If you read job ads, you'll see that employers have become very unrealistic in listing the qualifications they want in their new hires.
Reading job ads, you wouldn't think you're qualified to do anything, even if you've had a stellar career. Job ads are delusional. They want the sun, the moon and the stars.
We can understand why a department manager with one precious job opening to fill might go a little crazy and behave like a kid in a candy store as he or she writes a job spec. Part of the job of an HR person is to bring the department manager back down to reality.
I read job ads, and they are ridiculous. Employers don't know that they're driving talented people away with their overloaded job ads.
Who wants to take the time to apply for a job only to be told you're not qualified because you only have six years of experience with some obscure software application or tool, instead of seven years?
You can get a good job without having most of the qualifications listed in the job ad.
To get a job you're not qualified for (on paper -- of course you are qualified) you have to ignore the job ad and reach your hiring manager directly.
You have to ignore the instructions in the job ad that tell you to apply for the job online via the company's recruiting portal.
That is a losing move. You're likely never to hear back from the employer if you fill out its online application form.
You don't have to do that. You can find out who your hiring manager is.
Your hiring manager is the person who will be your boss in your new job. He or she is the department manager for the department you want to join.
Here's how to find your hiring manager's name using LinkedIn.
Once you have your hiring manager's name, the rest of the process is easy. You can find the mailing address for the company on its own website. You're going to write an old-fashioned letter and send it to your hiring manager in the mail. That will get his or her attention more than an email message will.
You're going to write a letter to your hiring manager, but it won't be a cover letter. It will be a different kind of outreach letter, called a Pain Letter. You can read about Pain Letters here.
A Pain Letter doesn't talk much about you. It talks about something your hiring manager is more interested in than that -- it talks about your hiring manager and his or her business problem, instead! That's why it's called a Pain Letter.
Every manager has pain, or they wouldn't hire anyone. The only reason anybody hires people to help him or her is that they have problems they can't solve without getting more hands on deck.
Your Pain Letter will address your manager's Business Pain head-on. That's how you will get an interview with your manager even when you might only have thirty percent of the goofy, made-up qualifications listed in the job ad.
When you stick with the topic of your manager's Business Pain and forget about trying to prove that you're worthy of consideration for the job, the dynamic in your job search changes.
Now you have something very valuable to bring employers.
Corey wrote his first Pain Letter two months ago. "I had already applied twice through the company's website and I hadn't heard anything back," he said. "I figured I had nothing to lose, so I sent a Pain Letter to the VP of Operations, Jill."
Corey is a Buyer/Planner.
Corey's Pain Letter to Jill read like this:
Dear Jill,
Congratulations on the incredible jump from 16th place to third place in Reseller Times' 2016 listing of top telecom resellers! That's an incredible accomplishment.
I can only imagine that your growing business must run into raw-materials issues at times. Having been a Buyer/Planner at Awesome Devices during its rise from $4M to $32M in sales I know how fast and nimble raw-materials supply chains have to be to keep up with customer demand and avoid wasted production time.
If you have a minute to talk, I'd love to hear about your Procurement and Supply Chain plans for 2016 and share a bit of my background with you.
All the best,
Corey Espinoza
Jill took a week to call Corey back, because she is swamped. When she did, she and Corey had a fantastic talk. "Totally different from any job interview I've ever had," Corey told us.
"I set the stage for my conversation with Jill through my Pain Letter, because I didn't approach her like a typical on-his-knees job seeker. I said 'Maybe you have this problem that I know how to solve.' I didn't know for sure, of course. What did it hurt me to try?"
Corey got hired in Jill's department three weeks after he mailed his first Pain Letter. He sent his Pain Letter to Jill in an 8.5 x 11-inch envelope. He stapled his Pain Letter to his Human-Voiced Resume before slipping both documents into the envelope and sticking a stamp on it. Easy peasy!
Jill never asked Corey about how well his background matched the delusional job spec she had written and had given to HR to publish. After he got the job, Corey told us "I might have fifty percent of the requirements the company was supposedly looking for, but I'm perfectly suited to the job."
Corey's application would have been tossed out of the pipeline in two seconds if he had applied for his job the traditional way. In fact, that's probably what happened to the two online applications Corey had submitted before he stepped out and sent his Pain Letter to Jill's desk, through the mail.
"When I was in Jill's office, I saw a stack of resumes on top of her filing cabinet," said Corey. "I'm pretty sure that two of my resumes are in that pile somewhere. Seeing that eight-inch-high pile of paper stacked on the filing cabinet really brought it home to me -- I can't afford to take my chances with the Black Hole recruiting system, ever again."
It's a new day. Old processes are showing their inability to keep up with the changing talent marketplace. Managers like Jill have real problems and very little time to solve them before their businesses feel the sting. You can take a chance and step out of the traditional job-search box the same way Corey did.
It will cost you fifty cents to step out of that box. Are you ready to make that investment, and take charge of your job search?
