When you decide to enter any contest, first you must find out how the game is played. What are the rules? How are winners selected? If you are not prepared, answering ads is like playing long shots at a race track where the odds are overwhelmingly against you. Those odds can be improved dramatically if you understand the rules.
In this article, the focus is on those advertisements which announce positions for managers, executives and professionals. Help Wanted ads for lower level positions, such as those that appear in classified sections of your newspapers are not of present concern.
A typical display ad for executives is usually two columns wide and two or three inches deep. These ads appear in the business sections of major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the best days to find job opportunities in the Journal. In city papers, the Sunday financial sections carry the largest selection of advertised openings. Newspapers also run many such display ads for managers in their Sunday Classified sections.
Some ads for executive positions may only elicit fifty responses, while others may receive 800 replies or more. The number of responses will depend on the nature of the job, the current economic situation and the number of job seekers competing for jobs in the category advertised. This discussion will assume that an ad for an executive job will receive about 300 responses, which represents the average situation.
After those 300 replies have been subjected to a weeding-out process five to ten respondents will probably be called in for job interviews. This means there are at least 290 immediate losers. And, of those five to ten interviewed, only one will get the job. These are lousy odds. This article will help you improve your odds when responding to an ad for a management position.
Blind Ads
Blind ads are those in which the company placing the ad does not disclose its identity. The job hunter is asked to reply to a box number, which may be a Post Office box or a box number provided by the newspaper. According to some authors, one way to improve your odds is to ignore all "blind ads." These authors suggest many blind ads are phonies, placed by executive recruiters trying to attract names in order to build up their files, or perhaps by real estate agents trying to identify executives who may be putting up their homes for sale.
This is nonsense! There may indeed be a phony ad here or there, but probably fewer than one-half of one percent of blind ads is phony. Most of these ads are genuine, simply because of the costs involved. But, suppose an occasional ad is a phony and was placed by some executive recruiter trying to build up his file of prospects--what is wrong with getting into his files? The more people who know of your availability, the better for you.
Display ads in major print media are too expensive to be phony. A full page of job ads in the Los Angeles Times or The Wall Street Journal represents ads costing a total of more than $30,000. That ad you are answering will have cost the advertiser between $1,200 and $2,500, so you must assume it is a serious effort to find a person to fill a position.
There are valid reasons why legitimate employers run blind ads. The employer often has several reasons for preferring anonymity. One good reason is to eliminate the need to respond to rejected job applicants with one of those form letters that gets you all excited, congratulates you on your fantastic qualifications, and promises to keep your letter on file.
If employers identify themselves and don't send out these letters, they can be subjected to the harassment of unwanted follow-up telephone calls or aggressive job hunters who show up at the front door, hoping to break through to a decision maker.
Consider major employers who run hundreds of ads each year. If their ads show the company name they have to send out thousands of acknowledgment letters at the considerable expense of postage, typing and stationery.
Another advantage of the blind ad is that employers can keep competitors, lenders and clients from knowing they are looking for a new financial officer, or marketing manager. This kind of information might reveal a management weakness. For this reason blind ads often conceal the best employment opportunities for higher level positions or sensitive jobs best kept confidential.
Keeping the same information away from the company's own employees helps keep rumors from circulating. If a company is running an ad for a new Controller, as soon as employees in the financial department find out, there will be gossip and worry about how the change will affect them. The blind ad reduces that problem.
One more bit of information regarding blind ads might prove valuable. If the box number is provided by the newspaper, there isn't anything you can do to penetrate the advertiser's veil of anonymity. However, if the ad provides a U.S. Postal box number, under the "freedom of information laws" it is possible to identify the advertiser. Do the following:
- Call the information section of the main Post Office of the city mentioned for the P.O. Box listed.
- On the phone say: "May I please have the business phone of P.O.Box?"
- If there is resistance, say: "Under section 352.44 of your Administrative Support Manual it says that the address and name of the advertisers must be revealed if they are doing business with the public. I want to know who ran the ad before I do business with them. May I have the information, please?"
- If they still refuse to provide the information, ask for the Supervisor and repeat point 2 (and point 3, if necessary).
If blind ads are so advantageous to the employer, why do about two-thirds of all ads carry the employers' names? One obvious reason is that companies have pride and believe their names will attract a better caliber job applicant.
Another reason ads show the name of the employer is that employment ads are a form of institutional advertising. Job hunters are also consumers. If you have seen impressive job ads run by a computer manufacturer, subsequently, when you are in the market for a computer, the company's name might stick in your mind and influence your purchase.
Finally, the person in charge of the Human Resources Department has an ego. He feels important when the ad shows the name of the company and underneath says: "Address replies to Peter McGhee, Director of Human Resources." When McGhee is doing his own job hunting, a portfolio containing these ads will reinforce his presentation.
For you, the job hunter, an open ad provides knowledge you might be able to use to your advantage. If a company has advertised for a marketing position meeting your qualifications and experience, you should answer the ad, of course. But, in addition, you might want to write a Broadcast Letter to the Marketing Vice President pretending you haven't seen the ad. The VP knows of the search in progress, so if your letter makes a good impression on him, he may send it on to the proper party with the suggestion you will be called in for an interview.
Also, now that you know of a specific opening of great interest to you, make a few phone calls and see if you can't find one of your acquaintances who knows someone within the company running the ad. This would be a situation ripe for a Networking approach. You might be able to set up a Networking meeting with a decision maker who might be predisposed to have interest in someone with your background.
To sum up: answer any ad you feel pertains to you, whether it is blind or open. Don't close off any of your options.
When to Answer
How prompt should you be with your response? There is an "Early Bird" school of thought which says: "Answer immediately and get there ahead of the crowd. The early bird gets the worm." These people run out Saturday night, buy the Sunday newspaper, go through the ads, type out their replies and drop them off at the post office on Sunday. There are also near-early birds who wait until the weekend activities are over, and then devote their energies to answering any pertinent Sunday ads before night falls on Monday.
At the other extreme, you have the "Avoid the Crowd" school of thought. Let that first deluge of replies flood in, and then, ten days later, their letter arrives all by itself. Isn't it much more likely to catch someone's attention?
Both of these schools of thought fail to take into account a primary consideration in the job ad contest: How are responses to job advertisements actually handled?
For example, a company advertises in the Sunday paper for a Production Manager and a total of 300 job hunters eventually respond. Following is a typical scatter pattern showing when responses are mailed and, assuming two-day mail delivery as an average, when they are received. Remember, many blind ads go to a box number and are then forwarded to the advertiser.
What happens Tuesday or Wednesday when those early responses arrive? The answer is: Nothing. That is right, nothing happens. Maybe somebody opens the envelope and flattens out the letters and resumes. Why does nothing happen? Most advertisers have run hundreds of ads over the years. They know the response pattern. Why would employers be interested in working on a pile of 30 or 60 or even 100 replies when they know these are only forerunners of a much larger pile which will arrive in the next few days?
So nothing happens the first few days after an ad appears. Nothing happens until the advertisers believe they are holding about 90 percent of the responses that will ultimately arrive. When will they start to do something? It will depend on the company's urgency to fill the position and, for most executive jobs advertised in newspapers, there is no great urgency. Had there been an urgent need to fill the position, the company would have taken other action rather than advertising. They might have given the assignment to an executive recruiter or they might have pursued a direct search of their own through their network of acquaintances, suppliers, customers and consultants.
Sometimes an ad will give a telephone number and invite applicants to phone for an appointment. That kind of invitation suggests urgency. So, if you are interested, call at once. But for most ads running, for instance, on Sunday, January thirteenth, they are probably looking for someone to come on board around March first.
It is recommended you get your letter in the mail sometime during the week following the ad's appearance. There is no point in rushing as you are not going to win any special prizes because you respond hastily. On the other hand, if you wait too long to reply, your response will usually arrive too late to be given consideration. By the time your answer is received, the selection for candidates to be interviewed will already have been made. What really counts is the quality of your reply, not the timing.
