A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IS INCONSISTENT ■ 93
If no resume, what then? In most cases what you want to send to anyone
is a sales letter focused not on everything you’ve done, but on those specific
things which support the particular job you are seeking. I tried this myself
the first time I sought a job. I mailed out an equal number of resumes and
an equal number of sales letters. The sales letters did far better in getting
interviews, and <strong>with</strong>out interviews there are no job offers.
With the Internet and all the job sites available, you may think that
these problems are solved. They are not. I recently visited an old friend.
He was president of the executive recruiting firm where I worked for six
months thirty years ago. We’ve remained friends all these years.
I gave his recruiters a presentation on “Gaining Power and Influence”
in exchange for their updating me on the latest Internet techniques used
by headhunters. I asked if they used the Internet to find candidates. The
answer may surprise you. They said generally not. To illustrate the problem,
one recruiter told me this story:
“I usually go to the job sites to locate companies and then contact
them to get a job order so that I can submit my own candidates. I almost
never use the posted resumes,” the recruiter said. “However, a couple
months ago, I saw a resume that was almost too good to be true and perfectly
fit an ongoing search I had. So I contacted the individual. He told
me that he hadn’t authorized any other headhunter to submit his name to
a company. With this reassurance, I called my client, who asked the name
of the individual. When I told him, he responded that I was about the
tenth recruiter to contact him about this candidate that week. Many had
even submitted this resume <strong>with</strong>out calling. He told me what I already
knew: ‘If he’s that desperate that everyone has his resume, he can’t be of
the level of individual I am looking for.’ It was personally embarrassing,”
the recruiter said, “but I believe the candidate told me the truth. The
problem is that unless the job sought is pretty low level, putting your
resume on the ‘Net’ is not a good idea.”
Limitations to the resume are also true in responding to an advertisement
for a job, even if a resume is demanded. Don’t send it. Why?
Because some really great jobs pull in hundreds of resumes. So the first
thing that happens is that someone in human resources screens them
against a list of requirements. When there are hundreds of resumes to go
through, many get eliminated unfairly when it is not easy to determine if
a particular requirement is met or not. My advice is that if you are
responding to an advertisement for a position, prepare a sales letter that