There are two ways of doing this. One is to write different letters for entirely different industries. For example, one executive job seeker conducted a successful campaign in which he sought a job as a director of engineering and simultaneously did a mailing seeking a position as a management consultant. Ultimately he chose a high paying job as a management consultant. But the important thing to remember here is that he got much more exposure and interview experience, and when he finally made the decision to become a consultant he knew that this was the right route to go even though he did not immediately eliminate a potential job as a director of engineering.
Some of my own experiences illustrate just how far you can go here. At one point I decided to move into marketing management for a major aerospace company. I was perfectly willing to hold either of two jobs: vice president of marketing, or, failing this, marketing manager reporting directly to a vice president. Because the aerospace industry was in a recession at the time, I felt it wiser to not limit myself to the vice president's job. Accordingly, I wrote two slightly different letters, both emphasizing my marketing expertise, but one emphasizing my top level management experience, and the other not being quite so precise about what level of experience I had.
Now, what do you do in this case about disguising the name on the letter? After all, here I was applying for a vice president's job, which implied that I must write to the president; and at the same time I must write to the vice president of the same company in order to get the marketing manager's job. The two letters were alike, except for the stated job objective and the slant of the description of accomplishments. I used my full name and address with nothing changed. Eventually I got the job I sought, but on the way a funny thing happened. I'm including this story here as an encouraging case of a job candidate beating bureaucracy and as an amusing example of the strange things that can happen in a campaign for a superior job.
I received a telephone call from the vice president of marketing of a major aerospace corporation saying that he had received my letter and requesting that I come in for an interview. I told my wife I was interviewing with this company and left for an interview at approximately ten o'clock in the morning. The interview went quite well, and I was taken out for lunch by the vice president of marketing and the executive vice president of the same company. Now, normally I am not much of a cocktail drinker at lunch, because drinking of any sort makes me very sleepy and I am unable to work well in the afternoon. (Incidentally, I would advise you not to partake of alcohol during interviews.) But at the end of lunch, my two hosts each ordered a double martini, and in order not to be different I had a double martini as well. We had no sooner finished our martinis when someone at another table said, "Another round for those three gentlemen over there," and we were soon looking at another double martini. By the time we left lunch, these two fellows thought I was the greatest candidate in the world, and I thought I'd rather work with them than with anyone else I'd ever met. I worried about my ability to drive home, but as I left the interview the vice president of marketing grasped my hand and said, "You're our kind of guy. We like you and you'll have an offer in the mail and it will be one that you won't want to turn down."
I got into my car, managed to drive home, and was greeted by my wife who looked at me with a rather suspicious eye. "I thought you went to an interview," she said, and she presented me with a letter from the company where I had just interviewed.
Upon reading this I started laughing because, as I informed my wife, the president of this company had been and was still in Europe for the past three weeks enjoying a hard earned vacation. What had happened was that my letter addressed to the president had been screened out by the secretary and sent to personnel, and I had received the personnel manager's standard form letter answer. By the way, I did get an offer from this company. If I hadn't received a better one from another firm where I had sent letters both to the president and to the vice president of marketing, I would have taken it.
This incident illustrates many different things. But it certainly emphasizes just how far you can go in your job campaign. You may wonder whether, in any firm, the vice president of marketing and the president ever talked about these two different letters which I had sent to the same company. The answer is yes. As a matter of fact, at the company that finally hired me, the president and the vice president of marketing had compared notes. What did they think? They thought it was rather clever. Maybe that's one reason I got the offer.
