In your role as salesperson you will use various techniques and persuasion to get your foot in that back door to arrange an interview, slant that interview in your favor, and finally outmaneuver your competition for that job.
The back door of the company opens directly into the office of a supervisor of an open job or of a department that could make use of your Special Ingredient. Unfortunately, the typical job hunter enters the front door of a company which opens into the personnel department. As stated earlier, this is the worst place to start looking for a job since the primary purpose of the personnel department is to reject people. The more candid personnel managers admit that fact. They will also admit that this rejection will be based on a subjective interpretation of the applicant's resume or application, and that the supervisors equally subjective hiring decision will be based largely on "gut feel" rather than on the job hunters resume. Therefore, as the more candid personnel managers also will admit, the personnel department and the supervisor will not always agree on whom to hire and whom to reject. However, it is the supervisor s decision that is important and not that of the personnel department.
I learn and realm the truth of those last two statements every day in recruiting. When I was a beginning headhunter and still naive, I was trying to find a job for a young geologist who had only two years of experience. I determined in my mind the proper company to approach on his behalf. Foolishly, I presented the geologist to the personnel manager who quickly rejected him because of lack of experience. Shortly thereafter, I became discouraged and let the matter drop. Two months later I learned that the geologist was working for that same company because he had had the intelligence and guts to contact, on his own, the chief geologist of the company.
On another occasion, the personnel manager of a different company called me and asked me to find him a person who specialized in negotiating oil leases. I found him such a person and arranged an interview. The personnel manager was very impressed with the candidate and recommended that the supervisor talk with him. The supervisor said he was not interested because the candidate's resume which was shown to him by the personnel manager, was weak. The personnel manager told me to give up on the candidate. However, I then arranged to have the candidate call the supervisor directly to amplify his experience and ask for an interview. Within a week, the candidate was working for that supervisor.
Recently a personnel administrator with yet another company confessed to me that he did not understand the hiring process of his own company. He stated that his company was rejecting better candidates than it was hiring. The applicants being rejected were sending resumes to the personal department, which referred the resumes to the proper managers who returned them without expressing interest. The applicants being hired, he said, had lesser qualifications but were making direct contact with the managers. The only explanation offered by the managers when asked why they were hiring less qualified applicants was that they liked the person.
What these examples mean to the average job hunter is very important. The hiring process is not always logical. The decision ultimately is based on the subjective personal chemistry between the individual and the potential supervisor. Since the supervisor is the real hiring authority, personal contact with him or her is more effective than contact in any form with the personnel department.
Therefore, the guidelines for job hunting are obvious:
- Do not rely on your resume.
- Do not rely on the personnel department.
- Do rely on personal contact with the supervisor of the open job.
An added benefit of this process is that the nature and level of your contacts may result in a job being created to utilize the talents of a person with your initiative. Good jobs are often created for good people, especial at the senior levels where up to one-third of new hires are for newly created slots. The chief asset of any company is the quality of its people. Therefore, any good manager will make room for a talented person, whether or not there is a specific opening, even if a manager has to manufacture a fresh position requirement or must get rid of someone else to do it.
