As I point out in “’Headhunter’ Hiring Secrets: The Rules of the Hiring Game Have Changed . . . Forever!,” there are all new “rules” in today’s hiring “game”—and that’s precisely how you must look at getting hired in today’s job market, as a “game”—and what may have worked, say, just a few years ago to land a new job no longer works, in many cases.

The major thesis in “‘Headhunter’ Hiring Secrets,” of course, is that the “rules” of the “hiring game” have changed . . . Forever! In the book I examine the entire job market and the many new rules that are operative in it. Then, I share hundreds of “secrets” that I have successfully used for nearly a decade to effectively work around these new rules and help hundreds of job candidates land their dream jobs—even during the Great Recession. The intent of the book was (and is!) to show job seekers whom I can’t personally help how they can, in effect, become their own “headhunters.” In this blog, I am going to examine five new rules that are quite common in today’s job market and then show you how you can effectively work around them to get where you want to go—to land your dream job in 2012!

New ‘rule’ #1 – The hiring process is designed to exclude you as a candidate

This is one of the best-kept, least-understood and most under-appreciated aspects of the job hunting process today. Contrary to what you—and the overwhelming majority of other job seekers—quite probably think and believe, companies are not looking for reasons to hire you! The truth of the matter is, hiring companies today are looking for reasons not to hire you, i.e., for reasons to exclude you from the candidate pool!

Maybe they decide they don’t like the look of your résumé. They might categorize you as a “job hopper.” Or, maybe they call you up and, if you don’t have a professional greeting on your voice mail, they simply assume that you probably aren’t all that professional, either. Or perhaps they don’t like what they see/read about you on your Facebook® page.

Why do hiring managers and the companies they represent treat today’s job candidates in such an arbitrary, capricious manner? The short answer? Because they can! With literally hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of candidates for virtually any open positions in today’s job market, besieged hiring managers usually have one principal goal in mind: To winnow the number of candidates down to a manageable number as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Unfair? You bet! Still, that’s the way the hiring game is played today, and if you are going to “play” in this game, then you had first better learn how not to lose.

“Headhunter” Hiring Secret: If you are losing on offense in a game, oftentimes upping your defensive game can turn the tide, and that certainly can be a winning strategy in the hiring game. While your competitors, i.e., other job seekers, are making the same mistakes over and over again, make sure you are not making these mistakes. After all, that’s what the whole personal branding concept is all about, isn’t it? Making sure that, in comparison to other candidates, you appear to be flawless, or at least virtually flawless. And it’s really all in the details. Here are just a few areas to concentrate on during your job search:

• While others may not even think about the importance of having a professional voice mail greeting, make sure you do!
• Make sure you know the importance of using an email address that actually works with today’s computer-read screening software systems.
• Make sure you format your résumé in such a way that it invites being read, not challenges a hiring manager to “plow” through it.
• Learn how to properly construct your LinkedIn® profile, your Facebook® page.
• Ensure that all written communications involved in your job search are error-free!

New ‘rule’ #2 – HR is the new ‘black hole’

Human Resources was one of the hardest hit employee groups during the Great Recession. (“Hey, we are not hiring so why do we need all of these HR folks?!”) As a result, and as hiring is once again picking up, HR simply can’t handle the increased volume of candidates until they themselves increase their own numbers. Thus, more often than not, a résumé submitted to a company’s job opening actually has little chance of being reviewed by a real, live person. (In the recruiting industry, HR these days is referred to as “the new black hole.”) Generally, a computer scans the résumé looking for key words. If the right words are there, you may get a call. If not, you are excluded (see “Rule #1”)—even though you may actually be the best candidate! Humans can overlay judgment on your résumé, computers can’t. But seldom anymore does a human being ever lay eyes on a résumé submitted online.

“Headhunter” Hiring Secret: There are powerful ways to brand yourself as unique and get around the online application process. Companies want you to believe that the only way to get hired is to apply to their positions online. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Here is what you should do:

• Go ahead and apply online, in order to play the HR game. Then, go around the HR process and position yourself, in parallel, directly with the hiring manager, by launching a direct mail campaign (click on this link to learn more). Today, this single tactic is one of the strongest in a job hunter’s arsenal during the job hunt.

New ‘rule’ #3 – Some online job postings aren’t all they appear to be

Generally, the job descriptions you read online are only half the story, and many times, not even the most important half of the story. Hiring managers themselves almost always know precisely what they are looking for in a candidate. But sometimes, when this information is communicated to Human Resources, something gets “lost” in the “translation” when a job description is prepared. You, as a potential candidate, read the job description and think, “Hey, I fit that. I am the perfect candidate.” And indeed you may, at least ostensibly! You might even get an interview by HR, but then you could just as easily end up not being the successful candidate and never really know why! It could be something as ridiculously simple as your not ever having been made aware of “the three things” (requested by the hiring manager) on the interviewer’s checklist. Why? Because these “three things” were never communicated to potential candidates or included in the online posting!

“Headhunter” Hiring Secret: Network inside the hiring company to learn what makes both the company and the hiring manager “tick.” Learn what the “hidden criteria” may be for any given job—before submitting an application for a position. (Click here to learn more about the approach to take to accomplish this.)

New ‘rule’ #4 – The interview ‘process’ is seldom a process

Candidates invited in for interviews are oftentimes subjected to interviewers who are ill prepared for the interview. Off-the-wall, irrelevant questions are asked, or virtually the same question (or type of question) is asked over and over again. And just when you think things went well, you are invited back for yet another round of interviews. (As a “headhunter,” I call this “death by interview.”) Unfortunately, even among some of the “best” companies in the world, the overall corporate interview process is, more often than not, considerably more whimsical and directionless than it is scientific and integrated.

“Headhunter” Hiring Secret: By learning to use the technique I have dubbed “leading the witness,” you can literally take control of the interview—without becoming overbearing or boorish. (Click here to learn more about this technique.)

New ‘rule’ #5 – Cast ‘shadows on the wall’ and, again, you’re excluded!

If you have ever watched any type of criminal TV show or movie (and who hasn’t?!), you are undoubtedly quite familiar with the so-called Miranda warning read to alleged wrongdoers: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. . . .” All too often candidates, in the spirit of wanting to be completely open and honest, share way too much information during a job interview. While I certainly don’t advocate lying or being dishonest, I do strongly advise against “baring your soul” during an interview. If you do this, you could easily end up casting “shadows” of the interviewer’s/hiring manager’s office wall. These “shadows” consist of mentioning anything that could cause the interviewer’s/hiring manager’s “antenna” to suddenly perk up. Let me give you an example of how this can work (true story, by the way).

A hiring manager interviewing one of my firm’s candidates remarked, as he rubbed his shoulder, “Boy, I need to get some surgery done on this shoulder. It continues to bother me.” The candidate himself had a bad knee, and in trying to relate as well as be empathetic, responded, “Yes, I know what you mean. One of these days I need some knee surgery too.” Needless to say, the candidate wasn’t hired. The candidate cast a “shadow on the wall.” The hiring manager later told me over the phone that he had several concerns: “How long will he be out if he does indeed have surgery?” “What other medical issues does this person possibly have?” “How much money will he end up costing the company?”

“Headhunter” Hiring Secret: First, be aware of the necessity for avoiding casting “shadows on the wall” during interviews! (Many, if not most, job seekers are not!) Then, take any steps necessary not to cast “shadow on the wall” by anticipating questions you may be asked during an interview and by practicing “safe” answers to such questions. Unfortunately perhaps, rarely in today’s job market is it the best candidate who is ultimately hired for the job. Usually, it is the safest candidate!

Study after study indicates that many currently employed people are looking to make a job change as the market improves. That means the competitive playing field will become even larger and more challenging than it is today. So, if you intend to be among those landing their dream jobs this year, it is even more vitally important that you strongly brand yourself as being different from and better than the “average” job seeker. Learning the new “rules” of the hiring “game,” and then using “secrets” such as I’ve suggested in this blog to work around and/or within the confines of these new rules will certainly get you headed in the right direction. Guaranteed. – Originally posted on the Personal Branding Blog by Skip Freeman

5 ‘Rules’ You Must Learn To Get Hired Today is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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2. Five Job Search Rules You Should Break
3. Why Talented People Don’t Get Hired

Glassdoor will be at booth #514 where we’ll be showcasing what Glassdoor has to offer and how we can help employers progress their branding and recruiting efforts.

Plus we invite all ERE attendees to attend a poker tournament sponsored by Glassdoor on Wednesday, September 7 at 8 p.m. at Rivals Waterfront Sports Grill (3460 South Ocean Drive, Hollywood, FL). All proceeds from the tournament will go directly to the ERE Foundation, which over the past few years has donated thousands of dollars to support educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth, with an emphasis on those parts of the world where the funds will have the greatest impacts.

#ERE Expo: Come Learn More About Glassdoor At Booth #514 is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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When creating a social media recruitment strategy, there are three critical considerations every employer or talent organization must address directly and comprehensively. The good news is, you already know the answers to these crucial questions, and while unique to every company, recruiter and job opportunity, those answers provide a strategic, measurable framework for social recruiting success.

The Big 3 Questions of Talent Acquisition

Hiring managers, HR business partners, recruiters and executive leadership (not to mention current employees) are all crucial stakeholders in the talent acquisition and retention process.

That’s why it’s important to remember that no matter what your role or the size of your company, recruiting relies on performance based feedback. Like whether or not top talent accepts your offer.

1. What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to finding and retaining top talent?

There’s always that one req or passive candidate profile that’s the most pressing, the most critical, and, by general rule, the most difficult for which to source. The one with an empty pipeline where “just-in-time” was yesterday. And, of course, market demand’s creating a revolving door for the A players you’ve already managed to bring on board. No matter what the title or department, if it’s the role which is the most imperative to your company’s business objectives, it’s the one you need to concentrate your social recruiting efforts on. Because it’s likely the one that’s taking up most of your time, anyway.

Bottom Line: Social Media saves time and should enhance, not replace, your current talent acquisition strategies.

2. What are you doing to overcome this challenge for recruitment and retention?

To build an effective social recruiting strategy, you have to know your objectives. And if you’re in the business of people, there’s only one objective: to find the best talent the most efficiently as possible. According to Career XRoads 10^th annual Source of Hire Study, for all the sourcing and spend dedicated to identifying external talent, the top source of hire (by far), was internal promotions and transfers. Internal movement accounted for 50.3% of all hires. #2 on the list, and the top source for external referrals (27.5%) was internal referrals. Following closely on both lists? Job boards, which accounted for 24.9% of all external hires in 2010. And that same study showed that 88.9% of blue chip brands and global employers surveyed in the study attributed at least one hire to Monster.com. Just thought that was worth a mention since actionable data is key to strategic recruitment.

Bottom Line: Engage your employees and hiring managers; they’re your most likely candidates, or the most likely to have that next hire in their network.

The easiest way to connect the dots? Social media. The content engine driving online engagement: job postings. To put it in Boolean terms, you can’t operate with OR anymore. It’s AND. That’s logic.

3. Why should top talent want to work for you?

The war for talent is heating up. If you find and engage a qualified, interested and available candidate, chances are so has the competition. That’s why when creating an employment value proposition and communicating it through employer branding, you’ve got to appeal to the head and the heart.

Bottom Line: Job descriptions, title, compensation and recruitment advertising looks a lot alike, but at the end of the day, top talent makes its decision based on one single competitive differentiation: your company’s culture and the people who create it.

That’s why the most valuable recruiter you’ve got is your current employees. Lucky there’s social media to put a face to the name (or Twitter name, or Facebook photo). - Originally Posted on MonsterThinking by Matt Charney

How To Create A Social Recruiting Strategy is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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The most frequently occurring was some variant of, “I loved you in Men in Black!” as the deliverer of this wit chuckled as though Will could not possibly have ever heard that one before.

I empathized with Will that evening, because telling people that you are a psychologist is a little bit like telling them that your name is Will Smith. While, “Are you reading my mind right now?” has to be my least favorite, there are a host of predictable responses to telling someone that you are a shrink.

Worse still is telling them that you are an organizational psychologist.If people have misguided and stereotypical notions of what a clinical psychologist does, they tend to have no clue what the work of an organizational psychologist entails.

In the convoluted knowledge economy in which we work, organizational psychologists are not alone in being misunderstood. Very few of us have the sort of job that has “When I Grow Up” name recognition and familiarity.

Sure, I get what a police officer and ballerina do, but what the heck is an “optical illuminator enhancer?” In my efforts to help people understand the role of organizational psychology, I have broken it down into three verbs:

Select, Perfect, and Persuade

Select – One of the primary tasks of an organizational psychologist is to examine a job, determine the profile of success for that role, and evaluate potential candidates relative to that profile. Psychologists typically use some combination of cognitive measures, personality profiles, interviews, and skills testing to assess goodness of fit between a candidate and a job.

You know how the last job you interviewed for asked you 700 different ways if you “had a wide circle of acquaintances?” Blame an organizational psychologist.

Perfect – A second duty of an organizational psychologist is to perfect the extant talent pool through training, coaching, and leadership development. Whereas clinical therapy sessions tend to be focused on pathology, executive coaching sessions typically key in on making good performance exceptional.

Similarly, psychologists may leverage their understanding of individual and group dynamics to help businesses build stronger teams with more skilled leaders.

Persuade – What do making a sale, achieving buy-in around an organizational change, and motivating a team all have in common? They are all fundamentally about persuasion. Organizational psychologists are schooled in the science of influence and motivation, and can help businesses design programs that account for the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

After all, a corporation, much as the name suggests, is made up of a corpus of individuals. While we may speak of organizations as distinct, unfeeling entities, people are the heartbeat of any business, and organizations that neglect this fact don’t typically last long enough to talk about it.

So, the next time you meet an organizational psychologist, save the jokes about cigars, tweed, and chaise lounges, and ask their opinion about the scientific study of people in the workplace.

Or don’t, but know that they are reading your mind anyway. - Originally Posted on MonsterThinking by Dr. Daniel Crosby.

Men In Black: Revealing Organizational Psychology Secrets is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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Plus if you feel the luck is on your side in Las Vegas this year, try placing your bet on how many poker chips are in Glassdoor’s “world’s largest tower of poker chips” – the person with the closest guess will win an iPad 2.

Visit the Glassdoor Booth #1267 to learn about…

• Job Search & Career Advancement Resources: New to Glassdoor? Employers, HR and other career industry professionals will have an opportunity to learn what employees and job candidates are saying. Glassdoor is a rapidly growing community with more than one million members, which offers ratings and reviews on more than 120,000 companies, along with salary and interview process insights, all provided by  those who know best: employees and job candidates. Come see what your staff and prospects are saying.
• Employer Branding & Retention Tools: Want to know how to get in on the conversation? Glassdoor will be showcasing Enhanced Employer Profiles (EEP), which allows employers to offer their perspective on what makes their company a ‘Best Place to Work.’ In today’s online world, job seekers are hungry for information and go beyond a company’s careers page, blog or other informational site. Find out how you can bring all your career and job opportunity insights together on Glassdoor.
• New Ways to Hire: How do you attract and retain the job candidates that matter most? Your job candidates and employees are turning to Glassdoor to learn about the latest job openings and to find out what it’s like to work at your company or your competitors. With Glassdoor JobAds, you can proactively engage with both passive and active candidates throughout Glassdoor; strategically target difficult to fill positions via industry, geographic, job title, and keyword targeting; learn from advanced analytics that track impressions and click through traffic; and benchmark results against your industry competitors.

We’re looking forward to this year’s event and to seeing you soon!

If you’re not able to attend this year’s conference, follow us on Twitter @glassdoordotcom to stay in the loop on the hot topics at SHRM.

Glassdoor’s Heading To SHRM 2011; Come Stop By Booth #1267 is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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“I doubt it,” I said. “What does the committee do?”

“It’s a committee of HR people who volunteer to review resumes for job seekers,” Garrett said. “People send in their resumes, and the HR people give them feedback.”

“Oh no!” I said. “HR people giving resume advice? That is scary.”

“How is it scary?” Garrett wanted to know.

“Look,” I said. “HR people are the undefeated world heavyweight champs of bureaucratic boilerplate. Have you read any HR memos lately? ‘Effective immediately, it will no longer be permissible to access the front lobby through the loading dock. Please be advised and alter your route accordingly.’ Who speaks that way outside of an HR memo?”

“I see what you mean,” said Garrett.

“I wouldn’t let an HR person within ten yards of my resume,” I said. “Asking HR people to give resume advice is like writing a screenplay and taking it to an actuaries’ convention to get help spicing up the dialogue.”

“You make a good point,” said my friend. “But HR people read resumes all day. So shouldn’t they know what a good resume looks like?”

“HR people write job ads all day, too,” I said. “Here’s what a typical job ad sounds like: ‘Our growing team seeks a motivated self-starter to enhance our ability to serve customers through world-class, efficient service. Must have a proven track record of success.”

“As opposed to a track record of failure, or maybe an unproven track record of success,” said Garrett. “With end-to-end solutions based on cross-functional paradigm shifting best practices,” he added.

“If you wanted a resume that didn’t sound look like a bottomless pit of corporate-speak boilerplate, you wouldn’t have an HR person help you with it,” I said.

“So who would you ask for resume advice?” Garrett wanted to know.

“That’s a great question,” I replied. “College students. Acupuncturists. Circus performers. Cab drivers and hairdressers. Almost anyone who speaks English would do. You’d hand your resume to one of these non-HR people, and you’d say ‘Let me know which parts of the resume you don’t understand.’”

“That would get the boilerplate language out,” Garrett agreed.

“I write resumes,” I said, “and I show excerpts to my kids. If the kid doesn’t understand what a phrase means — ‘multi-platform strategic alignment of core values,’ for instance — the phrase goes.”

“Why do we write resumes in such a stiff, formal way in the first place?” Garrett wondered aloud.

“You got me,” I said. “We’ve all been brainwashed into thinking that corporate junk-speak sounds more grown-up and professional than regular speech. So we stuff our resumes full of boilerplate dreck, and end up sounding like little kids playing a dress-up game of business under the kitchen table. We sound ridiculous and puffed-up and uncreative and sheep-like. We suck all the power out of our resumes when we write that way.”

“But don’t hold back,” said Garrett. “Tell me how you really feel.”

“It kills me that HR people would be advising job seekers on writing resumes,” I said. “That’s sure to perpetuate the problem.”

“I’ll tell you what, resume critique-writing could be a nice sideline for an underemployed circus performer,” said Garrett.

“You’ve got a point there,” I said.

The Bland Leading The Blind is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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We didn’t realize that we’d be looking back, twenty-five years later, and calling the early 1980s the Good Old Days for HR.

Now HR people are besieged. They are embattled. Employees hate them, management hates them, and jobseekers hate them most of all. It’s no fun being an HR person with many, many employers today. HR people are the bad guys. They make the rules and enforce them, they’re forced to take away perks and benefits and they lay people off on a regular basis. HR people still talk about Engaging Employees with the Mission, creating cultural Pixie Dust, and making their organizations Employers of Choice, but they don’t say it with as much force as they used to. If they did, their co-workers would laugh out loud or suck their teeth in disgust.

So what went wrong with HR?

Here’s my take. CEOs loved the rhetoric but they pooh-poohed the substance of what their HR leaders had to say. “Employees are our greatest asset” is much more comfortable as a slogan on the wall than it is as an operating principle.

The HR people I know hated outsourcing function after function, cutting salaries and benefits, tossing out skilled workers to make room for temps and newbies, and generally making terms like Employer of Choice and Great Corporate Culture in-house jokes.  They hated to become the Policy Police, too. They would much rather have spent their working hours creating change in their organizations, helping empowered employees innovate, collaborate and break down barriers. Those are the fun parts of HR, and the parts where HR people can change organizations for the better. I’m not talking about chair massages and lunchtime yoga classes (not that there’s anything wrong with those things). I’m talking about shifting organizations so that they can compete, by attracting and keeping the most talented people in their industries, opening channels for communication, and then stepping aside and letting those talented people move mountains.

One former HR VP friend of mine launched a recruiting firm when the air went out of the corporate-HR tires. “I got tired of explaining to my leadership team that people require at least as much care as photocopiers,” he said. Another former HR exec bought a franchise, and one more became an executive coach. “I can coach one executive at a time to believe in his people,” she said. “As an in-house HR leader, I felt like the guy pushing a rock up a hill, day after day.”

When fear rules the workplace, only toadies thrive, and there are plenty of those in the HR function. Their large numbers make it that much harder for those talented and dedicated HR leaders looking to build great organizations. When a company is comfortable with an HR chief who’s happy reviewing dental-plan enrollments and administering Forced Ranking systems, an HR change agent isn’t welcome.

After all, fear-based management has its advantages. It’s expedient. It doesn’t require a CEO to look in the mirror, or to take responsibility for his or her own hiring and leadership decisions. An HR chief who keeps silent about the emperor’s new clothes doesn’t need to worry too much about job security.

Occasionally a management team decides that it’s time to take employee concerns seriously, and a proactive and strategic new HR leader is sought. Six or twelve months later, you can spot the burnt-out change agent by the arrows in his back (or hers). Out s/he goes, and life returns to bureaucratic normal.

I look forward to the economic uptick that will lower unemployment and remind CEOs why they ever hired forward-looking HR people.  I can’t wait for the day when employers are fighting over talent, when sharp and human-focused HR leaders don’t despair for their profession. I’m eager to hear how innovative HR managers will spur collaboration, non-linear thinking and team-and-individual greatness in their shops.

That day can’t come soon enough! I just hope it comes soon enough for the exhausted employees who’ve had their fill of the can’t-help-you, fill-out-this-form, sorry-that’s-not-our-policy HR culture so much in evidence today.

The Downfall of HR; Can HR Be Saved? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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If the employer you’re targeting is on the small side, with a few hundred employees or fewer, your target decision-maker may be the head of your function. If the employer is larger, your decision-maker may be a few layers down from that functional VP.

How to Find A Decision-Maker’s Name:

If you’re targeting the VP of your function, the odds are good that you’ll find that person on the company’s website. Piece of cake! If you’re looking for someone a bit further down in the organization, here are four ways to find the name of your very-possibly next boss:

• Conduct a LinkedIn search on the company’s name and your target person’s most likely title.
• Use ZoomInfo.com to find the manager you’re looking for.
• Google the company name plus the title — ‘your’ manager’s name may pop up in a search result.

It’s easy to find a mailing address for your manager, once you’ve got a name. If you check LinkedIn and check with your three-dimensional network and can’t find a conduit person (someone who knows your hiring manager, who’d be willing to make an introduction for you) then your best bet is to send a snail mail letter straight to the decision-maker’s desk.

Now, Spot the Pain

Finding the decision-maker’s name is fairly easy, unless your target organization is a huge company like IBM. After you’ve got a name and a street address, your next job is to spot the pain the employer is facing — that is, the reason for the job opening.

Every job opening springs from some sort of business pain. If there’s no pain, there’s no opening. If things were working perfectly, why would the CFO approve a job opening? Your job is to spot the business pain and show the decision-maker how you’ve surmounted a similar problem in the past.

You can extrapolate the business pain from the job ad itself, at least fifty percent of the time. Read the job ad carefully, and ignore the list of requirements — X number of years of this, and Y years of that and certification in Z. We don’t want to write a letter to talk about those requirements. They aren’t central to the job opening. We want to talk about the pain, instead.

Identify A Company’s Pain: It Isn’t Rocket Science

There are only so many kinds of business pain — there’s growth-related pain, and contraction-related pain. There’s acquisition-related pain and globalization-related pain. If we can’t see the pain staring up at us from the job ad, we’ll move to the company’s own website and read as much as we can. From there, we’ll move to Google News to see what the rest of the world has to say about ‘our’ company.

Here’s an example. If we’re applying for a call center manager job and the job ad talks a lot about training staff and motivating staff, we’ve already got something to write about. Let’s do a bit of our own research to see how ‘our’ employer stacks up against its competitors. We can do a Google Blog search, and check Yahoo! message boards as well as visit Glassdoor.com to get the scoop on the company we’re targeting. We may learn that the company is number three in its market, and that turnover is high. Glassdoor users on the payroll say that the training in the call center is weak and motivation is low. That is business pain! If we’re up for the challenge of turning things around, we can write a pithy ain letter to the VP of Operations, a.k.a the hiring manager.

Here’s an example:

Dear Rodney,

I was struck by your observation in last month’s Call Center Manager magazine, “Capacity planning is the next frontier for savvy Call Center managers.” Given XYZ Inc.’s rapid growth and the spate of recent mergers among your competitors, I can just imagine the capacity-management issues you’re facing. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that customer experience, employee training and retention are also major issues on your 2010 agenda.

When I ran the call center at Charismatic Software, we launched an on-call system to allow off-the-clock agents to log on and take overflow calls as needed, keeping our hold times under two minutes and customer-sat ratings high. At the same job, I built an agent training system that gave more senior agents Mentor Points for working in groups or on-one-one with newer arrivals — and reduced turnover by twenty percent in one year.

I’d love to talk with you about XYZ’s call center opportunities when your schedule allows.

Yours,

Cassandra Martin

A good pain letter is conversational and direct, with no old-school flotsam like “I’m a results-oriented professional” but with at least one concrete, relevant story. Our job is to let the hiring manager that we can imagine the sort of dragon that’s flying around his castle walls this very minute – and that we’ve slain the exact same dragon before.

In A Job Search? Follow The Pain is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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3. Dealing With Job-Search Rejection

Of course they told you that! They are amoebae – it’s their job to make that speech. They have their priorities, and those priorities have everything to do with bureaucratic practices designed to keep job-seekers coloring inside the lines. Luckily, the hiring manager has other concerns. The hiring manager is the person we need to reach. The black hole and its amoeba tenders are not our friends.

The hiring manager has pain. If he or she did not have some kind of pain, there would be no job. Our job is to spot the pain, and address it in a pithy Pain Letter that will go with our resume directly to the hiring manager’s desk. If we can spot the pain and speak to it, we can get that hiring manager’s attention. Not every hiring manager has the budget to hire us, either as a W-2 employee or a consultant. Those opportunities, unfortunately, may be unavailable to us for financial reasons. But if the particular pain we solve is keeping the hiring manager awake at night, and driving him crazy by day, we may be able to convince that hiring manager to create a job opening where none existed, just yesterday. Thus, we can send a targeted Pain Letter to any decision-maker whose pain is likely to be related to our expertise. We don’t need to respond only to posted job openings. We can reach out to hiring managers who don’t have jobs posted, as well.

Here’s a Pain Letter story to illustrate the process…

Caroline had been a bookkeeper for ten years and the president of her homeowner’s association for five years when she began her job search. Caroline was based in Atlanta. We decided to build on her bookkeeping background and the valuable HOA stint by creating a property management resume and pursuing commercial property management jobs. Caroline hadn’t held a paid property management role at that point — and so what? We wrote the property management resume, emphasizing Caroline’s most relevant accomplishments. We made a list of commercial property owners who might need her help.  For each firm, we dug around to find the name of the most likely hiring manager. We didn’t bother looking at job ads. We knew that any job ads we might spot at these enormous national firms would only direct us into a deadly black hole. We found the head honcho’s name for each company, and wrote to him or her directly.

For one large firm, we couldn’t find the names of any Atlanta managers, but we could see the names and bios of each of the firm’s top execs, right on the organization’s website. We wrote a Pain Letter to the COO of the firm (using the logic that the COO is less likely than the CEO to have an admin standing by ready to toss all unsolicited correspondence) and sent it to him via snail mail with Caroline’s property management resume. About a week after that letter was mailed, Caroline got a phone call from the company’s regional VP in Atlanta.

“I’d like you to come for an interview,” he said, and off Caroline went. When she got to the interview, she saw her Pain Letter and resume, folded in thirds, sitting on the VP’s desk. The COO in New York must have shipped it off to the Atlanta fellow through the inter-office mail system. Caroline had her interview, and she got the offer. Until that moment, she hadn’t had one second of official property management experience. What got her over that substantial credentialing hump?

It was Caroline’s Pain Letter that did the trick. She didn’t write the typical boring, boilerplate cover letter to tell the COO and his VP all about her accomplishments. She figured that those guys get dozens of those letters every day. Instead, she wrote a letter that talked about them. She talked about the company’s news (she found it on their own website) and made an educated guess about their property management pain. It wasn’t hard to guess what that pain might be. Their company is growing, and commercial tenants are hard to find and keep. They’ve got to be kept happy, and a diligent property manager keeps tenants happy by working proactively to make sure their needs are met. A good property manager looks out over the horizon to stop any signs of trouble and stamp them out before they can do damage. Caroline talked about the business pain she imagined this company to have, and her own relevant (and specific!) experience slaying the very same dragon in other assignments. She sent her super-targeted Pain Letter along with her super-targeted resume directly to the guy with the pain, and wasted no time nor words talking about all the other fabulous, unrelated things she’s done.

There may well be a property management certification. Caroline doesn’t have that certification, if there is one. So what? She came prepared to talk about the issue at hand. She got the job, and here’s the best part: she had no competition, because there was no job posted. We can use Pain Letters and targeted resumes to reach decision-makers when there’s no job posted, and when there is one.

In my job search approach, the important points to remember are:

• Write to the decision-maker directly, not to the black hole address or to HR. Use LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and the employer’s own website to find that decision-maker.
• Write a Pain Letter that talks more about them than about you. Speak directly to the decision-making manager in a conversational tone. Make an educated guess about the business pain the employer is facing. (Next week in this space, we’ll share a Pain Letter example.)
• Use one concrete, highly relevant example to illustrate your past success solving a nearly identical variety of business pain — a la “I slew that same type of dragon last year in Romania.”
• Keep your Pain Letter short and simple. Don’t veer off into a litany of your skills and accolades. End with a simple call to action, e.g. “I’d love to talk when your schedule allows.”
• If you are writing a Pain Letter to a decision-maker in response to a posted job ad, remember to keep your focus on the pain — NOT on the list of requirements specified in the job ad. That list of requirements is trivial — the belief that you can solve the decision-maker’s pain is not.
• Send your Pain Letter with your highly-targeted resume (not the generic resume you send out in response to every job ad you see – you’re going to burn that thing and never, ever use it again). A snail mail letter to the decision-maker’s desk is the best choice if you can’t find a personal connection. If you can — via your 3-D network or LinkedIn – use that trusted-colleague avenue first, of course.

We cannot always locate ‘our’ hiring manager’s name. In an enormous organization like IBM, it may be nearly impossible to do that. For organizations of about 10,000 employees and fewer, we have a decent chance of locating ‘our’ decision-maker, and for organizations of 1,000 employees and fewer, it should be a slam-dunk exercise that takes about five minutes. More on that topic — finding the decision-maker — along with a sample Pain Letter in next week’s blog post. The big message for this week: no more resumes wasted in the black hole!

How To Circumvent The Resume Black Hole is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Arrogance of Talent Supply Threatens To Continue Resume Black Hole
2. Live Chat: Getting Your Resume Past The Black Hole
3. In A Job Search? Follow The Pain

Speaking topics range from “Innovate or Perish! 10 Tips to Improve Your HR Processes” to “The Future of Online Recruiting: Why Job Boards and Facebook Are Only Gateways to What Is Ahead.” Are you at SHRM 2009? Tell us how it’s going and what some of the important takeaways are for HR professionals in these next few months and years.

If you’re not at SHRM’s annual conference this year, here are some highlights from Twitter that show what’s catching the interest of conference attendees:

@recruiterdude says “complacency is the exact opposite of urgency” quoting this morning’s Keynote speaker John Kotter, a Harvard Business School Professor widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on leadership and change.

A tweet from loismelbourne also comments on Kotter’s keynote: “#SHRM09 Kotter – bad times do not create urgency.”

Lisalotzer reiterates Kotter’s list of priorities HR should focus on “1-increase urgency, 2-build team, 3-get vision right, 4-communicate for buy-in”

Knessing writes: “Be bold, be brave, etc. say presenters. Agreed! But most companies won’t hire HR people with new ideas. They prefer sheep. #SHRM09″

Want to hear more about what’s happening at SHRM this year? Follow the conference on Twitter #shrm09.

SHRM Annual Conference Evaluates HR in Changing Economy is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Glassdoor’s Heading To SHRM 2011; Come Stop By Booth #1267
2. #SHRM2010 – A Whirlwind Of A Success
3. College Career Services Connect on Twitter and in person with HR/Staffing Professionals