Highly Effective Job Search

You certainly can. While it’s not as effective as networking, it’s a whole lot more effective than nothing. If you do it well, it can produce interviews and offers. Like everything in job search, it’s all about the quality and quantity of your efforts. You’ve got to make enough contacts. That’s first. And second, you’ve got to make them effectively.

Lets talk about both of those, starting with what does “enough contacts” mean.

Let’s start with direct mail. It’s defined as mailing or e-mailing cover letters with resumes to organizations who have not advertised openings, organizations where you have no introduction of any kind. With this approach, there’s good reason to believe that your success rate will be in the general range of one interview for every 1000 sent. That’s right, one thousand, with three zeros. After all, when people use that same procedure with you, you call it junk mail or spam and rarely read it, much less buy anything. It does work, but it takes large numbers.

Don’t get discouraged. Please keep reading. The news gets better.

I haven’t seen studies on doing the same thing on the phone – telephoning strangers. This, of course, is what’s called telemarketing.  My educated guess is that it would take a smaller number of these to get an interview – something between dozens and a hundred or two, maybe. And I’m very clear that the lower the level of the position and the lower the compensation, the smaller the number needed for success. I often recommend this approach for hourly or entry level jobs.

The other thing I’m very clear about is that your success in using telemarketing is heavily dependent on your skill in making this kind of phone call. Are you comfortable with it? Do you have a good script? Can you use it in a way it doesn’t sound like a script — and sometimes even turn it into a real conversation?

The same is true of direct mail. It depends on your skill in writing the resume and letter. Sometimes a letter alone, one that encapsulates the resume, is better than a cover letter plus resume. And it depends on the quality of your mailing list. Do you have the right titles and names, spelled right? Does it look personal, rather than like a mass mailing? It’s entirely possible to beat the averages.

In short, when using direct mail or telemarketing in job search, it helps to do them more like the marketing professionals do them. That includes trying different approaches and tracking your success rate to see which gets the best results.

Here’s one last suggestion that most job search experts would agree with: Combine the direct mail with telephone follow-up. Send out a small batch of letters each week. Follow up on all of them on the telephone next week – and the week after. Hit each target with more than one piece of mail or email interspersed with repeated well-planned phone calls. It still takes some effort to get an interview, but the odds are much better than a single phone call or letter to each target. Persistence pays. I’ve seen people get jobs this way.

So if you’re not yet doing as much networking as you’d like, you can supplement it with some direct mail and telephone work – at least until you get your networking numbers up. And if you enjoy it and are getting interviews, then why not continue?

Everyone knows that networking is important in job search, but what if you’re having trouble making it work for you? In fact, many job hunters have problems with networking, especially early in their search. If you’re in that category, I have some suggestions for you.

But first, a question: can you get interviews without networking? If so, maybe networking is less important for you. Are you one of those lucky people who can do the entire search with job postings or recruiters?

If you can get interviews through ads and Internet job boards, count yourself as blessed. Most people can’t. If you can get one good interview from every 40 or fewer resume submissions, and you’re finding 20 or more appropriate ads or postings a week, networking may not be an essential part of your search.

Here’s the math. On average, it takes five appropriate interviews to land a job. If you’re hitting one interview for every 40 submissions and making 20 submissions a week, that would be an interview every second week and you would land in ten weeks. If you’re further out toward the tail of the bell curve and it takes eight interviews, that’s 16 weeks.

Now recruiters. If you sent resumes to ten recruiters and got one invitation to interview, maybe you should send out resumes to another batch of recruiters. You might get the offer on the first one, but remember that recruiters often present a slate of four to six candidates. You may not hit on the first try, so get more resumes out now.

On the other hand, suppose you sent resumes to 50 appropriate recruiters three weeks ago and haven’t heard from any of them. I hope you’re not just sitting and waiting. It’s time to start working harder on your networking, right?

In that case, my first two questions are these: “Do you have a target list of at least 40 organizations on paper, and have you made a list of at least 100 people that you could potentially contact as part of your networking?”

Most people have more trouble with the 100 than with the 40. People usually start by saying that they don’t have 100. But they do. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and even young antisocial introverts who work in a cubicle all day and go home and watch TV alone every night have 100.

To make your list of 100, you may need to ask for help from a few people that you know well. The 100 do not need to be well-placed or in your home town. They can be anyone anywhere that you have easy access to on the phone.

If you don’t know what to do with these two central lists, you need to study up on networking some more. There are several thousand books on job search and most of them include material on networking. Maybe you should go read some. You could even read mine.

And talk to other job hunters about how they network, what works and what doesn’t. Social networking Internet sites like LinkedIn.com offer sophisticated tools for organizing contacts you may already have, and getting in touch with new ones. But please don’t assume that you can get the job done entirely on the Internet.

You need to talk to people.

If the ultimate success in search is the acceptance of a great-fit, above-market offer, the penultimate success is multiple job offers in a short time frame.

In a perfect world, your quest would produce two or more excellent offers on the same day. In real life, two in a week would be just fine. If your base comp is solidly into six figures, a cluster of offers in the space of several weeks would do it very nicely. Having two offers on the table at the same time gives you excellent leverage – provided that you would be willing to accept either one.

If you’re thinking about bluffing the first one with a non-existent second one, I’d strongly recommend against it. There’s too much at stake — including your reputation if you’re found out.

With the right experience and resume, using a number of recruiters is one way to get to multiple offers. Don’t dribble resumes to them one at a time. Decide how many recruiters you want to contact and send resumes out in a batch.

You’ll want to have all of your prep work carefully done before making contact, so you’ll be ready for a callback. If you moved just a little slowly with the first recruiter to call, that might help. But watch it: Move too slowly and you’ll look uninterested.

Of course for most job candidates, recruiters simply don’t work. If you’re part of that majority, you can still use the batch processing approach to increase your chances of multiple offers. Make your initial target list 40 instead of four. Move all 40 along through initial research in a week or two.

Plan an intense week of initial networking to get introductions to insiders at your targets. When you get your first introductions to insiders, you might want to set the appointments out a bit so you can get a larger number of inside contacts working simultaneously.

When you are close to your first offer, look at your target list to see which other organizations might be considering you. Even if they’re not admitting to having an opening, express your interest even more enthusiastically.

Of course, when you get your first offer, you should go back to everyone at the top of your list again and tell them the bad news: you may soon be unavailable. Tell them again how interested you are and ask if it’s possible to speed up their process a bit.

The overall message here is simple: In planning and executing your search, don’t just consider effective activities, think also about their timing.

Locating multiple offers is not easy to do. It doesn’t require a miracle, but it does involve a certain amount of good luck on top of a solid plan and a more concentrated effort. The final result may not be the Holy Grail, but it is certainly a blessing – and a significant advantage in salary negotiations.

Orville Pierson is LHH’s Director of Program Design and the author of The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search (McGraw-Hill) and Highly Effective Networking: Meet the Right People and Get a Great Job (Career Press). With over 30 years’ experience in career services, he leads the team that designs LHH’s career transition programs. Orville can be reached at orville@highlyeffectivejobsearch.com with comments and questions that might become part of future postings, but he cannot respond to them individually.