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 Enclosed:
attached." often this is the entire subject and content of
mail I receive. I can see from a cursory glance that there's an
attachment to the mail, and also that the attachment is a resumé.
Ninety five times out of 100, the headless,
body-less missive goes straight into a folder that I'll never see
again. Then there are always a couple of job-seeking mail that raise
the hackles of my anti-virus program. I can spend the time to carefully
disinfect them, but I confess I don't bother. "Delete"
is what happens.
Which leaves just a couple of times out of
hundred that I actually open and read one of these mails. I look
at the attachment. And start wading through name, father's name,
age, sex, residential address, passport number, details of schooling,
the fact that the person in question got 67.3 per cent in Class
10 in CBSE.... And as my mind starts fading, it's poof! off into
The Folder Of Never To Be Seen Again.
I hope I don't sound arrogant here. It's not
that I'm a potential employer with hundreds of positions on offer
(note to job-seekers: I'm not). But I've seen the same kind of resignation
from others whose mailboxes are flooded with the seasonal resumé
deluge. And I get a parallel sense of frustration from job-seekers
who say nobody replies to their mail.
Perhaps a few pointers here could reduce the
frustration levels on both sides-and, who knows, result in more
positions being filled.
An empty vessel makes no noise. You've spent
a lot of time carefully crafting your c.v. And then you simply attach
it to an email (often, visibly sent to hundreds of people), press
'send', and then lean back, waiting for an appointment letter by
return mail. Let me ask you this-how many times have you received
an empty container of an email with no subject, no body, but just
an attachment, from someone you don't know, that's been mass-mailed
to others too and then bothered to open the darn thing? There's
a reason for a subject line in an email. Come on, capture my imagination
here.
We judge mail by the cover. Take the time and
write the 'cover letter'. In electronic form, often that's the only
thing that's read. I'd venture further to say a good cover letter
needn't be accompanied by a resumé-that can always follow
later, if needed.
Time for 1-on-1 marketing. "Your esteemed
organisation... blah blah... leadership... yada yada... career growth
blah blah..." Again, if you can't write a letter to me, and
just me, for something ostensibly as important as a job, then why
are you bothering at all? I can see that you've carefully written
the mail for me and a thousand other people. If you learn a little
about the people you are applying to, what they do, what you can
do for them, there's a far greater chance that your mail will even
be looked at. I think you'll get more out of 20 well-researched,
well-written job applications than from 20,000 mass-mailed robotic
CV's.
Research and develop your job search. You may
be willing to settle for a job, anything on offer. At least appear
to be selective. Do your research about the industry you want to
be in, the position you want to be at, the things you'd like to
be doing. The business your target company is in. How, specifically
you can be of use to them.
Go on, go to their website, pull up news articles
about them, go to "About us" and find out the people in
the company. Call the front desk and ask who the CEO and top-rung
people are. You'll be surprised how often you can actually get their
email addresses from their websites or assistants-and believe me
that's far more efficient than sending mail to a jobs@xyz.com address.
Ignore the normal channels. I'll get into eternal
flak from the hr people for this. There are the resume-filtering
companies who invite a million applications into a huge hopper and
then sniff out key personality traits like COM, DCOM, CORBA and
C++. In those cases, your humble submission needs to go into the
cement mixer too.
I'll let you in on a little secret. In any
business, there are at least five times as many vacancies as are
advertised. Look for a job, not from the list of who is advertising
for people, but from the list of firms you'd like to work for. And
then start there at the top. Get to talk to, meet, or write the
CEO-and then go to the hr person if that's where you're asked to
go. But this time with a difference-the CEO's asked you to meet
them.
More in my next column.
Mahesh Murthy, an angel investor, heads
Passionfund. He earlier ran Channel V and, before that, helped launch
Yahoo! and Amazon at a Valley-based interactive marketing firm.
Reach him at Mahesh@passionfund.com.
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