Success tips for using email and voicemail to get hired

By Neil Patrick

When we're job hunting and never hear back from a company we've approached by email or voicemail, it's tempting to give up and move on to the next prospect.

It's natural to conclude, either:

1. They’re not interested OR 

2. I messed up what I said OR

3. I won’t call again because I don’t want to be a pest

This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Your email or telephone message might be to you the most important thing you did that day. But the truth is, it’s rarely the same priority for the recipient.

The reason you don’t get called back is usually that people are just too busy. If for any reason you don’t make it into their dozen or so must do tasks for the day, you’ll end up ignored, deleted and forgotten.

Getting a job is a sales and marketing job. Not a mechanical process. And therefore you need to think like a sales person not an engineer.

For many years I worked in direct marketing. Some people would call it junk mail. And I was pretty successful. I ran hundreds of campaigns and spent millions of pounds and my bosses were really happy with the massive growth in new business this generated.

You might think that to be a junk mail maestro means you have to employ all sorts of trickery and special methods. Well, it was a rigorous process of selecting the right people for the right offer, creating a great sales message, designing mail packs which were cost efficient and ensuring the customer inquiries were well looked after by the operational teams.

But here’s the thing. This great success was based on about a 1% response rate. Put another way, for every 100 letters we sent, 99 were ignored. But the 1% that were interested more than covered the costs of sending out the other 99. In fact, they made huge profits for the business.

And job hunting is no different. You have to work the numbers, not worry about the fact that not everyone will be interested or respond. They never will.

And as Jill Konrath explains here, you should never assume that no reply means you shouldn’t go back again…quite the opposite in fact as you’ll discover in this clip: