What's a Pain Letter? It's A Job-Seeker's Secret Weapon!

If you ask anyone who's job-hunting "What's it like to job-hunt these days?" you will likely get the answer "It's hard. It's frustrating."

If you ask me, whose job is to survey the landscape of the post-millennium workplace and help people navigate it from both sides of the desk, I will tell you "It's hard and frustrating to job-hunt because the hiring process is broken."

We can see that it's broken. You are not going to hire great people by searching their resumes for keywords! It's absurd for anyone to think that you could.

I've been an HR leader since 1984. The book 1984 talks about a dystopian future where people are reduced to automatons, and in the recruiting process at least, that future has largely come to pass.

Corporations and institutions and sadly, even some small organizations that should know better have turned recruiting from a fast and organic human process into a slow, insulting, mechanical one.

You won't get a good job lobbing applications into Black Hole recruiting portals. All of your fizz and personality will be squashed between its gears. We need a better way to get a job these days, and luckily that better way is already here: fun to learn, highly effective and mojo-building as well!

You can reach your hiring manager directly with a letter sent through the mail. Nobody gets paper mail anymore so your letter has a good chance of catching your hiring manager's attention.

As you prepare to write the letter you're going to send along with your resume to start a conversation with your hiring manager a/k/a Possible Next Boss, you're going to conduct research here on LinkedIn and on the company's own website.
First, you have to find your specific hiring manager's name.

This is tough to do in enormous organizations like IBM but easy to do in most companies of 20,000 employers or fewer. If you can't find the exact manager you want, you can go up the organizational chart and write to the head of your function, instead. 

Your letter isn't going to drone on about your wonderful qualities. No one will care about your qualities -- no one, to be specific, can care about them - until they know that you understand them and the Business Pain that's keeping them up at night.

That's the second piece of the puzzle you are assembling. Before you can write a Pain Letter, you need to develop a Pain Hypothesis about the most likely Business Pain your Possible Next Boss is experiencing.

Think about your manager's job description and the size of the organization. You can learn all about it by reading the company's website and reading the profiles of its leaders on LinkedIn. Here are a few Pain Hypotheses to get your wheels turning:

Amelia's Pain Hypothesis (Amelia is an Account Manager with tons of customer support background)

Angry Chocolates is growing. They just opened their first regional distribution center, in Omaha. Their Angry Choco-Mints are sold at all Whole Foods stores now. My manager, Lucas, runs Customer Support. He and his team must be going crazy supporting big retailers now as well as consumers who buy through the Angry Chocolates website. Eureka -- national account service pain!

Rufus's Pain Hypothesis (Rufus is an IT person specialized in Networking and Telephony)

Acme Explosives is involved in a joint venture with Toontown Industries -- I read about it on their website. They are co-branding and co-developing products. That's a close relationship. Also, Acme's salesforce is growing. They look to have between 60 and 100 remote sales reps. How are they managing their networks with all these far-flung people  involved? My guess is that Acme's CIO, Bettina, is having more networking problems than most small-company CIOs might experience. 

Even if Amelia and Rufus are slightly off base with respect to the Pain Hypotheses they've constructed, how wrong can they be? They have a better chance of grabbing the attention of their hiring managers Marcus and Bettina by talking about a specific, relevant business problem than by using their outreach letters to trumpet their own fabulousness!

Amelia and Rufus construct Pain Letters written directly and personally to just one person -- their own hiring manager. "It feels interesting to write to a specific person instead of to a faceless abyss," Amelia said. "I spent a long time looking at Marcus' LinkedIn profile, and doing that helped me write a better Pain Letter."

A Pain Letter has four parts:

1. a Hook to get your recipient's mind open and awake;
2. a Pain Hypothesis to show your hiring manager that you know his or her pain;
3. one Dragon-Slaying Story from your past (not even necessarily your professional past) that shows that you can not only identify and relate to someone else's pain, but that you've slain a similar dragon in the past, as well! and finally,
4. a Closing that invites your hiring manager to call or email  you if he or she is in need of help solving whatever Business Pain s/he's experiencing.

Your Pain  Letter goes by mail to your hiring manager's desk at work. In the same envelope with your Pain Letter and stapled to it goes your one- or two-page Human-Voiced Resume.

A Human-Voiced Resume is a resume with a human voice in it -- one that sounds like you and not every other business drone on the planet!

You can take charge of your job search the way tens or hundreds of thousands of other job-seekers have done. Our clients tell us that they get a positive response for about one in every Pain Letters they send.

That means three of your Pain Letters will go unread or unresponded-to, but that's okay; the muscles you grow researching organizations and composing Pain Letters is never wasted!

Amelia had this to say about her experiences writing Pain Letters and composing her Human-Voiced Resume:

I never felt like a robot or a business drone, but my resume sure made me sound like one! When I finally wrote my Human-Voiced Resume and began writing Pain Letters, I grew a few inches, I swear. I felt stronger. I'm a business person, not a desperate, begging job-seeker.

Now I write to hiring managers in a human voice, on the same level with them, and I don't fill out online job applications any more. I have three interviews so far, but the best part is that they aren't insulting wait-in-this-chair-for-an-hour screening interviews. They are face-to-face business conversations with the actual person I'll be working for if I take the job.

That's what I was after. I'm not going back to the old way of job-hunting. My mojo is too big for that now!

Questions and Answers

Who draws the images for Liz Ryan's stories?

Liz Ryan draws them with markers and colored pencils.

What is happening in the image at the top of this story?

A manager is ruminating on her problems and feeling overwhelmed. Next to her in her Inbox is a Pain Letter. Wait until she spots it -- her mood will improve dramatically then!

How can I learn how to write Pain Letters, write my Human-Voiced Resume and reach hiring managers directly?

Join us in the Four-Week Virtual Course "Writing My First Pain Letter" beginning May 7th, 2016 (USD $129) or the in-depth, 12-Week Virtual Course "Crafting Compelling Pain Letters," (USD $299) also beginning May 7th! If you don't want to wait until May 7th, you can opt to receive all four or all 12 lessons now!

All Human Workplace Four-Week and 12-Week Virtual Courses start again on May 7th, 2016! Learn to get a great job the new-millennium way, get ahead at work or start your own consulting business!

Reach us with your questions here!