#CareerAdvice : #HowtoStandOut – How To Use Pain Letters In Your #JobSearch . A #MustRead !
Anybody who’s job-hunted in the past few years knows that the recruiting process is broken. You can easily apply for 100 jobs using employers’ own career portals and never hear a word back in reply.
When you do hear something from an employer it’s likely to be a terse auto-responder message that either says “If we want to hire you, you’ll hear from us, but don’t hold your breath!” or a terse auto-response commanding you to take a test or fill out another form.
Applying for a job these days is like applying for citizenship. It’s a bureaucratic morass. It’s demoralizing and insulting. If companies don’t need help, why do they run job ads? If they do need help, why do they treat job-seekers like dirt?
There’s a better way to get a job, but it requires you to step outside the lines and break some rules. Whose rules are they? They are HR rules. I’m an HR leader myself and I give you permission to break silly HR rules in your job search process, right now!
You can find your own hiring manager, the person who will be your boss if you take a job working for a given employer. Here’s how to do that. You can find the specific person you’ll be working for in your new job, and reach out to him or her directly.
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What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?
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You have to do some work and conduct some research in order to use the side door and avoid the dreaded online-application portal, but it’s worth it!
You will compose a thoughtful letter addressed directly to your hiring manager. Let’s say you’re writing to Arnie Smith, the Director of Customer Care at Angry Chocolates, a maker of specialty chocolate goodies.
You found Arnie on LinkedIn and read his complete profile. You know that Angry Chocolates is growing fast and winning awards for their high-quality chocolate treats.
You’re not going to send Arnie a boring cover letter with a boring resume. You’re going to compose a letter called a Pain Letter and staple it to your jazzy Human-Voiced Resume, and send those two documents together in an envelope (unfolded, so get an 8.5 x 11-inch envelope at the office-supply store) straight to Arnie’s desk!
Here’s how your Pain Letter to Arnie might read. “Dear Arnie, I was happy to see that Angry Chocolates was voted one of Fayetteville’s most up-and-coming companies. Hats off to you and your team!” That opening for your Pain Letter is called the Hook.
Your Hook gets Arnie to keep reading. He’s busy and if you start your correspondence to him talking about yourself, he’s likely to put your letter down and never pick it up again.
Your Pain Letter does the opposite. It talks about Arnie and his company, instead of you! You found the press release about the up-and-coming company designation right on the Angry Chocolates website.
There’s a paragraph break after your Hook and then you’ll dive into your Pain Hypothesis. “I can only imagine that given your thirty percent annual growth rate, your distributor clients must require more and more sophisticated levels of support all the time.” You’re only pointing out the obvious: that growing companies tend to burst at the seams.
Now you’ll segue into one of your favorite Dragon-Slaying Stories — a story about a time when you solved a similar kind of pain before. You worked for another company, Underwater Sleepwear, that also grew fast and almost got overwhelmed by demands from its customers.
“When I was at Underwater Sleepwear and our growth rate was twenty-five percent per year, we had a similar challenge,” you’ll write to Arnie.
“Our team split up the country into eight territories and each of us took on one or two large distributors and made sure we kept them happy. That way we were able to keep growing until we could hire and train new support folks. We didn’t lose a single customer and every one of our clients increased their year-over-year sales of our products.”
A Pain Letter is short. You’ll end it by saying “If large-account support is high on your radar screen I’d be happy to chat by phone or start an email conversation. All the best, Michael” or whatever your name is. You can research and send three or four Pain Letters every day. Not every hiring manager will respond to you, of course, but that’s okay – not everyone deserves you!
You can change up your job search process and step out of the traditional, mojo-sucking approach. Wouldn’t that be a welcome change?
Forbes.com | November 26, 2015