To start with, this article is a sequel to my first article titled Receiving 100s of Rejections To Your Applications? Read This! It’s only been about a week since publishing that article and it reached over 800 shares in such a short span of time. I doubt it had anything to do with the catchy title.
OK, maybe Just a little…
In that post, I talked about the fact that you are using wrong methods to reach out to employers, the fake job posts, and the real recruitment cycle.
Today, I will talk about the importance of the Letter of Interest and show you how it actually works! In my next article, I will then talk about how to craft the perfect letter of interest and which tools to use to distribute the letter of interest.
So, go ahead and quickly read that article I linked above and come back here because I am still going to be here waiting for you.
This is my second post at Work It Daily so I have to exceed the already very high expectations. I’ll sure try. But if you find value in this post at the end, please feel free to share.
Very well… Let’s get started already. Letter of Interest is one tool that can absolutely land your dream job. Yes, I just used that cliché phrase; land your dream job… Don’t hold that against me but I couldn’t find another phrase in my English vocabulary to emphasize the power of this tool.
Maybe visuals will work better:
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Let’s say you want to work for my employer PwC Consulting as a consultant. Assuming that you possess all the required experiences, skills, education, and determination, the usual recruitment process looks something like this for you.
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See, the problem with this structure is that all those stages in pink with HR are;
- Extremely competitive
- Sometimes very lengthy
- Just a frustrating process really…
If you started your process in this funnel from the top left corner, I’d say you have about 0.001 chance to make it to Hiring Manager interviews. Once you reach hiring manager interviews, your chances are significantly higher. As in, around 100 times better. I’d say, as a hiring manager, me and the partner for our business unit hire about 1 out of 5 applicants whom we interview. Sometimes it so happens that we just hire anyone who is lucky enough to pass the HR stages.
One of the reasons you will always have a higher passing ratio with Hiring Manager as opposed to HR is because we speak the same language.
HR and Hiring Managers look for completely different things. HR looks for certain character types, like
ENTJ or
ENTP to determine whether you are suitable for management consulting, whereas hiring managers are usually too busy to even know what those character types are. Also, my personal view, I don’t really believe in finding certain character types for consulting. If it was entirely up to me, I’d be looking at getting all the character types in alphabet to create the diversity. If we all possess the same perspective then we wouldn’t be able to get creative and move fast.
I will give you a weird analogy here. A horse cart with ten horses pulling it will go as fast as a cart with 200 horses pulling it. Every team needs a “that person.” What I mean by “that person” is; a certain member of the team must be the strongest in a certain area. For example, I am the presentation guy in our team. I am also pretty creative. I love presenting in front of an audience, to our clients, in general I just like presenting and I am pretty good at it. If you think I am being side-tracked here, then let me just tie this back to the content flow. This “that-person” can hardly be known by HR.
HR wouldn’t really know what kind of character that we are missing in our small business unit. In addition to usual skills, we may need the next excel master in our team or the next presentation master. We may need a proposal person or client pleaser. We may need a completely radical thinker with incredible creativity or we may need a business developer. See, in this short paragraph I must have mentioned at least ten different Myer’s Briggs character types.
Alright, so what am I suggesting?
I am suggesting that certain rules are meant to be broken, pushed, stretched…
Will you go to jail if you entirely skip the pink stages above and get in touch with the hiring manager? What is the worst that can happen? Will they blacklist you for having contacted the hiring manager directly?
Absolutely not.
If anything, I usually get quite impressed when I see a really well-written letter of interest sent to me through LinkedIn or an e-mail. I even get phone calls from potential candidates from time to time. A person who has the guts to call me on my mobile just to pitch her background definitely is worthy of a shot. She will still take the analytical tests but at least we hiring managers can pull some strings to completely eliminate the pink stages for her.
So, that’s why the Letter of Interest sent directly to Hiring Managers can just be the best bypass operation you take. Wow, this was a nice punch-line, wasn’t it?
Finally, before you go, I have one more awesomeness for you. If you want to take your career to the next level and achieve a thriving career with multinational companies then I strongly recommend you join my free 3-day video training series at
Landing Interviews Guaranteed. It already transformed the lives of over 1,400 people…
See you there.
P.S. Please stay tuned. The next article will be about how to craft the best Letter of Interest. Until then, I’d really appreciate if you share this article with your friends.
Disclosure: This post is sponsored by a CAREEREALISM-approved expert. You can learn more about expert posts here.
Photo Credit: Bigstock
