Most people will go to great lengths to avoid “standing out in a crowd,” or risk in any way being perceived as being “different” from everyone else. When it comes to job hunting today, though, you need to quickly disavow yourself of such notions. For the most part, the only way you are going to be successful in today’s job market is to indeed be “different,” and certainly to do what is necessary to “stand out in the crowd!”
Now, let me hasten to point out right up front here that I am NOT talking about doing such things as having your résumé printed on chartreuse paper stock or sending a Starbucks® gift card to a potential hiring manager! What I AM talking about are some very substantive, very specific, concrete things that most other job seekers—your competition in today’s job market!—either won’t know to do, or if they do know, simply won’t make the effort to do them. If you do them, though, I guarantee that you will certainly be perceived by hiring managers and companies as “different,” in the most positive sense of that word!
As I have repeatedly pointed out in this series of articles, the first, and arguably the most important point of differentiation between the successful job seeker and the somewhat-less-than-successful job seeker, involves the initial approach taken to finding a new job. You should eschew the job boards as your primary focus for finding new job opportunities. All you’ll accomplish today by sitting hour after hour in front of your computer, firing off generic résumé after generic résumé to positions for which you may not even be qualified, is to waste a lot of valuable job-hunting time and effort. (See “Why Job Boards Often HURT More Than They Help”) And, relying upon recruiters to “find” you a job isn’t a very promising strategy in today’s job market, either. (See “Can a Recruiter Help You? Odds are, Probably Not!) Job/career fairs? Same story in today’s job market.
By avoiding the “traps” that the majority of job seekers IMMEDIATELY fall into, i.e., hitting the job boards, attending job/career fair after job/career fair, and/or by relying upon someone else to do what today you must do for yourself when pursuing a new job/career, you will automatically “stand out from the crowd,” you will automatically be perceived as being “different” from (and “better prepared” than) most other job seekers!
So, what approach(es) should you take? The answer to that is simple. The tactics and strategies to employ to be successful in today’s job market, and ones that will make you be perceived as distinctly different from other job seekers, involve, principally, the effective use of THREE “channels to market”:*
An extensive examination of all three of these approaches is featured in “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever! In this article I am going to just briefly touch on an example of how effectively using just two of these approaches—the telephone and direct mail—can pay substantial dividends to a well-prepared job seeker.
First, Make Sure You Have a GREAT (Different!) ‘Marketing Brochure’
Obviously, before you can use either the telephone or direct mail to contact a targeted hiring manager, you must first have something to contact them with, and that of course consists of your résumé. But, before attempting to get your résumé into the hands of a hiring manager, you must first make absolutely certain that your “marketing brochure,” i.e., your résumé, is designed and presented in such a fashion that it will “stand out from the crowd,” that it will be perceived as being “different” (“better”) from all the other résumés the hiring manager receives day in and day out. Let me give you an example of how to effectively approach that task.
Recently, my recruiting firm was working with a candidate who had a degree in Chemical Engineering and was in a production role in a chemical plant. While we extensively “reworked” his résumé to make it the very best it could be, let me just address one of the improvements made to his résumé.
Here was one of the “bullet points” he was using in his résumé:
I think you will have to agree that there isn’t much exciting or compelling about this bullet point. After asking the candidate some questions, I learned that he had supervised a team of 12 people. I asked him what, in his opinion, made him unique—different!—or better than other production supervisors. He told me that he and his team had increased production. OK, that is good, I told him. (We were making progress.) The next obvious question was, “By how much?” His reply: “Four percent.” So far, so good. “Did this result in increased earnings or savings for the company?” I then asked. “Well, yes,” he allowed, “it ended up saving the company about $348,000 in production costs.”
Now we had something to say, something STRONG to add to this bullet point in his résumé!
Based upon the candidate’s input, here is how we helped him rewrite this one bullet point:
First, note that we replaced the word “responsible” with the much stronger, more definitive words “managed and led.” These are action-oriented words, and your résumé should contain as many of these types of words as possible, without going overboard, of course.
Next, since in today’s highly competitive job market teamwork is so highly prized by hiring managers and companies, we changed “second-shift production line” to “second-shift production team.”
When you make a company more money
(or save them more money) than what you cost them,
you are like a “walking, talking blue chip stock.”
This is what gets you HIRED!
Then we probed until we were able to add specific numbers to the candidate’s resume, i.e., a team of 12, four percent production increase, and most important, a dollar amount of savings for the company, $348,000. Numbers help hiring managers and companies quantify results and accomplishments, a vital consideration today when companies are looking primarily for employees who can either “save ‘em money,” “make ‘em money,” or, ideally, accomplish both things.
Now Use Direct Mail Followed Up with a Telephone Call
Now, get your “High Impact Marketing Brochure,” i.e., your résumé, in front of the hiring manager** by using Certified U.S. Mail, followed up with a telephone call! Do NOT—repeat do NOT!—apply online using the Internet! Why use U.S. Mail? Because email has become so pervasive in business today it is fast becoming yet another method of “screening out” job applicants, right alongside voice mail. “Snail mail,” on the other hand, actually tends to get read because it is becoming so increasingly rare!
Once you are certain that enough time has elapsed for your mailed résumé (along with a well-crafted one-page letter introducing yourself and telling the hiring manager what you can do for him/her and the company they represent, not what you are seeking to obtain from them!) to have reached the hiring manager, you then need to follow up with a telephone call.***
Does this approach work each and every time? Of course not, no approach does. But, I can tell you this: It works often enough to very seriously considering using it during your job search! Will it make you “stand out from the crowd”? Very definitely! Why? Because almost none of your competition, i.e., other job seekers will know to use it, or if they do know to use it, simply won’t go to the “trouble” to do it, to do anything different.
To learn more—much more!—about tactics and strategies you can employ to position yourself as a TOP candidate, a different candidate, in any job market, including today’s, and get HIRED!, you can of course discover in “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets. It can pay you to investigate my book!
Footnotes
*I am not suggesting, however, that you totally ignore the other three “channels to market,” i.e., job boards, recruiters and career/job fairs, only that your major emphasis should be on the three channels cited in this article.
**Researching and finding the names, titles and addresses of the appropriate hiring manager within your targeted companies, how to actually craft the direct mail letter and then effectively follow up, takes up 64 pages in “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets, so I am not going to go into anything but the process to follow in this article!
***Sample telephone scripts that get results from these follow up calls to the hiring manager are also covered extensively in “Headhunter” Hiring Secrets.
