Papering the World with Your Resume
OK, you need a job. Maybe it's your very first job or maybe it's your tenth. No matter. What most people do is create a very good resume and then email it or mail it to anyone and everyone imaginable. Good idea? Generally not.
Unless you are a former IRS tax attorney with 15 years experience in corporate taxes or a highly skilled high school Physics teacher or some other marketable, difficult to find professional, your mass mailings are likely to fall on deaf ears.
Here's why.
When you mass mail resumes, you will not be able to properly display your skills in a way that would be interesting to each individual employer. You will also not be able to customize your cover letter to the needs and particular skill set of the company or organization where you wish to work. This is problematic in several ways:
- The employer will probably be able to tell immediately that your resume and cover letter are identical to those sent to many other employers, since you will have few specifics in your cover letter that apply to only their company, other than, perhaps, the company name.
- The employer will not be impressed that you did not research their company before sending them your resume.
- The employer will not be able to see your skill set as uniquely suited for their company since you were forced to present only a general set of skills designed to appeal to a mass audience.
- You have unknowingly communicated to the employer that you have no strong interest in working for their company, you do not have enough confidence in your abilities to narrow your job search to a few well-chosen job opportunities and you do not mind wasting their time.
You probably did not mean to tell the employers all those negative things, did you?
To top it all off, doing all the work required (and spending all that money on postage) for a mass mailing of resumes and then getting little or no positive feedback can be very demoralizing. The last thing you need when you're looking for a new job is to be depressed. So why not, instead, set yourself up to succeed?
Although there are certainly exceptions to the scenario presented above, we recommend a more creative approach to job hunting. If you think of the process as the difference between search for a marital partner in a bar (aka "meat market") and meeting a potential life partner while you are both working as volunteers for your favorite charity, you will understand what I mean. Since most people spend as much, if not more, time at work than they do at home, the process of finding the right employer is no less important and no less personal.
The main reason that we have organized JobOpenings.net as we have, with links directly to job descriptions and company information, is that we feel very strongly that prospective employees should learn as much as they can about an employer before applying for a job there. Read the company website, search Google and Yahoo and MSN for press releases and new stories about the company. Look to see if the company is a member of the Better Business Bureau or a local Chamber of Commerce. In short, learn as much as you can.
After you have learned about the company, review both your resume and your cover letter and find ways to emphasize the skills, experience and education you have that are most applicable to that employer. Make sure your cover letter reveals the fact that you have done your homework. Then send in your resume, plan the date of your follow-up phone call and start thinking about your interview.
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