Using personal sales letters is the best and fastest method of generating interviews that lead to job offers for great jobs. Job hunters have proven this over and over on the firing line. For this reason, I urge you to emphasize this method above all others in your campaign. A personal sales letter is one or two-pages long and addressed right to your PE by name. It describes your outstanding accomplishments by quantifying them in such a way that the PE is convinced you are an exceptional candidate for the job. In this chapter I will show you how to write and package your accomplishments for maximum impact. I promise you that the results of mailing personal sales letters will amaze you; you will be invited in for interviews regardless of the present state of the economy and regardless of your past lack of success in generating interviews. There are several advantages in using sales letters for getting interviews. The quality of interview derived from a personal sales letter is higher than that derived from any other source, including answering advertisements, friends, personnel agencies, and the telephone. This means a higher offer-to-interview ratio and less wasted time. Personal sales letters generate also more predictable results than other methods of gaining interviews. You will be able to predict roughly how many interviews you will receive for each batch of sales letters you send out. I will discuss this in more detail later.
When you send out personal sales letters, you will have little competition for interviews and little or no competition for the possible job offer. If you respond to an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal or a large city newspaper, you may be competing with 500 or more job hunters for the same position. When you send a personal sales letter, the position may not even be advertised, the company's personnel or human resources department may not have been notified, and you may be the only candidate for the job. Imagine presenting your superior qualifications to the hiring executive under these circumstances! In a personal sales letter you can tailor your experience and accomplishments to the exact specifications (function, level, type of company) of the job you are seeking. When you tailor your response to an advertisement, you are trying to fit someone else's requirements. In the personal sales letter you write to fill your requirements.
Using sales letters instead of sending resumes also lets you avoid the problem of "knockout factors." I learned about knockout factors when I was a headhunter. These are factors established by the PE that will prevent you from getting the interview. In other words, if you have one of these factors in your background, you will never be invited for an interview. Further, these factors are frequently foolish and capricious, and they rarely have anything to do with your ability to do the job. They range from the worst of bigotry to such trivia as the geographical region in which you have worked. To make matters more complicated, you will have no idea what the knockout factors might be in any given job situation. And some factors you may consider a plus may actually be knock-out factors for some jobs. That's usually what has happened when someone is told that he or she is "over-qualified." I have never seen a resume that didn't have at least one or two knockout factors for specific job openings.
But the funny thing about knockout factors is that if you do get the interview, they no longer matter. The reason for this is strictly psychological. No matter how adamant a PE may be about not seeing a candidate with one knockout factor or another, if he does so anyway, a powerful force takes over: personal like or dislike. The bottom line is that if you have the qualifications and the PE likes you, you will be hired, knockout factor or no. This gets us back to the sales letter. It concentrates on presenting your resources in a brief and forceful manner against a single job objective. Its brevity greatly reduces the chances for some factor - one you may even consider favorable - eliminating you prior to the interview.
Let me give you an example of the effectiveness of sales letters. Jim B. had no experience in job hunting. He had been with the same company for 14 years when he suddenly found himself out of a job. Jim mailed out 1,000 sales letters. Within six weeks he had five firm job offers, all of them at a considerable increase in salary. Even though Jim was out of work, and even though he had not been a supervisor under his former employer, he sought a job only at the supervisory level. All the job offers he received were in this category. Jim accepted the best of the offers. For a month afterward he had to turn down requests for additional interviews.
Why Personal Sales Letters Are So Successful
Obviously, your PE is not sitting and waiting for your personal sales letter to arrive why, then, is this technique so successful. At any given time a certain percentage of executives with hiring authority will have personnel needs that must be fulfilled. They may have just begun to think about the problem or may even have extended someone an offer and be awaiting acceptance. It may be a president thinking about replacing a functional vice president, a sales manager recognizing the need for additional salespeople, an operations officer whose production manager has just given two weeks notice, or a chairman of the board who recognizes that a president will retire imminently because of poor health.
So the recipients of your personal sales letter have their own problems. It is the exact opposite of yours. They may or may not have begun to work on the solution to their problems. A certain percentage of them will need someone with the skills and experience you possess. The success of your personal sales letter stems from the fact that the product you describe yourself fills a definite need at this particular time. Of course, the higher the level of position you are seeking, the fewer positions will be open to you. A company may need many engineers but only one vice president of engineering. However, if you contact enough PEs, some will have openings at your level. In many cases you will have very little or no competition at all, since your PE may not yet have started a search.
