How to Reach Your Hiring Manager Directly

When you're job-hunting, your first priority is to get interviews. You don't get brownie points from some job-search authority in the sky for tossing resumes into the void. Nobody gives you credit for that. Flinging one more resume into the yawning abyss of another corporate Black Hole recruiting portal doesn't pay your bills or grow your flame. The point of a job search is to advance a conversation to the point where you go on a job interview.

You already know that the Black Hole recruiting process is broken. Hiring managers complain about it. HR people tear their hair out over it. "How can I find you a great candidate," they tell hiring managers, "when the only way I have to evaluate candidates is through these flippin' keywords!" Keywords tell us nothing. Would we believe that because a person uses the term "results-oriented professional" in his resume, therefore the guy is actually a can-do person with a great attitude? Of course not.

Keywords are actually the worst possible way to evaluate candidates for a position. But some genius in the nineteen-eighties set the paradigm by which most organizations make their first-cut hiring decisions now, and wouldn't you know, it's based on a keyword-searching-and-matching-algorithm. When in doubt, fearful humans put their trust in data! (Bad choice.)

Here's the good news for job-seekers. Hiring managers have big problems. At Human Workplace, we call the big problem, the one that's keeping a hiring manager up at night, the manager's Business Pain.

Business Pain is an essential topic for job-seekers and all working people to understand. If there were no pain, your hiring manager wouldn't have gotten approval to fill the job opening. Tight-fisted CFOs and Division Controllers are not telling hiring managers these days "Sure, hire all the new employees you want to!" They are hanging onto every nickel. So when you see a job ad posted, you know that a hiring manager has big pain, the kind that people lose sleep over.

So, when we focus on the Business Pain your hiring manager is facing, we can do something far more proactive than flinging a resume into another Black Hole. We can write to your manager directly at his or her desk, and talk about the Business Pain that's plaguing him or her.

When you lob a resume into a Black Hole recruiting portal, your chances of hearing back from the employer are about the same as your odds of winning the lottery. Actually the lottery has better odds, because by law, the lottery commission must choose a winner. I tell job-seekers that if you're relying on Black Hole portals for your job search, you're better off putting a stack of your resumes on the passenger's seat in your car and driving down the freeway with the passenger's side window of your car left open, so the resumes fly away.

Maybe by chance one of your resumes will wind up flying through the window of a hiring manager's office. Unlikely, right? That's what it's like tossing resumes into Black Hole job application websites.

There is a better way. You can send a Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume, stapled together, in the mail directly to your hiring manager's desk. I started helping career-coaching clients use this technique in about 2006. The results have been very consistent over the years.

People who use this job-search technique, which we call STOP! Don't Send that Resume, hear from their hiring managers or the HR people supporting them 25% of the time. That means that for every four Pain Letters, they get one job interview.

I wish the hit rate were better than 25%, but that's still a lot better than your odds with the Black Hole.

A Pain Letter is easy to write, but it takes a little research. You have to find a Hook to engage your hiring manager. A Hook is a recent (within six months) accomplishment of the organization or the specific hiring manager's team, that you can learn about (we've listed resources to do that below) and call attention to right at the top of your Pain Letter.

You have to find that Hook, and you also have to build a Pain Hypothesis, which is just a fancy way of saying you have to think about what is likely to be keeping your hiring manager up at night.

Pain Hypotheses are easy to derive. Listen to one of our Pain Letter webinars and you'll hear us talking together about Pain Hypotheses that our webinar participants are building. If the company is growing, they're likely to have growing pains.

That means that infrastructure isn't keeping up with sales growth, and customer service is probably suffering as a result.

Systems aren't in place when the company needs them to be. Growth creates all kinds of pain. They are good problems to have, but then again when you're job-seeking, all types of business pain are good problems to have.

When an industry is consolidating, smaller companies are merging. Then their systems overlap and nobody knows what's going on. It's mayhem, and that's just on the operational side. Culturally, smashing organizations together creates chaos that you, with your tremendous experience and wisdom, can help to relieve.

So you need a Hook and you need a Pain Hypothesis. You need one more thing to write a Pain Letter, and that is the name and street address of your hiring manager. People who are afraid to step outside the velvet ropes and write a Pain Letter like to say "You can't find the hiring manager's name!" but of course, thanks to wonderful tools like LinkedIn, you nearly always can.

Leaving out IBM and a handful of other massive organizations where half the people in the joint have the same title (Director of Program Management, for instance) you can nearly always find your hiring manager's name online.

And if you can't, no worries - you can go up in the org chart! We don't write to the CEO, unless it's a very small organization, because most CEO's diligent administrative assistants do such a good job of re-routing job-seeker inquiries back into the same Black Hole we were trying to avoid.

We write to the functional head your boss ultimately reports to -- the CFO or head of Marketing, for instance, instead of the CEO.

A Human-Voiced Resume is also easy to write. You can get rid of the "Results-Oriented Professional" gunk on your resume and sound like a human being.

No hiring manager wants to read about "motivated self-starters" with "superior communication skills." They are sick to death of language like that, as we all are.

The world is changing fast.

The brilliant futurist Edie Weiner says "Pay attention to things happening on the fringe, because they will be in the middle in five minutes."

Years ago, only sailors and gang members had tattoos. Now every suburban soccer mom has a tattoo. It's the same way in the business world. Get used to looking at Business Pain and using human practices like Human-Voiced Resumes and Pain Letters in your job search, because the future is already here.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT REACHING YOUR HIRING MANAGER DIRECTLY

What if I've already talked to HR and they told me specifically not to contact my hiring manager directly?

HR people hate the Black Hole as much as you do. They have to say "Don't circumvent the system" when they talk to job-seekers. That is their job! They have no choice.

You can write to whomever you want. We have never heard of a person getting bounced because he or she broke Godzilla's rules and reached a hiring manager directly.

And if that should happen -- if you could be blackballed because you dared to step outside the lines -- would you want to work for that organization, anyway?

How do I put a human voice in my resume, and how do I write a Pain Letter?

There's a list of resources at the end of this column, and you can also Google the term "pain letter" to see tons of Liz Ryan's articles on that topic. Then, Google the term "human-voiced resume" to see Liz's columns about those. Liz Ryan invented Pain Letters and Human-Voiced Resumes and has been writing about them for years.

What if I find my hiring manager on LinkedIn, but I can see he or she is not located at headquarters, and I can't find the mailing address for my hiring manager's office?

Don't worry about it. Just send your Pain Packet (that's a Pain Letter plus a Human-Voiced Resume, stapled together and sent in a white, 8.5 x 11-inch envelope, unfolded, with your hiring manager's name, title, company name and address block-printed neatly on the front and a stamp on it) to the company HQ. Since your hiring manager's name is on it, the mailroom folks will route your letter to him or her.

Block-printing? Isn't it more professional to run the 8.5 x 11-inch envelope through my printer to print the hiring manager's name and address on it?

Maybe more professional, but in our research we've found that block-printed envelopes get through the mailroom and printed ones get tossed in the mail. They look like business junk mail.

What if I send a Pain Letter and I don't hear anything back? Do I call him, then?

You have a choice. You can send an identical Pain Letter with a new date under the theory that your hiring manager didn't see the first one. You can reach out to your hiring manager via LinkedIn. You can email him or her if you can extrapolate his or her email address from the standard email convention used in that employer. You can call him or her by phone to make what we call a Pain Call. That's an advanced technique!

Why should I try this Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume approach?

If the Black Hole approach is working for you, there's no need to bother learning something new. :-)

If you're frustrated with the Black Hole system, you can grow your professional muscles (Pain-Spotting and Dragon-Slaying-Story-telling muscles, for instance) writing Pain Letters and adding a human voice to your resume.

You'll start more substantive conversations with managers when you send them Pain Letters, and the interviews that result will also be more focused and pain-and-solution-oriented than the lame, scripted interviews in a standard recruiting process.

Maybe the biggest reason to try a Pain Letter in your job search is that when you do, you'll shake a little toxic lemonade out of your veins. Most of us were raised to be good boys and girls and to listen to authority figures, no matter what. That is horrible, crippling advice that keeps far too many people off their path with a dim flame.

Our mission at Human Workplace is to wake people up to their own potential. Saying "Yes, I will!" when someone else says "No, you mustn't!" is an essential step in growing your voice and your mojo.

There's a system for hiring at Acme Explosives? Great. Does the system work? Nope. You've flung 12 resumes into it and received one terse, robotic auto-responder message. Awesome! You've learned something. The system is broken. No problem!

Mother Nature abhors a vacuum. You'll send a Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume directly to your hiring manager, whose name you will find on LinkedIn in about ten seconds. Now you're behaving as an independent adult. Doesn't it feel great?

RESOURCES:

Jump to the Human Workplace blog to see a sample Pain Letter and an excerpt from a Human-Voiced Resume!

Liz Ryan will write about how to find the employer name in a "blind" job ad, in an upcoming column!

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Reach Your Hiring Manager Directly, and avoid the Black Hole!

Our new eBook "Reach Your Hiring Manager Directly Collection" has just launched. It's on sale for $6.49 (and will sell for $29.99 after the launch period). This eBook includes 41 pages of advice on avoiding the Black Hole (recruiting portals) in your job search, and reaching your hiring manager directly with Pain Letters and your Human-Voiced Resume.

Check it out here!

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