Frustrating Job Search? Try a Pain Letter

It's no picnic to go from working full-time not having a job at all. It's jarring. It's bracing. It rocks you right smack down from wherever you were on Maslow's hierarchy to the bottom rung. That's a blow to your body and your psyche. It's disorienting to have a place to go every day and a steady income and then have both those things disappear at once.

Any time your income and your professional identity evaporate at the same time, you're going to be knocked off your feet to some degree. It would be almost impossible not to be. We don't have a good model for people transitioning out of the old economy into the new-millennium workplace. There's no roadmap - that's what we are building at Human Workplace, and why I am so fanatical about the topic.

I talk to wonderful people at job clubs and workforce development agencies who are using out-of-date job search tactics and worse, believing that their failure to get a good job by following the rules somehow makes them defective or less than qualified.

That's hogwash, of course. That kind of thinking makes my blood boil. I was an HR leader forever and I remember thinking "I'm not sure how all this technology is going to make for a better hiring process" fifteen years ago. Now we find ourselves in the post-apocalyptic Thunderdome hiring arena, where mechanization has almost completely taken over the standard corporation or institutional hiring process.

We don't take the time to address job candidates by name and remember their life and work situations, or create relationships with them while we're sorting out whether it makes sense for us to work together. Somehow we've let the Godzilla machinery take over what should be the most human task imaginable -- fitting great people and meaty assignments to one another.

Hiring should be juicy and fun, but it's too often dessicated and slow, bureaucratic and formal. Godzilla has taken over to the point where employers clamor about talent shortages while brilliant people go months without work. No one likes the current system, not the HR folks who staff it or the hiring managers who wait months for qualified candidates, and least of all the poor job-seekers who labor under the Black Hole recruiting machine.

But no one seems to know how to shift the energy and make recruiting more human. That is the other gospel we preach in our company, but today I am talking to job-seekers who are sick of the talent-repelling Black Hole recruiting apparatus. There must be a better way for you to reach hiring managers, and of course there is.

We call it a Pain Letter -- not a cover letter. Your Pain Letter goes in the mail directly to your hiring manager's desk, together with your Human-Voiced Resume. Your resume has that name because it reads like a person is talking to you, not like the standard Clone Trooper resume.

If you want to send one of these Pain Letters to a hiring manager, and I highly recommend that you try it, you have to get a little altitude on yourself and the assignments you're pursuing. The idea behind a Pain Letter is that no business or organization fills a job opening because it's fun. Businesses and institutions have problems. We call these problems Business Pain.

Companies will spend money to alleviate their business pain. If you can get reasonably good at Pain-Spotting, and there is no doubt you can, you can write to hiring managers about the actual issues on their desks, not about how your credentials line up against an endless and let's face it, fairly delusional list of Essential Qualifications in an opaque and sleep-inducing job ad.

You'll send your Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume to your hiring manager, whose name and title you'll snag on LinkedIn, and in your Pain Letter you'll talk not about yourself but about the guy you're writing to. (I use 'guy' as a unisex term.) Here are the five things we hear over and over again from people who have gotten into the Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume groove and started writing to hiring managers directly:

1) I feel like it's me on the page, and not a sterile version of myself. I'd rather have a hiring manager know right up front who I am before I waste time (mine and his or hers) going any further in the process.

2) When I get a response to my Pain Letters, the conversation is at a dramatically higher level immediately than the standard 'Here's the next step in our hiring process' conversation. The manager already knows I know the territory.

3) It's very good for me to do the research these Pain Letters require. It's growing business-intelligence muscles I need anyway.

4) I am getting better at Pain-Spotting, and it's an empowering feeling.

5) As soon as I sent my first Pain Letter, I realized that I was a consultant -- not just that, but that I've been a consultant for years!

What does a Pain Letter do?

When you send a Pain Letter to a hiring manager as a physical letter that lands on his or her desk, there's a good chance your target hiring manager will read it or at least open it. No one gets paper mail anymore. The hiring manager reads your letter and you're immediately talking to him or her like a human being, acknowledging that manager and his or her team on what they're doing out in the marketplace.

That's not fake or a gimmick; if you don't feel it, don't send the letter. You're saying "I see what you're doing and it's pretty cool, and it resonates with me." Who gets enough acknowledgement for what we do and how hard we work? No one. I know you don't get enough of it. So your hiring manager gets a little human acknowledgement from you, a person writing from outside the perimeter, and now your hiring manager's mind is open. Your hiring manager has a little aperture open in his or her head, a little window of possibility that gets him or her to keep reading.

The big question for would-be Pain Letter writers is "Can I step outside the velvet ropes?" We have been trained since childhood to follow the rules, even rules made by shadowy no-name undersea creatures from nineteen-fifties horror film. Weird! As my friend David said to Molly and I over lunch in New York last week, "Why do we follow these fifty-year-old resume rules so closely? We don't even know whose rules they are."

It's true, and on top of that it's 2013. We are humans first and working people second. If people don't get you, they don't deserve you and in your gut you know that's true.

You can bring yourself to your job search, and your flame can only grow when you do. If you want more information on writing Pain Letters, there's a free downloadable E-Book with twenty pages of Pain-Letter-writing advice . (It's the signup link for our Human Workplace newsletter. If you already subscribe to the newsletter, don't despair. Our new E-Book How to Write a Pain Letter will come to you as a newsletter subscriber in the next edition of the newsletter!)

In this story on the Denver Post blog is a link to a free downloadable E-Book called Jump-Start Your 2014 Plan.

If you like the Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume ideas and you want to learn more about them and the rest of the stuff we teach and do at Human Workplace, visit us at https://www.humanworkplace.com and reach us at [email protected]. Here are five ways to get involved with Human Workplace right now!

1. SUBSCRIBE to our monthly newsletter and receive the free downloadable 20-page E-Book "How to Write a Pain Letter." The E-book is in the subscription confirmation page for the newsletter.
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Reach us: [email protected]

Our 12-week virtual coaching group Crafting Compelling Pain Letters kicks off on Saturday, October 26, 2013. As a participant in that group you'll get a new lesson every Saturday for 12 weeks, leading you through the process of researching and writing your own pithy Pain Letters.

There are two versions of Crafting Compelling Pain Letters -- the standard Advanced Version with twelve 8-to-18-page lessons and several exercises each week, and the new Quick Start edition with twelve two-to-five-page lessons and one exercise each week. The standard Advanced version of Crafting Compelling Pain Letters costs $299. The new Quick Start edition of Crafting Compelling Pain Letters costs $149. Questions? Please reach Michael Wilcox at [email protected].