There are several advantages to letters for getting interviews. The quality of interview derived from a personal sales letter is higher than that derived from any other source, including advertisements, friends, personnel agencies, and the telephone. This means a higher offer to interview ratio and less wasted time. Personal sales letters generate more predictable results than other methods of gaining interviews. You will be able to predict roughly how many interviews you will receive for each batch of sales letters you send out I will discuss this in more detail later.
When you send out personal sales letters, you will have little competition for interviews and little or no competition for the possible job offer. If you respond to an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal, for example, you may be competing with 500 or more job hunters for the same position. When you send a personal sales letter, the position may not even be advertised, the company's personnel department may not have been notified, and you may be the only candidate for the job. Imagine presenting your superior qualifications to the hiring executive under these circumstances!
In a personal sales letter you can tailor your experience and accomplishments to the exact specifications (function, level, type of company) of the job you are seeking. When you tailor your response to an advertisement, you are trying to fit someone else's requirements. In the personal sales letter you write to fill your requirements. Using sales letters instead of sending resumes also lets you avoid the problem of "knockout factors." I learned about knockout factors when I was a headhunter. These are raptors established by the PE that will prevent you from getting the interview. In other words, if you have one of these factors in your background, you will never be invited in. Further, these factors are frequently foolish and capricious, and they rarely have anything to do with your ability to do the job. They range from the worst of bigotry to such trivia as the part of the country you may be from. To make matters (more complicated, you will have no idea what the knockout factors might be in any given job situation. I have never seen a resume that didn't have, at least one or two knockout factors that have appeared on some company's list at one time or another.)
But the funny thing about knockout factors is that if you do get the interview, they are no longer in force. The reason for this is strictly psychological. No matter how adamant a PE may be about not seeing a candidate with one knockout factor or another, if he does so inadvertently, a powerful force take over human like or dislike. The bottom line is that if 'you have the qualifications and the PE likes you, you will be hired, knockout factor or no. This gets us back to the sales letter. It concentrates on presenting your resources in a brief and forceful manner against a single job objective. Its brevity greatly reduces the chances for some factor one you may even consider favorable eliminating you prior to the interview. Let me give you an example of the effectiveness of sales letters. Jim B. had no experience in job hunting. He had been with the same company for 14 years when he suddenly found himself out of a job. Jim mailed out 1,000 sales letters. Within six weeks he had five firm job offers, all of them at a considerable increase in salary. Even though Jim was out of work, and even though he had not been a supervisor under his former employer, he sought a job only at the supervisory level. All the job offers he received were in this category. Jim accepted the best of the offers. For a month afterward he had to turn down requests for additional interviews.
