Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

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You have a marketing problem, and you're not going to solve it by doing what you've been doing. dmcmullin gave you good advice: Stop selling your resume to people and start looking for a way to solve their problems.

Instead of blanketing the market with an advertisement that says "I'm looking for work. Please hire me ... " start saying "I understand your problem and I can solve it." You'll have to do a lot of up-front research to understand the specific problems of each company, but it's the only way you'll get what you want.

Narrow your focus to just a few companies who really need what you do best. Concentrate on them. And plan your marketing strategy carefully. Don't be in a hurry to get your name in front of them. Better to be successful with one company after 6 weeks than unsuccessful with a different company every week for 6 weeks.

Good luck.

You can check out The Potato Chip Difference at www.potatochipdifference.com .

mgoodman:

If I am understanding you correctly, your advice is to figure out which companies I would like to work for, do research on those companies, and figure out what their marketing problems are. Then once I have done that, THEN approach them with a solution to their marketing problem, that I can provide for them.

In theory, that sounds like a good idea. However, I am skeptical that most companies would have such easy access to their internal information that anyone would internet access could figure out what their marketing problems were. Because if I could figure it out, so could their competitors.

Or maybe I am misinterpretting your response?

What Michael and the rest of us are saying is that:
1. Pick the companies for which you believe can benefit most from your skills.
2. Research them and based on you experience, figure out what their marketing issues might be.
3. When you feel you have the problems and solutions, then begin to find people who know people who are "in" with the target companies...NETWORK.
4. Begin a dialog with them and get them to talk about their problems.
5. Discuss with them your specific experiences where you solved similar problems as theirs. DON'T give them your answers - if you do this, they have no reason to hire you! Discuss the process you went through in solving similar problems for other companies and give them the results you achieved.

Hope this clarifies the process.

Wayde

Ok so if I am following you.....

1 - Make an educated guess at which companies I could help the most

2 - Research them and try to figure out what their marketing problems are. Again I think getting the information necessary to find this would be far more difficult than you present it to be, but let's assume it can be found with a bit of hunting.

3 - After I get a list of companies that I think I can help, then I try to find a contact(s) at these companies.

4 - Get to know them to the point where they are willing to confide in me what their marketing problems are.

5 - Once they tell me what their problems are, tell them about how I solved a similar problem, and I am assuming this will impress them enough for them to contact someone at their company who will recommend hiring me?


I'm not sure I'm seeing how this would work. Can you give me an example from your working history where you employed these methods to land a job?

Actually I may be getting a bit off track here. The advice I am getting about researching companies and their potential marketing problems is something I will definitely look into.

However, the reason why I posted this question was because of my extremely low callback rate to jobs I apply for. I understand that when you apply for jobs on job boards you are competing with many more applicants. But in over 2 years of actively seeking a job in marketing management, I have received I would guess around 20 callbacks tops. And in that time I have easily applied for hundreds of positions, if not thousands, all over the southeast. Unfortunately, I haven't even received enough callbacks to note any trends from the ones I do (ie are the callbacks based on location, company size, position applied for) Keep in mind that I have 2 years marketing management experience, an MBA, and 6 years total management experience. 90% of the jobs I am applying for call for 2-5 years marketing experience, with 2-5 years management experience, and an MBA optional. The fact that I am meeting and EXCEEDING the requirements for the positions I am applying for, yet still have such a low response rate, makes me wonder if there is another problem?

Trying to figure out where the bottleneck is is what prompted my first post. Again, I understand the importance of networking, and accessing the 'hidden' job market. But 20 callbacks in 2 years when applying for positions I am qualified for seems low enough to signal a potential problem. Again, I have shown my resume to fellow marketing AND advertising professionals, and all agree that my resume looks fine, and most compliment me on it. So I am assuming the resume itself is not the problem.

I don't mean to give the impression that I am discounting the advice about researching companies and attempting to network with them to solve their marketing problems. Unfortunately my seasonal vendor position I worked this summer ended at the end of July, so I am currently unemployed and have far more time than I would like on my hands. So I can easily find the time to do the research that will be necessary.

Thanks again all.

Maybe I missed it... how many resumes have you sent out?

(When you refer to "callbacks" - do you mean responses to your resume?)

You have spent 2 years of "active searching" - you have 20 callbacks from your efforts, but have you sent out 21 resumes, or 210, or 2,100, or 21,000? You ask us to help you increase your response rate - but how can we possibly assess the response rate if we do not know this simple fact?

I'm glad you are proud of your own resume... but how can we suggest improvements without seeing it? Can you post a link to your resume?

Like the others above - I would prefer to suggest other avenues to look for a job (I personally liked the book, "What Color is Your Parachute", which I read 20 or so years ago, and which I believe has been revised and reprinted). You seem to be asking us to address one issue - then neglecting to give us the most basic info we need to be of assistance.

We have two complementary schools of thought going on here. First, the resume is an important tool for the job search and for the 40% of the job market for which it is the leading document, then having it just right is necessary. As Paul (Square Peg) states, go to an expert in resume writing and get some help.

As the forum here is "marketing," many of us subscribe to the process of marketing yourself. As we read your situational analysis, we are concluding that your problem with call-backs is probably not the resume, it's the approach. We are inferring that you are answering ads, postings on job sites, or postings on company websites. This is certainly one way to land a job - 40% of all people do this. But, you lose any edge this way because the jobs are already known to literally millions of potential applicants as you apply.

60% of jobs are gotten before they are ever posted, advertised, or known about by the outside world. At this stage, at most, only a handful of applicants might know about it. For instance, most companies post a job internally for a week or two prior to taking it to external candidates. If you find out about the need during that stage and who the hiring manager is, what his needs are, you can present yourself, your experience solving problems similar to his, and your capabilities before any other candidates toss their resume in the hat. Even if he looks at the hundreds of other resumes, he will still remember you best. You gain access to these decision makers through networking - someone you know knows someone at the company who heard about a job opening and knows someone who knows the hiring manager. You follow the network chain, asking questions along the way to find out information so that you are in a position to understand the manager's needs by the time you talk to him. You use one network link as an introduction to the next: "Hello, Mr. Doe, I'm Mcollier71 and John Smith told me that you might be a person who could help me with some information about Getty Company. Would you have a few minutes to answer some of my questions?" Then you tell him you are interested in working for Getty Company as a marketing professional, give him a very brief rundown on your capabilities and background (a one minute commercial because it takes no more than one minute - this generally includes your current position, the one before that, the skills you are very good at, and a couple accomplishments you have had along the way with dollar impact). Then you ask him if he knows if Getty Company has people similar to your capabilities. If he does, ask if he would mind sharing their name and phone number. If he does, ask him what kind of person they are, how he knows them...get some background. If he doesn't, ask if he knows anyone at Getty Company that may know someone like you with whom you could talk. Politely thank him and move onto the next link in the network.

As Michael said (mgoodman), prioritize your companies and work the top ones - this networking does take time and a lot of effort.

In parallel with that, by all means, work on pointing up your resume with a resume writing expert (this costs - anywhere up to a couple hundred dollars) and continue to answer ads and job sites. Experts in job hunting tell us that your time spent on these activities should be roughly proportional to the chances of getting hired this way: Recruitors - 20%, job boards - 15%, ads - 5%.

So, in summary, what we're saying is that your call-back may not be because of your resume - after all, everyone says it's great. It may be your approach to marketing yourself. Take a look at Michael's book: The Potato Chip Difference and put together a marketing campaign for yourself.

I hope this helps clarify (versus further confuse you).

Wayde

"You have spent 2 years of "active searching" - you have 20 callbacks from your efforts, but have you sent out 21 resumes, or 210, or 2,100, or 21,000? You ask us to help you increase your response rate - but how can we possibly assess the response rate if we do not know this simple fact?"

It's in the post I left above yours, I've applied for hundreds of positions in the last 2 years at least. My best guess would be between 300-500 positions.

And from those 20 or so callbacks I have had 10-15 interviews.(The 5-10 I didn't interview with ended up being positions that I wasn't interested with after getting more information during the callback, ie a sales position that was advertised as a marketing position) The interviews have gone better, one led to my last job, for another I ended up being in the final 2 picked for the job, and for a couple of others I had an additional interview before the position was filled.

So from my experience, once I get the callback, my response rate for interviews seems to be better.

oops, my bad. Sorry 'bout that - yes, I missed your reference to sending out 200-1000 or more resumes.

Your response rate therefore may be somewhere between 2% and 10%. I'm not a resume expert, but those numbers do not sound unreasonable to me. (My personal experience in response rates from resumes is in the 1% to 2% range).

I personally subscribe to the school of thought that one should market themselves. Sending out resumes to announced positions could be 20-30% of your efforts, but I would not bet the ranch on it.

Sorry to hear you are having a tough time. If I were in your shoes, I would take on some contract work ASAP so that I would not appear "unemployed". If I were in desperate financial shape and wanted to send resumes, I would broaden my geographic scope and email tens of thousands of resumes, not hundreds.

Are you on Monster.com? Have you looked at Resume Rabbit?

Have you attended local trade shows and networking events, resume in hand? Have you knocked on doors? Have you called everyone you know, e.g. old school buddies, and asked them to forward your resume? Have you looked at www.venturewire.com to see who has recently raised money (they used to have a limited free service, I will need to check that out).

Have you been to your library to look at the Redbooks to see who is spending money in advertising in your local area? Have you asked your local reference librarian to help you build a list of target companies? Have you looked in the "enginering" section of the help wanted section, to see who is hiring in general?

Have you purchased and read two or three books on today's job market? Have you gone back to the folks you sent resumes 90 days ago to... in case their hiring decision didn't work out?

Jobs are harder to find today... you may need to make a comittment to spend more time actively searching. And, if it were me, I'd spend the money for a professional to help you polish up that resume. Good luck.

douglas.hitchcock, great idea about the marketing for the visitor's bureaus, I'll definitely look into that. I would prefer to stay in a 2-hour radius, but would definitely move for the right opportunity.

And explain to me what you mean by a 'white paper', please.

"in my recent job search, I only applied for 2 jobs...and got offers for both of them... my cover letters were only about 6 sentences, but they were six really good sentences...about their company and why I wanted to work there... in the interviews, i brought samples of my work along with research i had done on their companies and industries..."

Flash were those 2 jobs local jobs or in another area? Also were these marketing positions?