I'd Make a Great Employee -- Trust Me!

A big shock to a lot of job-seekers is the degree to which the job-search world has changed since the last time they job-hunted. The old job-search world is still with us, but it's creaky and riddled with termites. The time you spend filling out endless online forms and taking online tests, waiting for some hopeful word from the employer and generally being dissed and ignored is like a prison sentence.

I don't want you to waste your precious energy and mojo in that broken job search system. There is a new way to job-hunt that is more fluid and more organic, not to mention more human, more fun and more effective than the crusty, robotic Black Hole method.

When you lob a resume or application into the Black Hole, you know your chances of hearing anything back range from slim to none.

You also know that if you do hear anything, it's likely to be a terse and unfriendly auto-responder message like "Your materials have been received. If we want to talk to you, we know where to find you. In the meantime, go jump in a lake."

The techno-barbaric Applicant Tracking System world is dying. The good news for job-seekers is that that system is just as useless to hiring managers as it is to job-seekers. They don't like the Black Hole any more than you do. HR people don't like it. It's expensive, cumbersome and completely ineffective at separating the best applicants from the rest.

Imagine that you worked with two people on your last job. One sat on your left and the other on your right. The person to your left was the most switched-on, smart and friendly co-worker you could ask for. This person always had good ideas and worked hard for the company. The person on your right was an annoying slacker. Most of his day was spent avoiding doing any work or trying to find someone to blame for his mistakes.

Now think about how those two co-workers would describe their jobs in an Applicant Tracking System application. Since they both held the same job title during the same dates and at the same company, their entries in the Black Hole would look identical.

No keyword screener would be able to tell them apart! Any human being would, inside of thirty seconds.

Smart employers are already ditching their Black Hole recruiting systems for more human processes. Part of our business at Human Workplace is teaching them how to do that.

In the meantime, you will still run into lots of employers who tell job-seekers to go to a certain website and start filling out applications.

Don't do it!

Ignore those instructions. You can find your hiring manager using LinkedIn, Google and the company's own website, and write to him or her directly. You'll write a Pain Letter, which is a little like a cover letter but much more specific to the hiring manager's situation. It's more friendly and human than a cover letter is, too.

You'll send your Pain Letter in a white envelope along with your Human-Voiced Resume straight to the hiring manager's desk through the postal service. You'll avoid the Black Hole completely.

If you want to use this non-traditional job search approach (called STOP! Don't Send That Resume -- you will send your resume of course, just not into the Black Hole portal) you've got to shift your thinking in several important ways:

• You have to be willing to break a few rules, for starters. You have to revert out of your corporate brain into your human brain, and realize that you don't have to follow rules set by people you don't work for and don't even know.
• You have to be willing to sound like a human being and not a Star Wars battle drone in your Pain Letter and your Human-Voiced Resume.
• You have to take the time and a little bit of energy to find your hiring manager's name and street address and write to him or her directly, one human being to another.
• You have to shake a lot of toxic lemonade out of your veins -- after years of sucking down dogma about what you MUST and MUST NOT do to be acceptable to hiring authorities.

This is a great time to ask yourself: who do I want to work for, with and among? Do I want a stupid job doing stupid things, or do I want to step out of the standard box and work with creative and fun people who have lives outside of work and value them?

You get to choose, if you believe that you're worthy of a Human Workplace. I know you are. Can you step into the version of yourself that I see so clearly?

It might seem scary to do that, but what is the alternative -- to spend the rest of your career wishing that things were different than they are, or that you had a little more mojo or courage?

One of the flavors of toxic lemonade you're going to drain from your veins is the horrendous notion that the best way to describe yourself is by telling complete strangers what you think of yourself. I'm sure you know what I mean:

"I'm a successful, results-oriented professional who uses strategic thinking and insightful analysis to arrive at breakthrough solutions to mission-critical problems..."

EEEEWWWW!

That drivel doesn't sound like a living person wrote it. You aren't going to win in the new-millennium workplace writing dreck like that.

You've got to come out from behind the wall of fake-ass corporate jargon and tell us about the person behind the resume, if you want to play in the Human Workplace.

For starters, you're going to have to stop praising yourself.

I know, I know, we've been told for years that you have to toot your own horn. We've been taught a lot of garbage over the years -- that people are motivated by rewards and penalties, that every human activity can be reduced to an X + Y = Z equation and that our time in the business world is best spent measuring everything in sight.

All of this anti-human bullshiz is fading away as we wake up from our collective coma to remember that business is and always has been a human activity. If people aren't all the way invested, nothing good can happen. Traditional HR, leadership and OD teaching is meaningless and destructive when the energy on a team or in a workplace is broken, as it so often is.

Tooting your own horn in the form of uninvited self-praise is the surest sign of a job-seeker who's lost his mojo somewhere along the line, and doesn't know who he is without the braggadocio.

A person who knows him- or herself doesn't resort to self-praising language. S/he'd be horrified at the thought of it. In real life, do you compliment yourself? You might tell your best friend or your mom, "I'm so happy because I learned how to create this one gnarly report at work!"

That's a human emotion - happiness - not a boast. The only people who brag about themselves are people afraid that if they don't tell you they're wonderful, you won't reach that conclusion on your own.

You can't use a Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume to tell us what you think of yourself, not only because we don't care but because that approach doesn't work. I know that you've read about how to puff yourself up in thousands of books and articles. So what?

For years we read about rubbing a puppy's nose in his mess to train the puppy out of pooping in the house. Didn't work then, doesn't work now. We learned that spicy foods cause ulcers, which turned out to be caused by viruses. As a species we are always learning, if we're lucky!

"I am smart and a hard worker" is a losing job-search pitch, but "I'm fascinated by the Angry Chocolates story" is a great thing to say to your hiring manager at Angry Chocolates, if it's true.

"My friends say I'm easy to work with" is useless and gratuitous (your friends could be idiots or in prison, or both) but "I'm excited to see that you've got Angry Choco-Mints into Whole Foods across the inter-mountain West" is not.

Do you see a pattern? You're going to focus on your hiring manager in your outreach message, not on yourself. Your hiring manager might be the greatest guy in the world (a unisex term) but he can't focus on you unless you show up as someone who understands his situation. You'll use your Pain Letter to make it clear that you do.

We can't expect a busy hiring manager with dozens of tasks on his to-do list to stop and focus on you unless you make it clear right away that you've lived the hiring manager's movie yourself. When people are in pain -- and every hiring manager is, in one way or another -- they always have time to talk about pain relief. That's why your letter is called a Pain Letter. It's short and to the point, and talks less about your awesome background than about the person you're writing to.

Dear Jack,

I caught the last half of your speech at the Tulsa Natural Foods Expo, and I couldn't agree more with your observation that kelp is the new hemp. I've been a fan of Angry Chocolates since you had a booth at the downtown Farmer's Market, and I'm thrilled to see that you're in national distribution now. Hats off to you and your team!

With two new distribution centers coming online this year I can only imagine that your production and supply chain teams are stretched to the limit. When I was at Seasick Seagrass during its rapid-growth years, we had a similar challenge. We had to ramp production seventy-two percent between 2009 and 2010 without slipping on quality or disappointing our retail customers. We pulled it out and ended up winning Tulsa's Manufacturer of the Year in 2011.

If you've got a minute to talk about Angry's plans and production, let me know. My contact information is on my attached resume. Congratulations again on your tremendous success.

Best,

Declan McManus

Jack's days are packed from the minute he hits the office until the minute he leaves for home, but if you're anywhere in the ballpark with the Business Pain you've identified (and chances are excellent that you are) he'll make time for a phone call with you.

It might feel scary to write to a hiring manager like Jack the first time you do it, but when you get that excited return call or email message ("Declan, thanks for reaching out. Do you have time for coffee?") you can quickly become addicted to the Pain Letter way of life.

A great thing about the STOP! Don't Send that Resume approach is that you don't have to limit yourself to employers who actually have posted job openings. You can send a Pain Letter to anyone! Consultants use them, public speakers do, and contractors do too. It takes about a half hour of time and one postage stamp to start a conversation and potentially create your next job or assignment.

The best part is that as you recall and reclaim the Dragon-Slaying Stories in your past that make up the 'story' part of your resume (in Declan's case, the story about Seasick Seagrass's production ramp-up) your mojo will grow.

That's a big plus, because a new-millennium job search is powered by mojo. You don't need to bluster and brag about yourself anymore. Those days are over. Real people have human conversations with one another, and the energy flows like water. Maybe it's time for you to abandon the Black Hole that has treated you so badly over the years, step into your power and bring your whole self to a job search, at last.

Note from Liz Ryan:

My colleague Molly Campbell thinks the cookie eater in the image above looks like a crew member on the Starship Enterprise. Do you agree?

Have a great week!

Liz

Note from Michael Wilcox:

Thanks for your notes, cards, poems, stories and good wishes! We are so grateful for 200,000+ Followers here on LinkedIn and over 300,000 Human Workplace members so far in over 200 countries! That's more countries than are in the UN!

We are grateful to you for spreading the Human Workplace message, sharing Liz Ryan's articles and tools at your workplace and letting your CEO and HR folks know about us! We work with employers and job-seekers in equal proportions, so let us know how we can help you grow your flame and find, make or build your own Human Workplace.

Thanks!

Michael (michael@humanworkplace.com)

Our company, Human Workplace, was founded in 2012 to reinvent work for people. Our CEO and Founder Liz Ryan was a Fortune 500 HR SVP and is now the world's most widely-read career and workplace advisor.

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