Hiring Managers Want to Know: "What Problem Can You Solve?"

Hiring managers have pain, but they don't want to show it. If they didn't have a big, painful problem, they'd never hire anyone.

Like animals, people hide their pain. They don't talk about it. Not many hiring managers have the confidence to say in a job ad "Our company is great, but we've got problems, too! We need your help."

Once we understand that job ads are ridiculous and Black Hole recruiting portals are designed to shut people out, we have a big advantage. We don't have to panic when we don't have all the requirements listed in a fanciful-bordering-on-delusional job ad. We don't even have to read the job ads anymore.

We can approach any employer at all with a simple inquiry about Business Pain. The good news is that every organization has problems. You can't be in business without having them!

You can spot the pain hiring managers are experiencing, but only if you take their perspective. That means forgetting about your Skills and Competencies.

No one cares about those things except weenified resume screeners, and as a new-millennium job seeker you're going to turn your attention away from people like that.

You're going to focus on hiring managers, instead -- the people who have the pain and the funding to relieve their pain.

Instead of thinking about yourself through the lens "What do I do?" where the answer might be Marketing, Coding, HR, Finance or Purchasing, you're going to ask the more interesting question "What problems do I solve for my employers?" Now you have something worth talking about. When you can talk about the Business Pain you solve, you have power in the hiring equation.

Let's do a simple Business Pain Breakdown to see how the pieces fit together.

Let's say you're a Marketing person with a focus on social media. You're painfully aware that there are millions of people who describe themselves the same way.

You know you bring something special, but that knowledge and five dollars can buy you a mocha latte. It won't help you on your job search unless you can bring your power and heft across to hiring managers.

Ask yourself the question "What problems do Marketing VPs have in the social media arena? What worries them enough to spend money to make the pain go away?"

Lots of Marketing VPs worry that they're behind the curve social-media-wise. They don't want to waste time and money coming up the learning curve. They also don't want to lose opportunities that social media presents. They worry that their brand has no social media presence and no followers. Audiences are engaging with somebody else's brand, but not theirs!

Let's look at the problem through the Marketing VP's eyes. How would a fictional Marketing VP, Martha, explain her problem to a friend?

FRIEND: So Martha, is Acme Explosives big on Facebook and Twitter and all that?

MARTHA: No, we don't do any of that. Our market is made up of construction firms.

FRIEND: But don't firms like that still use social media?

MARTHA: I guess some of them do. I need to get on that, actually. We don't even have a Twitter account or Facebook page.

What is Martha worried about? She's worried that Acme Explosives is losing business because they have no social media presence. Now is a great time to reach out to Martha and offer her a helping hand over the threshold into Social Media Land.

Abigail, an enterprising Marketer with a social media focus, spots Acme Explosives on her radar. She sends Martha a quick and friendly Pain Letter to introduce herself. She doesn't talk about her experience.

Why would Martha care about that? Abigail talks about Martha, instead of herself. She compliments Martha on a traditional ad that ran in National Construction magazine.

"I spotted your ad in National Construction magazine and I loved it!" says Abigail in her letter. "Hats off to your team and your agency - what a fun way to talk about dynamite!"

The first part of a Pain Letter is the Hook. The Hook gets the hiring manager to keep reading, by opening an aperture in the hiring manager's mind. Abigail's Hook opened an aperture for Martha, who kept reading.

"I wonder whether Acme, like most vendors to the construction industry, is on the fence about social media," Abigail continues. "It's hard to know whether to stay on the sidelines or plunge in, and if so, which platforms make the most sense in your marketing strategy."

Abigail sounds like she's talking to Martha directly. That's exactly her intention! Now she shifts into storytelling mode.

"When I was at Graysteel Plastics, we had the same issue. We experimented with social media and let our customers and their behaviors guide us. A year later we had added 35,000 names to our mailing list and got our first government RFPs. Now Graysteel is a vendor to cities, states and the Department of Transportation."

In four simple, human sentences, Abigail lays it out. Notice that she hasn't said Word One about her own fabulousness. She knows that Martha doesn't care about that -- and why should she? Martha, like every living being, is focused on her own needs.

Abigail's Pain Letter cost her a half hour in time and fifty cents for a postage stamp. It got her an interview and a new job where there was no job opening before.

You can do the same thing. You just have to change your job-search mindset completely. You have to know more about the pain you solve for employers than most job-seekers do.

You have to know how your hiring manager experiences that pain. How does s/he first become aware of the pain? How does the pain show up? What does the pain cost your hiring manager, if it goes unaddressed?

You have to be ready to dig more deeply into Business Pain at a job interview. You're not going to spend your precious interview airtime talking about your yourself. You're going to ask questions, instead. Here's Abigail at her first coffee meeting with Martha:

MARTHA: Thanks for meeting.

ABBY: Not at all. It's great to meet you. How did you get into construction?

MARTHA: I was in consumer products, and I met my CEO at a conference where he was on a panel. I was interested in construction because it's real. I had worked for a lot of companies where we depended on trends and fads to keep us in business.

ABBY: What a shift for you, though!

MARTHA: Yes and no. We have different challenges in our industry. Weather, politics, you name it. It's fun.

ABBY: It's hard to know how much of the consumer branding applies when your customers aren't consumers.

MARTHA: That's it! We make dynamite. We work with firms that blow up rocks to build tunnels and roads. I don't think our clients live on Twitter.

ABBY: Right. And the CEO in each of your client firms is the one who's got to have Acme top of mind, right?

MARTHA: Him or her, for sure, but then again we respond to RFPs, and I need to have other people in our client firms aware of us and what we're doing. I need to get that RFP. I've thought of hosting webinars for the vendor procurement people in our client firms.

ABBY: What would they get on a webinar to learn about?

MARTHA: Well, interestingly enough, maybe social media. It's a general behind-the-curve issue across the industry. It's not just us.

ABBY: And if they came on a webinar, how would that help you?

MARTHA: We'd get names on our mailing list for one, and I think we could establish ourselves as a firm that's looking to educate and support our clients, since their landscape is changing too.

Abby is dying to talk about her webinar experience right now, but she resists the temptation. She doesn't know enough about the pain Martha is experiencing. So far it sounds like a social media presence would be nice to have, and that's not good enough. She needs to hear about pain. She's got to dig a bit more.

ABBY: That sounds like a fun thing to do when the swamp is cleared of alligators, around the fourth quarter of the year Never.

MARTHA: That's the issue. What is the relative priority, with all the other Marketing projects we've got?

ABBY: Are sales exactly where you want them to be?

MARTHA: We're growing, but we lose business too, and there are projects we never hear about.

ABBY: Any big ones you gnashed your teeth over?

MARTHA: A couple. If we'd gotten both of them, it would have been momentous.

ABBY: Big as in...

MARTHA: Let's say $100M projects and up.

ABBY: And what's your piece of that?

MARTHA: Oh, maybe three million dollars apiece, but that's a big sale for us.

ABBY: So the opportunity is real.

MARTHA: It's real.

ABBY: Two projects, six million on the table, is that right?

MARTHA: God, I've never thought of it that way, but yes.

ABBY: (not going to solutions!): Ah.

MARTHA: I just don't know. Would either of those bids have come our way if we had a greater Facebook presence? I don't see the connective tissue.

ABBY: And then you wonder what other projects are out there that you won't hear about at all.

MARTHA: You're saying that's where social media could help us.

ABBY: It's the idea of virality. No one expects a dynamite manufacturer to have a Youtube channel with ten million pageviews. It's the issue of reaching people who don't know about you, and staying top of mind for people who know you but have a million other things to think about.

MARTHA: My CEO said "I'm hiring you because you're going to bring your consumer products wisdom to our old-fashioned industry."

ABBY: Maybe the problem goes away on its own. Are you doing traditional marketing things that could vault sales by six or ten million next year, without social media?

MARTHA: No. Definitely no. Traditional business development, our website, construction trade shows. Nothing with hockey stick potential.

ABBY: Ah.

MARTHA: Not to get to brass tacks, but if you joined us, can you give me a ballpark --

ABBY: Seventy-five thousand. That's about six thousand bucks a month.

MARTHA: Would you have time to come and meet some people at Acme next week?

If you aren't tightly connected to the Business Pain you solve, you're at the mercy of a broken recruiting process and bullet-point-obsessed resume screeners.

When you know very well which Business Pain you solve, what it costs hiring managers and just how it keeps them tossing and turning at night, you're in the driver's seat on your job search. Isn't that where you want to be?

Our company is called Human Workplace. Our CEO, Liz Ryan, writes our columns and draws the pictures that go with them. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.

Our 12-week virtual coaching group Get a Job No Matter What Boot Camp starts on Saturday, March 22nd. It's a 12-week guided self-study course. You'll get a new lesson each week to work on as your schedule allows. We'll support you with answers to your questions, tons of tools and advice as you go. We'll dig into Pain Letters and tons more in the Boot Camp! Get a Job No Matter What Boot Camp costs US $299. Learn more here!

Launch Your Consulting Business, our 12-week virtual coaching group for budding and established consultants, also starts on Saturday, March 22nd. Here's the scoop!

SUCCESS!

Here's what Clare sent us on Twitter today:

"You know that one and only Pain Letter I wrote? Well, I got the job!" (next tweet) "And that's after months of trying to find some work that I could love using other methods."

You rock, Clare!

ABIGAIL'S FULL PAIN LETTER TO MARTHA

Abigail found Martha's profile in LinkedIn and thought "Hmm, a consumer-products Marketing VP who moved into the construction industry two years ago. I'll bet she's got her bearings by now. I've looked for Acme Explosives in the social media sphere and I don't find anything. I wonder whether Martha has some pain in that area? I'm going to send her a Pain Letter. What's the worst that can happen, if she doesn't like it?"

Abigail writes her Pain Letter and sends it to Martha via snail mail. She staples her brief and snappy Pain Letter to the front of her two-paged Human-Voiced Resume and sends the two documents together in a white 8.5 x 11-inch envelope with a stamp on it. Easy peasy!

Here's what Abigail writes in her Pain Letter:

Dear Martha,

I spotted your ad in National Construction magazine and I loved it! Hats off to your team and your agency - what a fun way to talk about dynamite!

I wonder whether Acme, like most vendors to the construction industry, is on the fence about social media. It's hard to know whether to stay on the sidelines or plunge in, and if so, which platforms make the most sense in your marketing strategy.

When I was at Graysteel Plastics, we had the same issue. We experimented with social media and let our customers and their behaviors guide us. A year later we had added 35,000 names to our mailing list and got our first government RFPs. Now Graysteel is a vendor to cities, states and the Department of Transportation.

If Acme's social media launch is worth an email correspondence or phone conversation, my contact info is on my resume.

Best,

Abigail Adams

Martha called Abby and they chatted. Abby suggested a coffee date, and the rest is history.