"When you had a really difficult hiring problem, and you urgently needed someone with a particular background to fill an important spot, didn't you then follow up by contacting everyone whose resume came to your attention and seemed to show exactly what you were looking for?"
Invariably they reply:
"Well, of course then I did. Anyone would."
So I press the point:
"What if, instead of the Postal Service bringing that resume, it just blew in through the window...all tattered and dirty, along with a bunch of autumn leaves? Wouldn't you still call up the person if he or she looked like the possible solution to your problem?"
You know their answer. It would be yours too.
My first-hand experience as a retainer executive recruiter doing searches at the $100,000+ level for the past 24 years has proven beyond doubt that mailed-in employment inquiries do get attention.
In about one out of every two searches I conduct, the ultimate decision-maker who hires me hands over at least one...and more often several...resumes he or she has collected before calling me in. Approximately a third of those have been forwarded by outside directors, employees, customers, suppliers, lawyers, accountants, etc. (the product of personal contact and networking). The majority, however, were merely delivered by mail. And of course I'm not called...and never see the resume when anyone is so tempting that there's an interview, offer, and acceptance without any need for me.
It's all a matter of timing.
The key advantage of direct mail is not how strong a medium it is, but the fact that it's strong enough, if it reaches a decision-maker at exactly his or her moment of need.
Moreover, it doesn't matter what method you use, if you reach the decision-maker when she has no need. Even you-in-person...with all your persuasive logic, charm, wit, elegant grooming, and both your new shiny shoes...won't achieve a sale, if your host isn't seeking what you're selling. That's always the problem...with most networking calls, and with most mailed-in resumes, too.
On the other hand, your resume, dog-eared and folded, that a CEO happens to find protruding from the pocket on the seat ahead of him when he flies the Concorde to Paris could net you an exciting phone call. The same lucky break might also occur if you happen to sit next to him on the flight...assuming of course that he talks to seat-mates.
The value of direct mail is not in how it's delivered, but rather in the great number of potential buyers it can reach simultaneously, in order to stimulate one or two of the rare few who happen to have the right need at the right moment.
Consider what corporations do. The President and the Chief Marketing or Sales Officer may personally contact key accounts that provide enormous volumes of business. Customers who buy fairly often will be handled by the direct salespeople...perhaps 150 to 300 people spread across the country. And finally, to reach customers in out-of-the-way places or who order only once-in-a-while...customers it isn't feasible to serve with salespeople...companies rely on direct mail, or telephone marketing, or a combination of both.
But even telephone calls have serious limitations. You can only call so many people per day. Your listener will seldom stay on the wire long enough to hear a comprehensive sales pitch for a complex product. And afterward there's nothing left behind on paper to refresh his memory and encourage follow-up.
So the method companies turn to when they want to cover the whole market at once, to get where they can't send a salesperson, and yet deliver their entire selling message and have it remain afterward in writing-is a wide-ranging direct mail campaign.
Indeed, direct mail is effective, or it wouldn't be so widely used. The proof is in your mailbox every day. If direct mail weren't effective, the companies who send it would soon be out of business, having thrown their money away on something that doesn't work.
What kinds of products are sold through direct mail? Not the inexpensive, uncomplicated things that everyone needs every day. Soap, corn flakes, diet cola, floor wax, and nationwide "fast food" chains are best advertised in TV commercials aimed at the entire population. Such products are easily-understood. Just about everybody is a potential purchaser. And the whole story can be boiled down to 30 seconds or a minute. Forget the "cents-off" coupons. The long letters in your mail-box are not about cake mix and laundry detergent.
What are those long letters about? Seldom-purchased products and services that:
- only a few people out of the vast population are likely to need and be able to afford at the moment they get the advertisement, and
- require more explanation and persuasion than can be crammed into a 30-second or one-minute TV spot, or even into a one-page magazine ad
You see the analogy. An executive is a seldom-acquired item...very costly, unique, and relatively complicated to understand and evaluate. The best way that the marketing geniuses of the twentieth century have figured out to spread the news about such an item is by direct mail advertising. And the amount you receive is dollars-and-cents proof that it's effective.
The Three-Fold Marketing Science of Direct Mail
Compared to the Stardust world of cover-girls, cowboys, sunsets, laundry-room drama, and bar-room humor of the TV commercials and magazine ads for consumer products, the fact-packed mailings that promote business publications and economic newsletters look pretty prosaic and predictable.
And they are. Direct mail of all the marketing arts...has been the most quantifiably studied and refined over the past 50 years. Today it's about as close to a science as anything that's also highly creative can possibly be.
Every time an advertiser sends out a multi-million-letter mailing, she first prepares several different "test" versions and tries each one on thousands of potential customers. She finds out which will bring in the most orders per $1,000 spent on paper, printing, and postage.
Therefore, each national mailing you receive represents a new high-water mark in the advertiser's knowledge of what does and doesn't work in delivering a complicated sales pitch by letter.
There are a lot of intricacies to selling by direct mail. I won't bore you with more information than we really need for our purposes, except to say that knowledge on the subject breaks down into three categories:
- Copy writing effectiveness,
- Prospect identification (list selection), and
- Statistical assessment.
But we will take advantage of the most fundamental principles direct mail experts have learned with respect to points 1 and 3.
But before we go one step further, let's see whether direct mail is something you should seriously consider.
The Networking vs. Direct Mail Trade-Off
If you reach someone when he or she has no need and knows of nobody else who has a need, there's no sale. And it doesn't matter whether you get there in person or in writing.
The advantage of a personal visit...networking...is its human interaction. Your host may not have or know of a job that could advance your career. But seeing and befriending you...and wanting to do a favor for the person who referred you...she can usually be persuaded to pass you along to several others. Your contacts will, indeed, "increase geometrically." But "geometrically" only until you have more people to see than you have hours to go see them. After that, you've got strictly a linear progression of appointments to make, two or three a day...probably ten to fifteen a week.
The advantage of direct mail, on the other hand, is that you can reach an unlimited number of people simultaneously. Therefore, you can inflate that number to the point of very high probability that you'll reach some of the rare few who actually do need what you're selling at the very moment you happen to make your contact. And when you finally do reach someone with an immediate need for what you're offering, that person is likely to be interested...even though no mutual acquaintance made the introduction. Is there a downside to direct mail?
Will reaching the potential decision-makers in lots of companies make you seem:
- too available?
- too eager?
- unwanted and unloved?
- desperate?
- none of the above?
No chief executive nor anyone else in control of a job that might represent a valuable career advancement for you is sitting breathlessly by his "IN box" waiting for your letter and resume to arrive...that is, unless he's one of the infinitesimally rare few who right then happens to have that job wide open, urgently needing someone like you to fill it.
The person who doesn't need what you're offering will merely throw away your mailing, or pass it along for filing and a courteous "no thank you." He's not going to pick up the phone and ask his peers in other companies and his contacts in the leading executive recruiting firms if they also got your mailing, and what did they think of it, and what are they going to do about it, and weren't you stupid not to have known in advance that he and they didn't need anyone like you right now.
The fact is, either he'll do you some good, or he'll do you no harm. And in the "some good" department, you may be pleasantly surprised. If a colleague in his own organization, or a friend, or an executive recruiter calling him for suggestions happens to mention a need for someone like you, the person who's just received your resume and doesn't need you himself will probably pass your resume along, just as one of your networking contacts would.
And if your mailing is so impressive that the recipient or his personnel department saves a copy for a few weeks or months, he might wind up referring several inquirers to you. When extremely well done, direct mail can, with luck, take on a bit of the same "geometric" dimension networking has.
No. A lot of people worry needlessly about this possibility, so let's examine it.
First of all, every retainer recruiter will automatically assume you've sent your mailing to all the other retainer firms and to a wide range of companies, because it's in your best interest to do so. No two retainer firms are ever working simultaneously on the same project; therefore, you have to reach all those firms to reach all their projects.
Of course, it's unthinkable that you would simultaneously be presented..."sold" at the rate of $5,000 to $10,000 and more per candidate... to more than one client of the same retainer recruiting firm for the reasons we looked at earlier. But there's no client PR damage to either firm when two different retainer firms present you to two different companies. If either or both of these companies should find out, they can't blame their own retainer firm for what a different one has done. And of course, the companies normally won't find out, because they're competing for the same talent at the same time. Therefore, they're certainly not exchanging information on candidates.
Moreover, the idea that you may also have written to her client company won't scare away the one-and-only recruiter in a sizable retainer firm who, for the moment, has the right to deal with you. She always expects you to have taken that perfectly logical step. And she has no reason...or method...to reward you if you haven't. Indeed, going directly to companies is the only way you can possibly break through the barrier that confines you to this recruiter and her client company, while putting you "off-limits" to all the other recruiters in her firm and to all their client companies.
Believe it or not, if you're really a good candidate, a retainer recruiter is less worried that his client won't be amazed when he identifies you, than he is that the client will think he's a dope for not finding you when you've already made yourself obvious to the client company.
The bottom line on trying to be more attractive by being less known:
It doesn't work!
Known is like pregnant; you're known or you're not known...by each person individually. The way the relationships we're interested in work, each player in the game either knows of you or he doesn't; they're never going to gang up on you and take a poll to see how many know about you.
What will make you less attractive is being unemployed a long time, and the fewer people who know about your fine background and your availability, the more likely that might happen.
The only circumstance where being widely know is dangerous to your economic health is when a recruiter operating on contingency submits you...price-tag attached...to companies who never specifically engaged him to do so. Getting around on your own is altogether different. It's great. Circulate!
You may never need to conduct a direct mail campaign to advance your career; although it is one of the "Rites of Passage" you should be aware of.
But you and every other executive should always have a persuasive sales-representative-on-paper standing by; ready to go any where...by hand or by mail...to do the best possible job of communicating your abilities and achievements to people who haven't witnessed them firsthand. That's a resume. And its purpose is to be where you can't be and sell when you're not there. Direct mail marketing is the science of doing.
