Knock Em Dead Cover Letters 11th edition

Cover Letters and Strategies to Get the Book You Want

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780996662321
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Knock em Dead Cover Letters 11th edition—cover letters and strategies to get the job you want. Step-by-step guide for how write cover letters and every type of letter you will use in a job hunt. How to build, edit and polish professional letters for maximum impact and how to use them to get four times the interviews.

Chapter 1

COVER LETTERS: THE SECRET
WEAPON OF YOUR JOB SEARCH

A recent survey of 1,000 executives revealed that 91 percent found cover letters to be valuable in their evaluation of candidates. Your cover letter can add information that isn’t in your resume and help establish a communication channel between two professionals with a common interest.

You can build the greatest cover letter in the world, but if you don’t learn how to use it properly, your job search will take longer, and the job you get and the money you earn may not be all you deserve. Cover letters are most effective when you develop a plan of attack that includes reaching out directly to hiring authorities. Whenever someone in a position to hire you reads your resume and cover letter, the odds of getting that interview increase dramatically, because you have skipped right over the initial hurdle—getting pulled from the resume database—and you are pitching directly to a recruiter or hiring manager.

The primary goal of every job search is to get into conversation, as quickly and as frequently as possible, with people in a position to hire you, because without conversations, job offers don’t get made. Difficulty reaching hiring authorities with the candidate’s message is one of the major reasons job searches stall. This happens when job searches involve themselves, almost exclusively, with posting resumes to resume banks and responding to job postings by uploading resumes into other resume databases.

However, when you can get your resume, personalized with a cover letter, in front of recruiters and hiring authorities, you differentiate yourself and dramatically increase your chances of landing an interview.

Recruiters and hiring managers overwhelmingly appreciate cover and follow-up letters. If all you are planning to do is load your resume into resume databases, a cover letter can help, but its main strength is in personalizing your message to a specific company, and ideally a specific person. When you develop a plan of attack for your job search that includes reaching out directly to decision makers, the personalizing touch of a letter really increases your bang.

WHO TO TARGET IN YOUR JOB SEARCH

The hiring titles to target during your job search are:

•Those titles mostly likely to be in a position to hire you. Usually this will be managers 1–3 levels above your target job.

•Those titles most likely to be involved in the selection process. Typically, this will be a manager working in a related department.

Your ideal target for direct communication is always someone who can hire you, although any management title offers opportunity for referral. Even HR contacts are valuable: They can’t make the hiring decision, but the pivotal nature of their jobs means HR professionals are aware of all areas within a company that could use your skills.

Any name and title you capture in a job search is valuable. With the Internet at your fingertips, there are countless ways to identify the names of people who hold the titles you need to reach, and if a name and title is of no use to you, hold on to it anyway: It might be just the contact another job hunter needs, so it can be a valuable commodity to leverage in your networking activities. Refer to Chapter 8 for much more information on how to find the names of hiring authorities. For more on leveraging your network and general networking strategies, see the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.

When an e-mail or envelope is opened, your cover letter will be the first thing looked at. It personalizes your candidacy for a specific job in ways that are impossible for your resume to do, given its formal nature and structure. The cover letter sets the stage for the reader to accept your resume, and therefore you, as something and someone special. It can create common ground between you and the reader, and demonstrates that you are well qualified and suitable for this job with this company.

Cover Letter Tactics

Address Your Target by Name

Your first step is to grab the reader’s attention and arouse interest, so whenever possible, address the letter to someone by name.

Approaching recruiters and hiring authorities directly is one of the very best tactics for getting job offers. Whenever you can find the names of any one of these titles involved in the recruitment and selection cycle, approach them directly and address them by name. Again, see Chapter 8 for much more information on this topic.

Make Your Letter Readable

Your customer, the reader, is always going to be distracted, so your letters need to be easily readable, focused, clear, and brief. Your letters should cut to the chase and be both friendly and respectful; they should never be unfocused, pompous, or sound like you swallowed a dictionary.

You can also grab the reader’s attention with the appearance of your letter, which should mirror the fonts and font sizes of your resume, giving you a coordinated and professional look.

Hardly anyone in a position to hire you is still young enough to comfortably read 10-point fonts. Anyone who has been staring at computer screens for ten or more years and has a dozen other priorities pressing for her attention is likely to have problems with tiny font sizes and elaborate but unreadable fonts. I recommend a minimum of 11- or 12-point font size. Applying these rules of matching font and font size to e-mail and print letters is easy to do and easily overlooked; but paying attention to the details pays dividends in a job search.

Emphasize Your Personal Brand

Branding is the process by which you consistently draw attention to the bundle of skills and behaviors that makes you a little different. All the job search letters you send—and yes, that includes every e-mail—are part of the packaging that captures the professional you. If your written words look good and carry a succinct, relevant, readily accessible message that shows you to be a down-to-earth professional with a clear sense of self, you’re well on the road to establishing a viable professional brand. When your actions differentiate you from others, your standing as a candidate is improved.

What makes you special?

•Just being smart enough to get your resume directly under the nose of a manager, who wants to make a good hire and get back to work, makes you special.

•Getting your resume to the hiring manager in a creative way and showing that you know what you are doing makes you special. Your letter might say in part, “I sent my resume by e-mail, but thought you might appreciate a screen break, so you’ll find a hard copy attached to this letter.…” Your e-mail might note, “As well as attaching my resume to this e-mail, in case you need a screen break, I’ve also sent it by traditional mail.”

•Writing a strong cover letter that presents your resume and establishes connectivity between you and the manager makes you special.

•Keeping your message clear and succinct makes you special.

•Following up your meetings with thoughtful letters that continue the messaging of a consummate professional makes you special and confirms your professional brand.

•Making sure in all your e-mails and print letters that the fonts are legible and coordinated with your resume makes you special.

Continuity in Written Communication

To ensure continuity in your written communications, make a commitment to:

1.Make the font you employ for contact information and headlines in both your resume and your cover letter the same.

2.Use the same font you chose for your resume’s body copy for the message in your cover letter.

3.Use the same font choices for all your e-mail communications. Smart idea: set the chosen font as your default e-mail font.

4.Make the font choices of your written communications consistent with the font choices you employ in e-mail and other electronic communications.

5.Get matching paper for resume, cover letters, and envelopes. Every office superstore has them. Sending your cover letter and resume by traditional mail when the opportunity arises is a great way to get your resume read, because most job hunters don’t think to do this. Today, hiring managers get far fewer resumes by mail, but a busy manager still likes a break from the computer screen, so more time is spent reviewing your resume. You’ll also need printed resumes to take to interviews.

Cut to the Chase and Stay On-Message

A good cover letter gets your resume read with serious consideration. Time is precious, which means recruiters and hiring authorities won’t waste it on a letter that wanders. Your letters should always reflect a professional whose resume will have something to say.

When you can, make a specific reference to a job’s key requirements. You want the reader to move from your letter to the resume already thinking, “Here’s a candidate who can do the job.” You can do this in either of two ways:

•Referencing a job’s most important requirements.

•Referencing the issues behind the job’s most important requirements.

If an advertisement, a job posting, or a telephone conversation with a potential employer reveals an aspect of a particular job opening that is not addressed in your resume (and for some reason you haven’t had time to update it), use a cover letter to fill in the gaps; the Executive Briefing (you’ll see a sample shortly) is an especially useful tool for this job.

Brevity is important. The letter doesn’t sell everything about you; it positions you for serious consideration, hoping to demonstrate that you grasp what is at the heart of the job’s deliverables. Leave your reader wanting more.

End with a Call to Action

Just as you work to create a strong opening, make sure your closing carries the same conviction. It is the reader’s last personal impression of you, so make it strong, make it tight, and make it obvious that you are serious about entering into meaningful conversation. Your letters should always include a call to action. Explain when, where, and how you can be contacted. You can also be proactive, telling the reader that you intend to follow up at a certain time if he or she has not already contacted you.

Every step of the job search and selection cycle offers opportunities to use letters to leverage your candidacy. A good, strong letter will get your foot in the door, differentiate you from other contenders, and ultimately help you define a distinctive professional brand. Although the majority of your communications will be e-mails, stand out by sending really important information in both e-mails and traditional letters. If nothing more, by delivering your message through two media, it gets read twice, which increases the odds of your candidacy being noticed and advanced.

Chapter 2

SIX HIGH-MILEAGE
COVER LETTERS

Corporate America’s wholesale adoption of the Internet as its primary recruitment vehicle has completely changed the way you need to approach your job search.

Every year, the number of resumes loaded into commercial resume databases grows exponentially. Currently, the larger databases each house more than 40 million resumes. Many individual corporate resume banks have more than 1 million resumes stored and social networking sites like LinkedIn have more than 100 million resumes and professional profiles registered. This has made life easier for recruiters, since they can usually find enough qualified can...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Read This First
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Cover Letters: The Secret Weapon of Your Job Search
• Chapter 2: Six High-Mileage Cover Letters
• Chapter 3: Know the Job, Know Your Customer
• Chapter 4: How to Identify and Build a Desirable Professional Brand
• Chapter 5: Elements of a Great Cover Letter
• Chapter 6: How to Build a Killer Cover Letter
• Chapter 7: How to Polish and Edit Your Letters for Maximum Impact
• Chapter 8: Use Cover Letters to Get Four Times the Interviews
• Chapter 9: Sending Out Cover Letters
• Chapter 10: Sample Letters
• Career Consultants and Resume Writing Services
• Internet Resources
• Index