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:

What to say to employers to get hired into the hidden jobs market

By Neil Patrick

If you are looking for a job, how many times have you called a company to ask if they have any job openings and the response has been something like, ‘Not right now, but please send us your resume and we’ll keep it on file and let you know if something comes up’?

I don’t think I can say it’s never happened, but I have never heard of anyone being called back after their resume has been sent in to a firm and put ‘on file’.

It might as well be filed in the bin. Sometimes, I am sure it is.

To avoid this happening to you, you need totally different tactics.

As I talked about in this post here on the hidden job market, the secret is not to ask people if they have any job vacancies. It’s to become a detective and use research to discover firms that have a problem that you can help them solve.

As with so many aspects of successful job searching, the key to your success is in working smarter, not harder. And thinking of yourself not as a job seeker, but a solution to other people’s problems. Find the problems and you’re half way there.

If you want to know how you can do this, how to find the right organisations to approach and exactly what to say to them, this great clip from sales expert Jill Konrath, spells it all out for you.

How a blog will explode your work opportunities

By Neil Patrick

If you are looking for work, or wish to boost your profile, you may have seriously underestimated the value of having a blog. Or you may have thought it is too difficult without technical skills. Or it’s too time consuming. Or any other excuse.

Well, don’t debate it, don’t think about it, just do it!

It’s quite possibly the best investment in your professional prospects you’ll ever make.

How long do you spend currently online each day? And wouldn’t an hour or two a day of that time be a better investment if it boosted your personal profile in your area of expertise and show cased your knowledge and professionalism to the people YOU need to influence?

And it’s much, much easier than you’d ever believe. What’s more, one of the most common reasons recruiters and hiring companies discriminate against older workers is that they believe that older professionals don’t have up to date IT and digital media skills. Doing this destroys that prejudice at a single stroke!

So don’t wait or even think about it too much.

Just do it.

You’ll boost your profile, showcase your talent AND prove not only that you are technically savvy, but also that you know how to take the initiative.

Oh, and if that’s not enough, you’ll learn a heap of valuable new things and grow your contact network too!

Here’s Jill Konrath, who spells these points out brilliantly as usual. Everything you need to understand about why and what you should do to set up your blog is here...not all the little details granted, but all the vital fundamentals to get you started are covered in less than 10 minutes!

This really is all you need to know to get started and to start building your online asset base.

Oh and if you want me to help you with my own tips and experience about this topic, just let me know!

Why it’s good to be promiscuous

By Neil Patrick

Last week I sent out a link to my LinkedIn profile via Twitter. It was accompanied with an open invitation to connect for anyone who wished to.

I had an unexpected reply tweet.

The exact words escape me now, but the essence was ‘ Why do this…surely you don’t want to connect with just anyone?’

My reply was unequivocal. Sure I do. Why would I not? I can always say 'No' (but I rarely do).

I had a similar conversation with a professional friend a couple of weeks ago. He has been a (very) late comer to Linkedin and only has about a dozen connections. He recognises the importance of building his network, but he was paranoid that if any of his connections were with anyone that wasn’t an absolute superstar, this might harm his reputation. But of course the people he wanted to connect with that didn’t know him or have any connection with him would be unlikely to accept an invitation from a stranger with only a dozen connections.

Catch 22.

Now if I think for a moment about all the work I am engaged on right now, I have about half a dozen professional projects on the go. How did these come to be? Well every single one bar just one, came about from relationships I have developed with other professionals through social media. That’s right about 83% of them.

And did I carefully target these people? Nope. They came about naturally through them choosing to work with me because they felt I was the right person that could help them out. And they made this choice of their own free will, not because I had targeted them as a ‘prospect’.

Sure I have had plenty of other approaches which I have turned down, but not because they were necessarily a waste of my time or unattractive, more because I have to prioritise and I’m in the fortunate position of being able to choose which proposals I take up and which I politely turn down.

But I have absolutely no way of knowing which connections I make through social media will turn into business relationships and which will not. And more importantly, if I wasted my time trying to second guess this, I suspect I’d nearly always get it wrong.

So I network freely and openly. And despite this ‘promiscuity’ I have not once had a problem with any of my social media connections.

Quite the contrary in fact. I am constantly amazed and humbled at how many people in my network help me out of sheer kindness and generosity of spirit.

All this social media interaction drives more attention. It’s like power to an electronic magnet. The more power, the stronger the attraction field becomes.

Exactly the same principles apply when you are looking to find a new job. If your attraction field is weak, you’ll get found by fewer prospective opportunities.

This principal and much more which it seems is counter-instinctive to many professional people is talked about here by the ever excellent Jill Konrath, who it seems is just as promiscuous as I am!

Redesign your value proposition to become the must-hire candidate

By Neil Patrick

One of the things many people overlook in their job hunting process, is to properly understand and develop their unique value proposition.

Too many people simply think of themselves as an accountant, or a teacher, or a janitor or whatever. This isn’t who you are. You know it and I know it. And critically, this doesn’t represent the unique value that you can add to your next employer.

You are much more than that and this fact has far more value than you might imagine.

One thing you can be sure about every other candidate who is going for the job you want, is that EVERY one of them will have a career history in the same area of work you are in. And the chances are that every one of them will be going to great lengths to explain to the interviewer why this job history makes them the ideal candidate.

Do not fall into the trap of simply doing the same thing.

What are the odds of you standing out as the must-hire candidate, when all you are doing is presenting your job role based competencies? I don’t have to tell you how competitive the jobs market is right now. You have to do more than ever before to stand out.

And that means having the best sales pitch of any of the candidates.

But being good at selling yourself is something that  a lot of people misunderstand. Others are simply uncomfortable with the idea of selling themselves, because of this misunderstanding. It’s not about having some super slick patter, or bragging. It’s about demonstrating you have more qualities to offer than the other candidates and that those qualities will add real value to the employer.

This point is critical because the fact that you have been given an interview, means that on paper, the employer thinks you MAY have what they are looking for. Your task now is to prove to them you have MORE to offer than any of the other candidates.

Get this value add into your proposition and you’ll become so much more than just what’s on your resume. You’ll become the must-hire candidate.

So how can you do this? Once again, I am happy to share Jill Konrath’s excellent tips for doing exactly this in this short video.