Stuck in your Job Search? Try a Pain Letter!

The number one question people ask us is "How do I write a Pain Letter? Give me the story!"

Here is the story. You might want to wait until you have fifteen or twenty minutes to dive into this topic before you start reading, because this story includes a Pain Letter-writing lesson and will take you a little while to get through.

The Problem: Black Hole Recruiting

We invented Pain Letters when we noticed that smart and talented job-seekers were spending all their job-search time and energy dealing with dysfunctional Black Hole recruiting systems. That one boring, mojo-sucking activity at the center of their job hunts was killing them.

When I talk about the Black Hole, I'm referring to automated recruiting processes, the ones that command you to fill in field after field on page after page, most of it information already found on your resume. Those applicant tracking systems are absolutely awful -- boring and insulting and soul-crushing in their bureaucratic imperiousness.

People send us the urls to the worst recruiting sites they see in their job-search travels -- like the one where the greeting is "Welcome to our Careers Site. Any fields left blank will subject the applicant to automatic disqualification from consideration for employment."

Aren't you just dying to work for these people? What a disgusting way to address the very same talent population you keep saying you want to engage with!

So Much For Our First Date

I can hardly imagine what sort of relationship this employer is trying to create with a possible new team member. What better message than "bow down to us, dogmeat job-seeker!" to set the tone for the employment relationship waiting on the other side of the Black Hole?

Hiding behind the royally bureaucratic, passive-voiced Battle Drone writing style doesn't change the fact that real people operate on both sides of the recruiting funnel. You can't distance yourself from your obligation to be human at work, just because you've employed technology to help you make hiring decisions.

You can't use the machine's voice to greet your job applicants and expect real people to show up to work. It's nauseating. It's wrong.

Death of a Resume

I call those recruiting portals Black Holes because when you pitch a resume into one, you almost never hear anything back. Imagine how many millions of people-hours have been wasted by job-seekers and recruiters NOT talking to each other, but lobbing countless resumes and applications into the void instead?

We knew there had to be a better way to start conversations with hiring managers. There is a better way! We started teaching people how to write Pain Letters and writing Pain Letters for them, and they started to get interviews.

It's important to remember that hiring managers don't like the Black Hole system any better than job-seekers do. HR people don't like it. I don't know of anyone who likes it.

Black Hole Recruiting Solved the Wrong Problem, Anyway

The only reason we have enough resumes coming in to have to even worry about sifting and sorting out the unsuitable ones is this: it's taken us forever to figure out that recruiting is a marketing job.

Headhunters know it -- they call themselves sales and marketing people, as well they should! HR departments, or perhaps their leaders, were slower to get the memo. We still think that our problem is weeding out candidates, when the actual problem nearly every organization faces is finding good people.

We need to do less sorting and more relationship-building, and that is a big change for HR teams. Recruiting has been transactional, and it cannot be transactional any more, not if our firms are going to complete for talent in the new century.

You Also Need a Taxi Driver's License And Must Be Fluent in Ancient Greek

We create our own recruiting problems by loading up job requisitions with essential requirements that we pulled out of wherever we pull other foolish ideas from.

We overdo it with the requirements on our job ads out of the delusion that by writing the essential bullets on paper, the magical candidate will appear like Peter Pan in front of us.

HR people need to stiffen their backbones, find their voices and gently educate hiring managers about the nature of the delusion that has overtaken them, then get rid of at least half the bullets on the typical job ad. That would be a start. After that, we need to stop advertising job openings on the side of a barn -- but this story is for job-seekers.

Let's Talk About the Manager in Pain, And Not About You

We started to write and teach Pain-Letter writing when our first few Pain Letters hit their mark. Here's what we saw. The people who adopted the Pain Letter approach didn't just get interviews.

They got to have real conversations with their hiring managers at a pretty high level - talking about the thorniest issues the manager was facing.

The energy around the conversation was completely different from a standard job interview, which is so often stilted and weird. The Pain Letter set the tone and the manager stepped into the new frame -- not every manager, of course, but some of them, enough to get jobs for a lot of people that had been stuck in Black Hole silence and darkness for ages, like Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar."

The Side Entrance is Open

When you write a Pain Letter, you don't waste a second with the Black Hole. You ignore it completely. You write directly to your hiring manager at his or her desk. You can find your hiring manager using this technique.

If you can't find your exact hiring manager by name (try it before you decide it's impossible -- it's actually really easy most of the time) you can go up in the organizational chart, and write to the head of your function instead.

Don't write to the CEO unless it's a very small firm. CEOs have magnificently protective administrators who could easily shuttle your HVR and Pain Letter straight back into the Black Hole.

Four Parts to a Pain Letter

What does a Pain Letter say? There are four parts to a Pain Letter. The first section is the Hook. You're going to open your letter with a compliment or an attaboy/attagirl that specifically mentions something cool the company has done recently.

You'll find your Hook in the News or Pressroom section of the company's website. Pick a press release about something you'd be proud of if you were the hiring manager you're writing to. Here's an example of a Hook:

Dear Jerry,

Congratulations to you and Angry Chocolates team on winning Best New Product at Chocoholic Expo 2014. What a fantastic affirmation for your Choco-Tips edible nail polish line!

The Aperture Opens!

The Hook is designed to open an aperture in your hiring manager's busy mind, and get him or her to read the rest of your letter and then flip it over to scan your one-or-two-page resume, attached by one staple in the corner to your less-than-one-page Pain Letter. Why did your Hook get the aperture open? It was relevant! You were talking about the person you were writing to, not about yourself.

If somebody wrote to me and praised me for something cool that I had done or my company had done, I'd keep reading their letter - wouldn't you? None of us gets enough affirmation (although I must say the colors you're wearing today really bring out your eyes!).

The Fine Art of Pain-Spotting

After the Hook you'll leave a paragraph break, then dive into your Pain Hypothesis. What's a Pain Hypothesis? It's an educated guess about the unpleasant, expensive and personally frustrating Business Pain most likely to be keeping your hiring manager up at night right now.

I can only imagine that given Angry's massive growth since 2013, keeping your channel partners equipped and trained on your products has got to be a challenge at times.

You're too polite to say "There's no way in hell you're keeping your resellers happy right now, now that Angry Chocolates are on the shelves at Whole Foods."

Think about what your life would be like, if you were the manager you're writing to. Which problems would be highest on your radar screen? Pick the one that feels the gnarliest and write about it in your Pain Letter.

How I Slew The Dragon

Now you've mentioned the pain that you figure might be vexing your hiring manager. "Yep, that's my problem," he or she may be thinking as s/he reads. "What can you do about it?"

You've got to prove that you're very familiar with the pain your manager is experiencing, and that you've slain that dragon before in another situation. You'll follow your Pain Hypothesis directly (no paragraph break!) with a pithy Dragon-Slaying Story, like this:

When I was at Exclusive Candies before its acquisition by Nestle, we had a similar challenge. We had to keep our loyal reseller team happy while expanding Exclusive's offerings into Europe and Latin America. We pulled it off and grew sales 45% in a year with only a ten percent increase in our Marketing budget.

Notice the conversational tone? That's a critical piece of a Pain Letter. You can't write to a human being through a human channel -- the post office -- and use a robotic, standard-business-tone. It doesn't work.

If your letter looks anything like a standard cover letter when it hits your manager's desk, it's headed straight back to the very same Black Hole you were trying to avoid.

The goal of a Pain Letter is to get the hiring manager out of the mental frame "Oh, just another job-seeker --- I'll send this to HR" and into a new frame: "Dang! This person knows my movie. I'm calling this person up. Maybe we can have coffee."

Here's a column about writing Dragon-Slaying Stories.

You're Not a Job-Seeker: You're a Consultant!

You're not a job-seeker, when you write your Pain Letter. You're an observant and interested person who's writing to inquire whether another person, your hiring manager, might be struggling with a certain kind of pain that you're familiar with.

It's a reasonable question ("Do you have this pain, by chance?"). There's a lot of that pain around, whatever it may be!

You'll finish your Pain Letter with a quick closing. "If your reseller support program is on your radar screen and warrants a conversation, my contact information is on my resume. All the best, Chris."

That's it. You don't mention a job opening or use the word 'job.' You're in consulting mode now. Believe me, if your manager has the budget to hire someone and your Pain Letter gets across the fact that you've slain his or her dragon before, the first thing your manager will think of is "I could hire this person for my open position!"

God Bless the Stack, But You Don't Want to Be There

There might be a stack of resumes on your manager's filing cabinet when s/he opens the envelope to read your Pain Letter.

Those resumes will be forgotten in a heartbeat when you make the intellectuo-emotional connection with your manager that a forty-five-second read of your Pain Letter can evoke. We see it happen every day.

The success rate on a Pain Letter, if it's well-written and accompanied by a Human-Voiced Resume, is twenty-five percent, according to our clients who report back to us. That means that three out of four of your Pain Letters will go unread. The fourth one will generate a phone call or an email back to you, and here's the great thing:

The quality of that phone call or email will be completely different from the standard HR response "Okay, we got your resume, now take a test." It will be the person in pain him- or herself, contacting you, wanting to talk about real business issues, and fast!

Learn, Baby, Learn!

A Pain Letter has a template, as I've just described, but it's not a Mad Lib. It's not a fill-in-the-blanks exercise.

You have to do your research. Your focused attention and thinking about your manager's Business Pain is more important than anything else in your Pain Letter.

It's a new day now. You can't be a passive job seeker, pitching resumes into the abyss and hoping to get lucky. If you do that, you'll be unemployed for years. You have to take matters into your own hands. You have to start conversations with hiring managers and see where they lead.

The era of the Pain Letter is here, and we hear from folks every day who got their jobs by writing Pain Letters and sending them. I'll tell you one thing: it's empowering to mentally put on your manager's glasses and see the world through his or her eyes.

You Are Magnificent!

It's empowering to realize that you're not just a bundle of skills and certifications. You're a person with powerful Dragon-Slaying Stories and your own unique spin on your work and life in general. You can step out of the traditional job-search box any time. Here's your permission to send a Pain Letter and speak to your next manager with your own voice!