully, looking for Management
Team bios. - Find your hiring manager (the person who will be your boss in your new job) or that person's manager -- that is, the head of the department you want to join.
- If the company or institution is so large that it's impossible to find your hiring manager on its website, jump to
LinkedIn and conduct a search on the Advanced People Search page. Enter the employer name and the most likely job title of your hiring manager as search parameters to find your hiring manager using LinkedIn. - Once you know your hiring manager's name, you'll need four more pieces of information to reach your hiring manager directly and avoid the dreaded Black Hole recruiting portal.
- You'll need the organization's street address (easily found on its website) to address the envelope containing your Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume.
- You'll also need a Hook, the opening section of your Pain Letter. You can find a usable Hook in the Press or Newsroom section of the employer's website. Your Hook will congratulate or acknowledge your hiring manager or his or her firm for something cool and noteworthy they've accomplished in the past six months or so. You'll find those accomplishments in the press releases on the employer's website.
- Once you've found a Hook, like "Congratulations on the launch of your Tast-E-Nails edible nail polish line!" you'll also need to develop a Pain Hypothesis to share in your Pain Letter. What is a Pain Hypothesis? It's a statement about the type of Business Pain most likely in your view to be standing between your hiring manager and his or her near-term business goals.
- Read about the employer and think about your history in the working world to imagine what's keeping your hiring manager tossing and turning at night. That's your Pain Hypothesis! Maybe it's low inventory turns or expense overruns. Put yourself in your manager's shoes and imagine the issues most likely to be on his or her mind and plate right now.
- The last element you'll need for your Pain Letter is a powerful Dragon-Slaying Story from your career history. A Dragon-Slaying Story is a story about a time when you came, saw and conquered at work.
- Now, put the elements together in the form of a Pain Letter like this example.
- Last, print out your Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume. Staple your one-page Pain Letter to the front of your one- or two-page Human-Voiced Resume and slide the two documents together, unfolded, into an 8.5 x 11-inch white business envelope. Hand-write (in block print) your hiring manager's name, job title, company name and street address on the front of the envelope, right in the middle.
- Hand-write your own name and address in the upper left corner of the envelope. Take your addressed envelope (now called a Pain Packet) to the post office and let them stamp it, or stamp it yourself and put it in the mailbox.
Log your Pain Packet on your job-search status spreadsheet and celebrate with a nice gelato. Once you get used to composing Pain Letters you can send out one or two per day, even if you're working full-time.
You won't hear back from everybody who receives one of your Pain Packets; our clients tell us that they hear back from twenty-five percent of their hiring-manager recipients on average, meaning that three out of four Pain Letters will end up in the trash or the recycling bin.
That's okay! It's still a much higher response rate than you're likely to get from the Black Hole where job applications go to die. Just as importantly, your job search with a human voice will bring across a much stronger, more human version of you than an online application could ever do.
