مکالمه

BEC : Campaign - Conversation

AJ: Okay, I’d like to talk about now the idea of campaigning versus promoting or a campaign versus a promotion. This is kind of a marketing idea. These are terms used in marketing, but they also apply very much to a job search as well. In fact, anyone who is looking for a job, either they have one and they’re looking for a better one or they think they might need one some day or they desperately need one now, really needs to think more like a marketer because all you’re doing is marketing yourself and a job search is just a marketing campaign for yourself.

What most people do is they really do a shotgun promotion, I would call it.

What I mean is they look and they find every job advertisement they can find somewhere and then maybe they make a list of some places they want to work, also, hoping they have some openings. Then they just send out a whole lot of letters and emails with resumes. They send them one time to lots and lots of places, so it’s like a shotgun. They blast it out to as many people as they can and then they kind of wait and hope that something will happen.

Usually, I’m sure you can speak to this, that’s a pretty bad approach with very low odds.

George: Very, very low odds. Even the recruiters and the specialists on how to get hired will tell you that you can send as many as 2,000 letters or 2,000 emails and you might get yourself five or six interviews. The percentages are just ridiculous, ridiculously low. The reason being, obviously, if you look through the Internet or the newspaper and that’s where you’re looking to find your jobs there’s tons and tons and tons of jobs in there, but guess what? There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people applying for every single one of those jobs.

Less than a month ago, I remember hearing about a job in the Atlanta area and they were looking for 14 people. Sorry, I can’t remember the name of the company, but they were looking for 14 people. They had 20,000 resumes mailed to them. What do you think your odds are of getting a job when there are only 14 jobs and there’s 20,000 people applying? That’s truly the shotgun approach and it just isn’t going to work for you. You need to refine this thing down and pick and choose who it is that you’re applying to or sending resumes to and put in place a program to get yourself in front of them, to get in the door and get that interview, to make yourself unique so that they want to call you, because you’re not the only one out there that’s looking, I’ll guarantee you.

AJ: Yeah, again, it’s just a marketing campaign. As a businessperson I look back when I was job searching and now I look at it and it’s just a marketing campaign. It’s exactly what I do to promote or campaign, really, my own business. So first you do some kind of market research, meaning you have a target group. If you’re a businessperson you have a target group that you want to sell to. They’re the most likely to buy or they’re like your perfect customers, the ones you really want.

You’ve got to do that in a job search and what that means is you really have to think exactly what kind of job do I want and can I do. What would I enjoy? What’s got the best potential for me now? You want to go out and do research and don’t worry whether they’re advertising for jobs or not. You just find let’s say the 10 best places you want to work, the jobs you want, the 10 that you want and then what you’re going to do is you’re going to campaign them.

A ‘campaign’ is a series of actions. That’s the difference. So a ‘promotion’ is basically like one time, a one-time action. You send your letter and resume to them one time. You’ve just promoted yourself once, but if you send a different letter and your resume to them seven times, 10 times, 20 times, 50 times, that is a campaign. It’s a series. In this case a series of letters and it is much, much, much more powerful.

Very few people will call you for an interview or buy something from you after just hearing from you once, but after the third time, fifth time, seventh time, tenth time the odds get better and better and better for you. So you have to target, number one. Target and find out who do you really want to work for.

Why bother applying for jobs you don’t really want. Then, next, you’re going to have a campaign for those. You’re going to send them a series of letters and possibly other things. I’ll talk more about that at another time.

George: Yeah, absolutely, a series of letters. Each one of them is going to be a little bit different. You’re not going to send that resume and your cover letter every time. What you’re trying to do in this campaign, the sales campaign, the marketing campaign, is promote yourself. The resume really is kind of a general promotion or a general announcement that I’m here, I’m available and you probably would want to hire me.

AJ: It’s just like a brochure really.

George: Yeah, exactly. Then the ongoing letters that you’re going to send you’re going to further expand on your skills, your abilities, your accomplishments and, bottom line, what you can bring to the table and contribute to this company that you’re wanting to interview with or this particular manager who’s in a particular department that you want to go to. It works either way, inside the company, outside the company.

Here’s where your networking that we talked about can help you a little bit too because you can find out who the key people are that you should be conducting this campaign with. You don’t want to just send the thing to the human resources department.

AJ: Yeah, yeah, avoid them. Don’t send things to them.

George: No. I don’t want to upset you if you’re a human resources person. You have a great function in the business, but quite frankly we understand that accepting resumes is probably not one of the best ones.

AJ: Yeah, I don’t mind upsetting the HR people. HR is short for human resources.

Some places call it the personnel department. People who are applying for jobs think oh, that’s where you send your resume, that’s where you send your application and that is just bullshit. That is the worst place to send your application or resume.

You must, must, must find the specific department where you’re going to be working, if it’s a big company, and you have to find who will actually be your boss. You have to find out their name and some kind of contact information, an address, an email, telephone. It’s kind of hard to cold call people, at least for me, but you’ve got to get to the right person.

HR (human resources) they just get thousands and thousands and they don’t know anything about if you’re trying to get a sales position. They’re not salespeople. They don’t really know much about it. You have to get to the specific sales manager who would actually interview you. So avoid human resources. You deal with them after you have already talked to the manager and he says oh, we want to hire you. Now go fill out an application in human resources.

George: Yeah, you have to fill out the forms and the applications and all that stuff.

Okay, another point is, as I said, you’re looking for the hiring manager and you have to remember that particularly in large companies, in fact specifically in large companies, jobs are not advertised. They’re already taken care of internally a lot of times, but they just don’t advertise jobs. A job opening in large companies, particularly large companies, get filled by networks, okay? AJ: Small ones too, actually.

George: Yeah, there’s no better way to say it. They get filled by networks. Small companies, large companies, it is people that somebody in the organization knows that knows somebody who can do whatever the function is. Maybe it’s a relative that knows somebody or maybe it is even a relative. So you have to understand, again going back to this business with the newspapers and the Internet, these advertised jobs, I would bet you that a vast majority of those jobs are either already filled or they know who they’re going to put into that job.

The large companies, by creed I guess within their own company or within their own human resources rules, have to advertise certain jobs, but that doesn’t mean somebody hasn’t already hired someone. I can think of many, many times where I’ve heard the comment that oh, yes, I’ll hire you. You get the job, but I can’t get back to you and officially offer it to you yet because we have to advertise it, meaning we have to put it in the newspaper.

AJ: Right, which means you need to be contacting your dream list, your target list. It doesn’t matter if they’re advertising or not. In fact, what you want to do is you want to get to them because they might have an opening that’s coming soon. Maybe it just happened and they haven’t advertised it yet. So you can get to them before they advertise and you’ve got a much better shot.

The other thing that can happen is let’s say they don’t have an opening, but you get to them and you do this email campaign, which I’ll talk more about in my commentary. If they like you they might give your resume to someone else that they know in their own company or some friend of theirs and say wow, I don’t have a job opening, but this guy or this woman really seems pretty good. Why don’t you talk to them? So it’s really important to do this and to be focused and not just be sending hundreds or thousands of random letters and resumes. You really have to target and then you do a campaign.

George: Absolutely. You can think of this simply as expanding your network. You’re going to pick out 10 key places where you’d like to go or 10 key jobs you’d like to have and you may very well be contacting 10 key people that you don’t know and they don’t know you, but when you’re done with the program guess what? They’re part of your network. They’re part of that group you’re going to write down and say you can contact.

AJ: So, yeah, this is great, this system. I’ll describe my approach to it in the commentary and you can talk about kind of your thinking on it, but it has worked for me many, many, many times very well. I mean it’s exactly what I still do as a businessperson. Now I’m selling lessons and seminars and things, but it’s the same basic approach. It’s just being a good marketer is all it is.

The End.