Career Q&A: Are Job Fairs Worth Attending?

“Matt: I keep seeing advertisements for various job fairs around town.  Are these worth attending?  And how about all of these ‘pink slip parties’ and similar events I’m seeing spring up where groups of unemployed people get together for drinks and such?”

Let’s start with the first part of the question, related to the value of attending job fairs.  While these events can sound highly tempting, and the Puget Sound area (like most metro areas) plays host to at least a few dozen such gatherings each year, I’ll confess I can’t think of a single case over the years where a client of mine attended a job fair and walked away with a viable, appropriate new lead to show for it.  Has anybody out there had a different experience?  Do you have a great success story to share, related to job fairs?  If so, please feel free to post a comment about your experience and enlighten us.  From my perspective, however, I find job fairs to be an almost complete waste of time for the average professional-level job seeker.  In fact, in some cases, I’m concerned that they can actually damage one’s search efforts — since it doesn’t do much for your confidence level to stand in a line of hundreds of job seekers at Meydenbauer Center, waiting for a 30-second turn to drop your resume in a basket!

So if these job fairs are so ineffective, why are there so darn many of them?  Well, for starters, it’s important to recognize that job fairs are viewed as a form of public relations by many companies and a way to get their name out in the community, even if they aren’t actually engaged in any current hiring activity.  They are also a way that organizations can pay lip service to certain topics, like diversity, and to publicly reinforce the notion that they engage in open, non-discriminatory hiring practices.  And lastly, on a more optimistic note, there’s no question that job fairs CAN be an effective way to attract lower-level candidates for hourly positions.  In fact, every job fair I’ve attended (especially the big ones) seems to be primarily intended to help companies find staff at this level, whether it involves the recruitment of custodial staff, call center reps, housekeepers, security guards, or valet parking attendants.  For professionals at the mid-to-senior-level, though, you can expect pretty slim pickings.

Long story short, these are the reasons I’d steer most of my clients away from such events, unless the job fair in question has a specific focus to it like high-tech or accounting that would be right up somebody’s occupational alley.  If you need to attend at least one job fair just to get it out of your system, however, go for it.  Or better yet, drag a friend or two along who’s also looking for work so that you can divide and conquer throughout the course of the day.  And how does one hear about such events?  Well, aside from the standard announcements in the media, one can always do a Google search on a phrase like “job fair in Seattle” or visit the WorkSource calendar here for a list of upcoming hiring events.  Remember that most fairs usually have their own websites, too, so you should visit these sites in advance to do some reconnaissance and make sure the list of participating employers is one that has at least some bearing on your own individual background and career goals.

As for that OTHER breed of career event that was asked about, that’s something of a different animal.  When you combine the current economy with a host of new social media tools that can help get the word out about events, in a hurry, it’s no great surprise that a ton of unorthodox and creative new events have popped up where enterprising individuals have devised new ways for job hunters to support one another — and to entice employers and potential employees to spend time in the same room together.  For a sampling of these types of creative new events, check out sites like Pink Slip Party and Seattle Job Social and Job Club Seattle.

Are these newfangled casual job fair + unstructured format + alcohol events worth attending?  It’s too early to say, especially since these gatherings wary wildly in terms of their format and their specific intended purpose.  If nothing else, though, we suspect they’re a lot more fun than traditional job fairs, and one probably can’t go wrong by checking a few of them out to see if they some value to the search process.  We also can’t help but relish the slightly irreverent tone many of them take towards unemployment as a general concept.  Given the cloud of grave seriousness surrounding most job-related events, we appreciate how some of these non-traditional get-togethers are trying to lighten things up and eradicate the stigma of being jobless, if nothing else!  So with these types of events, you might have to play the field a bit to see which ones fit your style more than others.  And again, we’d welcome any comments from people who have attended these kinds of functions and have some feedback to share…

Website Review: PDFDig.com

Interested in comparing your resume against those of your peers/competitors?  Or finding a sheet of helpful tips for introverted job seekers?  Or reading through a “career change checklist” to help plot your course to a new occupation?  If so, there’s a great new website called PDFDig that I’d recommend you get acquainted with!

This website was just brought to my attention the other day by a good samaritan who added a comment about the resource to one of my blog postings from long, long ago.  And after playing around with the site for just a few days, I’m hooked!  The concept is an incredibly simple one.  Almost deceptively so, in fact, since all the PDFDig site appears to do is scour the Web for PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files on every topic under the sun and then collect them all in one place for easy searchability.  It’s basically like a “Google” for PDF files — and while you can search Google exclusively for PDF files, as well, it requires a few extra steps.  So for now, I’d recommend the PDFDig site for this purpose, which makes the process even more simple and streamlined.

So pay the site a visit and just start searching away on topics that interest you.  You’ll be amazed at what you find out there among the millions of Acrobat files stored in cyberspace.  In addition to the subjects I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’ve turned up some great documents on how to write a business plan, how to negotiate a raise with your boss, how to get a job in grantwriting, how to determine the right rates to charge as a freelancer, how to find work in France, and so on, and so forth.

The sky’s truly the limit in terms of the resources you might uncover, and while there are no guarantees in terms of the quality of what you turn up, many of the resources look extremely credible and professional.  The sheer depth of written work the site catalogues, in fact, reminds me of the old saying “If an infinite number of monkeys were to start banging away on an infinite number of typewriters, they’d eventually rewrite the complete works of Shakespeare…”

Give to Get: Game Theory

Ready for esoteric networking commentary, part two?

While composing my previous article, about the tie-in between the famous “give to get” networking principle and the “potlatch” rite practiced by a number of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, it struck me that there was one other geeky example I could share where modern job search advice seems to intersect with the annals of art, science, and history.  Again, folks, I realize it’s a sickness, so forgive me.  But I just love it when I spot a new twist or juicy, corroborating case study about networking that I haven’t seen anybody talk about before out there…

So this time around, we’re going to talk about the fascinating world of game theory.  If you really want to know more about this field, click here, but the cliff-notes version is that it involves scientists and mathematicians applying complex formulas, algorithms, and simulations to try to uncover the keys to successful strategy — be it of the military, corporate, board game, or “winning in life” variety.  And in these studies, if you peer closely enough, you’ll find empirical echoes of the “give to get” networking philosophy playing out, as well.

One famous experiment, for example, demonstrated that the most successful and stable long-term strategy for individuals living within a community was to always cooperate with the people around them as the first option.  To quote a few relevant passages about this study, again from Wikipedia: “Greedy strategies tended to do very poorly in the long run while more altruistic strategies did better, as judged purely by self-interest.”  Additionally, after conducting the experiment, Robert Axelrod [game theory expert and professor of Political Science & Public Policy at the University of Michigan] reached “the oxymoronic-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious.”

How accurate or controlled was this particular experiment?  I can’t say for sure, since I can barely remember how to do long division, much less understand the level of math involved in this kind of thing.  But setting that issue aside for a moment, if you re-read the paragraph above, there’s one part that really caught my attention and that relates back to the key point of this article, which is how these concepts relate to business and career networking.  If you read the quote again, you’ll notice that the experiments in question weren’t examining the benefits of cooperation from an ethical standpoint or for the sake of community welfare as a whole.  They were testing the effectiveness of cooperation (i.e. reciprocity) solely as a self-interested strategy designed to help the individual in question “win” and satisfy their OWN personal wants and needs.

This, to me, is the really intriguing part.  According to these experiments, even if one truly does view networking solely as a means to an end, from a purely self-interested “how can I leverage the people around me to get help/leads/referrals?” point of view, these studies still suggest that the key to success is to practice a help-others-first strategy as opposed to just going out and strip-mining your Rolodex for favors.  Scientifically proven?  Absolutely beyond dispute?  Directly relevant to your own daily networking efforts?  I’ll leave those questions up to you to answer, but I thought it was some interesting food for thought, at the very least…

Give to Get: The Potlatch Principle

Given the avalanche of books, literature, and blog articles that have been produced on the subject of “networking” over the past decade, it can be tough to find something new to contribute to the discussion, at times!  By now, most professionals (especially those in transition) have heard the same key networking themes dogmatically repeated dozens, if not hundreds, of times during their search:

1)  60-80% of all jobs come through the “hidden” job market of  networking and personal contacts;
2)  Social networking websites (e.g. Facebook, Biznik, LinkedIn) are now indispensable tools in the networking arsenal; and
3)  Your networking shouldn’t be 100% one-sided; you should practice a “give to get” philosophy for best results

It’s around the third point above, however, that I wanted to add a few thoughts that I haven’t seen talked about much in the networking literature to date.  As an avid fan of history, and sociology, I’m always on the lookout (to a fault, probably) for connections between supposedly “new” job hunting principles and other aspects of civilization that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years.  To me, finding these connections is not just fun, but helps me get a better grasp on why certain principles work, how long they’ve worked, and how best to explain them to other people who may not be as familiar with them on a day-to-day basis.

So on that note, let’s talk for a second about the idea that we can all get more of what we want out of life by focusing on giving things to others, versus getting things ourselves.  Frankly, I think most of us would agree that this notion makes sense.  Nobody likes being used, after all, and I’m sure all of us have had the experience of having been asked for a big favor by somebody who then disappears without a word of thanks, a thoughtful follow-up note, or a single gesture of reciprocity.  When this happens, too, I’m sure we all tend to kick ourselves and promise that we’ll never lift a finger to help the ingrate in question again, right?  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I certainly have a “mental blacklist” (thankfully a very short one!) of people from the past to whom I gave, and gave, and gave, and didn’t ever really seem to “get back” from.  So to avoid becoming one of these people, myself, I consciously focus on trying to help other people and reciprocate as much as possible, knowing that these efforts are mostly likely to keep the door open for future favors.

As for the origins of this whole two-way networking notion, one could certainly argue that Dale Carnegie was the first person who brought the “give to get” concept to the masses in his 1936 classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  Since then, numerous authors have slapped their own spin on the same concept and re-branded it.  For example, there are variations on the theme found in both Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” as well as Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” books.  You’ll also find a metaphysical twist on the principle running throughout all of the “Law of Attraction” titles that have come out in recent years.  Every few decades, like clockwork, somebody seems to resuscitate this pearl of interpersonal wisdom, package it for the next generation, and sell a few million dollars’ worth of books and self-help videos.

My belief, however, is that there’s a community out there that’s got even Mr. Carnegie beat in terms of espousing the “give to get” concept in an organized way.  Who might that be?  Growing up in Juneau, Alaska, we spent a fair amount of time in school studying the history of the local Native tribes, and I remember being taught that these communities routinely held a special type of party called a “potlatch” where the hosts would (among other rites) make a point of giving away lavish gifts to all of their guests, almost to the point of impoverishment.  The more valuable the gifts given, the greater the esteem and respect would be accorded to the hosts.  To cite the relevant Wikipedia entry on the subject, in a Potlatch culture “the status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources.”

So when it comes to the idea that giving freely to other people is the best route to achieving success, both among one’s network and among the community at large, I think the Pacific Northwest tribes get the prize for fleshing this idea out first in formalized fashion.  In fact, I’ll confess that whenever I hear the “give to get” guideline cited by various networking experts out there, I automatically translate the concept into “The Potlatch Principle” in my head, since this label helps me both understand it, as well as remember and practice it in my own business ventures.

Pretty esoteric stuff, I realize, and I wouldn’t be surprised a bit if some of you immediately start forwarding me some literature proving that the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or some other ancient civilization was routinely preaching/practicing the two-way networking schtick even earlier!  As I mentioned, though, it’s hard to find anything terribly original to add to the sea of networking advice out there, so I thought I’d dust off my keyboard today and give it my best shot…

Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Seriously!

While I suspect the majority of my readers out there are between jobs at the moment, given the focus of this blog, I wanted to take a quick detour and pen a short article aimed at sharing some advice for those of you in the working ranks, as well…

Amazingly, what I’m finding is that a lot of people who still have jobs, at present, don’t quite seem to fully appreciate how tough the job market has gotten over the past year.  Job hunters, am I wrong about this?  Seems hard to believe, I know, given the incessant news coverage of the country’s economic issues.  But I make this claim based on the fact that I continue to encounter a steady stream of people who either a) are planning to quit their job because they don’t like it very much or b) are planning to abandon their current line of work in the hopes of making a significant career change.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m only speaking in macro-level generalities here, not pretending that my viewpoint applies to every individual’s unique situation, since there are always special circumstances that can apply in these scenarios.  But on the whole, if you’re a person who is fortunate enough to have a steady income stream in place right now, especially one that carries health insurance benefits, I’d suggest you think extremely long and hard before quitting your job or turning in a resignation note.

Sure, your job might bore you at times.  Or require you to work long hours.  Or perhaps your boss continually asks you to “do him a flavor” and it makes you want to scream, at times.  But on the whole, as frustrating as certain aspects of your current role might be, I’d encourage you to not lose sight of the one precious thing you have in your possession: a steady paycheck.  Try to keep in mind that there are millions of Americans at the moment who have lost their jobs, are struggling to make ends meet, and who would gladly fill your shoes if given the opportunity.  Trust me, they’d gladly put up with “flavor” requests all day long if it meant keeping a roof over their heads or being able to afford their kids’ doctors appointments!

How does this advice apply to the career change scenario I mentioned earlier?  This same dynamic, the shortage of jobs relative to the competition level, has the logical impact of making the process of switching to a new career a lot harder than many people might think.  It can take many, many months right now, after all, to find a job in the exact area where you have proven experience.  How tough do you think it will be if you were to venture into an occupational avenue where you’re a complete underdog, with little-to-no relevant experience under your belt?

I know, I know.  Not the news we all want to hear or talk about.  But having recently come across a number of people who seem ready to quit their jobs, based on what strike me as some fairly minor and cosmetic issues, my suspicion is that a lot of working folks may still not grasp the true state of the marketplace — or how much they’d start missing those automatic bank account deposits every 30 days!  So to these people, I say “don’t be a blindfolded Tarzan.”  When you have a bad day at work, avoid kneejerk reactions, and don’t let go of your current employment vine until you have an even healthier-looking vine swinging up at you, ready for the grasping!

BIG DISCLAIMER:  The one exception to everything I’ve said above?   If your current job is so stressful and demanding that it’s literally ruining your health, than it’s obviously not wise to stay put.  If you’ve got a boss who is subjecting you to massive amounts of emotional abuse, for example, let alone physical/sexual abuse, it’s clearly time to move on–or possibly even to retain legal counsel.  And if you’re working in blatantly unsafe or unhealthy conditions, life’s too short to hang on just for a paycheck.  But there an awful lot of people talking about quitting for reasons that far fall short of these issues, and these are the people to whom I’m directing this post!

Career Poll: Interview Follow-Up Method?

While I certainly have my own personal preferences in terms of interview follow-up activities, there’s been a growing amount of discussion lately about the type of follow up that is most appropriate in today’s frenetic, fast-paced Internet age.  So I thought I’d put the matter to a vote, just to see how my opinions stack up to the views the rest of you out there hold on the issue!  Recruiters?  HR professionals?  Hiring managers?  What say you on this topic?

State of the Job Market: A Visualization

A client of mine recently sent along an interesting little link that paints a picture of the job market (and its recent unpleasantness) in a new and different way than I’ve seen before.  If you click here, you’ll see this animated feature, which demonstrates the growth and shrinkage of the available jobs across the country over the past few years.  If you watch carefully, in fact, you’ll see the impact of Hurricane Katrina, the emergence of the auto industry crisis, the turmoil on Wall Street, and many other current events reflected.

(Spoiler alert: if you’re actively trying to avoid any negative news about the economy, this site is probably worth skipping!)

So why did I decide to post this link, knowing it could potentially bum some people out?  For starters, it was because the client who sent it to me encouraged me to do so, after I asked her opinion on the matter, and I thought she had a great point to offer: “Although initially I felt like throwing up my hands in surrender, after I looked at it (the animated diagram) a bit I felt better.  The reason is that over the last couple of months, I started thinking about looking at other cities in the country.  On looking at the map, Seattle doesn’t look so bad compared to other areas I would consider, (in fact, looks more favorable) so that told me to take a breath and just stay put (which I want to do).”

Additionally, I think it’s a great case study in critical thinking and in pondering this kind of data carefully instead of allowing yourself to have an indulgent, kneejerk reaction to it.  If you take the time to read the string of comments posted under the animated feature, in fact, you’ll note that a number of people have called the authors of this presentation on the carpet for not being totally accurate in their portrayal of the data in question.  And while I’m not enough of a statistician to debate the merits of the arguments presented, it’s clear that one can’t (or at least shouldn’t) simply take the information in this graph at face value, saying “Look, here’s indisputable proof that the economic apocalypse is nigh!”

Just thought I’d throw it out there for discussion…

Book Review: The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl (Karen Burns)

If YOU just so happened to have held 59 different jobs in your life, you’d hope that you’d have a few interesting stories and pearls of wisdom to pass along, wouldn’t you?  Well Karen Burns certainly does!  The author of this new book (subtitled “Real Life Career Advice You Can Actually Use”) has written a very fun and refreshing little book on the subject of occupational success, showcasing hundreds of short vignettes from the  nearly 60 distinct jobs she has held in her life to date — ranging from ditch digger to envelope sorter to working as an English instructor in Paris.

What sets this book apart from so many career-related works out there, first and foremost, is its digestibility.  The author (who I had the good fortune of recently meeting for coffee) is not striving to write a Doctorate thesis on any one aspect of career success, but to share a stream of small, pithy observations that derive from her near-endless series of employment roles.  Think of the writing style employed by the books “Who Moved My Cheese?” or “The Tao of Pooh” as an example of what to expect.  Or “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko” if you wanted to compare it with a book in the career advice genre.  At any rate, we enjoyed the punchy and entertaining writing style Ms. Burns embraces throughout the book, including the way she peppers her prose with little boxes containing “Eternal Truths” such as “Life is supposed to be a little bit dangerous” and “If you refuse to tell the little lies, no one will ask you to tell a big lie.”  True statements, those!

Another element we loved about “Working Girl” was the thread of mischievous humor that runs throughout the book.  Ms. Burns seems to be able to find the silly side of ANY work situation, even cases from her past that involve abusive bosses and mild forms of sexual harassment.  In fact, it seems to me that a large part of the advice she gives throughout the book for dealing with work challenges is to rise above them and to employ laughter as a tool for defusing conflict, getting ahead, and accomplishing one’s goals.  Clearly, Ms. Burns is a highly resilient individual.  She’s adaptable.  She’s a survivor.  She’s not afraid to try new things or to risk failure in an unfamiliar environment.  And these are all qualities that many professionals today could benefit from displaying, as well.

In the end, The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl may not be for everyone, as many experienced (aka older) professionals might already have picked up a lot of this advice the hard way, on their own, through their own tapestry of diverse career experiences.  The book is still a great read, however, both due to the quirky storytelling it embodies as well as the range of hard-won work wisdom that it encapsulates.  And if you have a younger friend or family member just entering the workforce, as I do, it might make a perfect graduation gift, since it lays out a terrific, approachable roadmap for those embarking on their own occupational adventure for the first time!

Interviewing & the Killer Instinct

Are you competitive?  Do you like to win?  Does pressure tend to bring out the best in you?

If not, you might be at a significant disadvantage in today’s interviewing process.  Like it or not, when the economy is stagnant and few new jobs are being added, interviewing becomes a zero sum game where winning a job offer essentially requires you to beat out somebody else for an assignment– or quite a few people, potentially.  So when the opportunity presents itself, you’ve got to bring your “A Game” and carry a certain amount of killer instinct into the interview process if you hope to compete effectively.

This being said, I’ve met with a series of folks lately who I don’t feel are demonstrating quite enough “fire in the belly”  to knock an employer’s socks off given the competition level in today’s market.  Sure, they’ve reviewed all the standard interview questions, and rehearsed their responses, but when you look in their eyes they still don’t seem to be playing to win.  They seem to be hoping to skate by with a series of pleasant, thoughtful answers versus showing up loaded for bear with an aggressive strategy in place for knocking off their competition and securing the offer.

What’s that?  Strategy, you say?  Why yes.  When you think about any competitive arena in life, ranging from sports to politics to military conquest, you’ll find that strategy is an essential component of success.  How did Obama rise from anonymity to beat out household names like Hilary Clinton and John McCain for the presidency?  How did the United States amateur hockey team beat the dominant Soviet team in the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” moment?  How did a group of 300 Spartans hold back an army of thousands of Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae?  In each case, victory was dependent on the individual/team/army in question coming up with a game plan that maximized their strengths and minimized their weaknesses relative to those of the competition.

Believe it or not, this is exactly what I counsel serious job hunters to do when preparing for an interview.  It’s not terribly difficult, after all, to size up one’s professional strengths and weaknesses compared to the likely competition they’ll be facing in the modern market.  On the strengths side, one simply has to evaluate the areas in which they’ve shined, consistently, compared to their peers in the field over the years.  Often, this feedback comes in the form of accolades and praise from one’s colleagues, customers, or supervisors over the years.  And on the flip side, in terms of vulnerabilities, most job candidates already realize the areas in which their qualifications don’t quite measure up to other folks in their field, whether this might involve the lack of a certain certification or degree, or perhaps a choppy work history or a lack of experience with a certain important technology.

The point is, strategy has become far more important than tactics in terms of landing job offers.  There are numerous books that have been written about the tactical aspects of interviewing, such as how to answer certain common questions (e.g. “What is your greatest weakness?” or “Why should I hire you?”) and how to prepare a series of well-organized examples to fit a behavioral interview format.  I’ve seen much less material out there emphasizing interviewing strategy in the sense of approaching the entire interview with a game plan on how to get the employer to acknowledge, appreciate, and place significant value on the particular areas where you possess dominant talent — while simultaneously minimizing or marginalizing those areas where your skills likely don’ t measure up to other applicants.

So don’t just memorize a few canned answers to a few tired questions.  Think strategically and figure out what you can say to the interviewer that will shift the agenda in your favor and shape the conversation to play to your strengths, versus having you play defense the entire time around various qualifications where you’re a bit shaky.  Better yet, wrap this concept up in an assertive, almost cocky attitude of “I’m going into this interview to prove to the hiring manager, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I’m the best person for the job” and you’ll be a force to be reckoned with in terms of your ability to consistently convert interviews into viable offers!

Cover Letters: Time of Death, 2009…

As I shared with many of you in my latest newsletter, I’m finally throwing in the towel — and yielding to the overwhelming evidence suggesting that cover letters (at least in their traditional form) are no longer an effective or important part of the modern job search process.

This may not seem like a big deal, to some, but for those out of work this is a “tectonic” development with significant implications.  The reason?  The process of drafting cover letters tends to suck up hours and hours of time each week from the average job hunter’s efforts, and if nobody is reading these masterpieces, this time and energy can be invested much more productively somewhere else.  Additionally, many people despise the process of writing such letters, and will save themselves considerable psychic anguish if they are “absolved” from having to write these pieces for each and every resume submission.

I realize, of course, that I’m somewhat late to the party (at least among career coaching circles) in arriving at this conclusion.  There have been a number of articles, blog postings, and other pieces published over the last few years where knowledgeable folks have expressed their belief that cover letters have lost their luster.  In general, however, I tend to be wary of “faddish” career advice and wanted to make sure that the sudden anti-letter sentiment wasn’t simply being used by some folks as a form of shock value to raise the anxiety level of job seekers and sell more services.  After hearing a number of my recruiting friends mention that they never, ever read cover letters from job candidates anymore, however, followed by several of my HR acquaintances echoing this same sentiment, I started to believe the hype — and to examine whether my coaching philosophy on this issue had exceeded its shelf-life.

It was at that point, too, that I took matters into my own hands and started asking every hiring manager I came into contact with whether they felt the cover letter added any real value to the job application process.  In what was nearly a clean sweep, virtually every single one of them said “Honestly, no.  I don’t read the letters.  I just go right to the resume and it tells me what I need to know.”

So if the evidence is to be believed, job hunters should seriously curtail their letter-writing efforts and channel most of their writing mojo (including some serious customization) into the resume presentation itself.  The resume now needs to stand completely on its own two feet in terms of communicating your fit for a particular opportunity — and must clearly indicate your top qualifications for the role at hand, ideally through a list of 8-10 bullets near the top of the first page.  One size most definitely does not fit all, anymore.  You need to demonstrate to each employer, within a few seconds, that you have the exact set of skills they’re looking for if you want to land in the “interview” pile.

As for whether you should send any kind of covering document with your resume, well, it stands to reason that you have to say at least a little something about why you’re submitting your credentials to a given employer.  You can’t just send your resume ala carte and assume employers will know what to do with it.  So my advice to job hunters, going forward, will be that you e-mail your resume to employers using a crystal-clear subject line (e.g. “Resume of John Smith, Accounting Manager”) accompanied by a short one- or two-paragraph e-mail note explaining why you’re writing and perhaps highlighting one key thought or attention-grabbing statement of why you’d be a great fit for the job in question.

Along these lines, here are three types of “killer thoughts” you might consider highlighting in your e-mail cover note:

1)  A very specific, interesting reason as to why the job in question appeals to you

Example: “While I’ve applied to a number of inside sales jobs in the past few weeks, I was instantly drawn to your company’s advertisement because of your statement that you want somebody who openly embraces cold-calling as a way of driving revenue.  Trust me, this won’t be a problem should you end up adding me to your team.  I’ve got zero problem picking up the phone and reaching out to qualified customers — my last boss, in fact, commented that he never once had to worry about me violating his ‘no whining’ policy when it came to having to make such calls.”

2)  A very specific, interesting reason as to why the company in question appeals to you

Example: “Given current economic conditions, I’d imagine that numerous candidates are submitting their resume for this opportunity.  I’d like to emphasize, however, that I’m particularly drawn to Escapia due to the fact that I used to run a bed and breakfast, myself, and therefore have a detailed understanding of the tourism industry and its terminology.  So while I suppose my accounting skills could translate into just about any organization, I’d love the chance to get back into a company like your own that relates so closely to my interests and caters to my former peers in the hospitality world.”

3)  A very specific, interesting qualification that differentiates you from other candidates

Example: “As you’ll note from my resume, my experience to date touches upon almost every single one of the specific skills and qualifications requested in your advertisement.  On top of these credentials, however, I’d also emphasize that I helped my previous employer complete a major SAP installation just six short months ago — and that this entire process, including lessons learned, is completely fresh in my mind and ready to be brought to bear on your company’s pending SAP implementation effort.”

The statements above are obviously not intended to represent the entire e-mail note you’d send in response to an advertisement, of course, but should give you a flavor of the types of “zinger lines” that you can incorporate to help your submission stand out.  Will you win ‘em all?  Probably not, if employers these days are as militant as they claim about focusing solely on the resume document.  But at least you won’t need to channel tons of time into writing formal, fully-formatted letters of the old-fashioned variety any longer.  And if you DO manage to catch the employer’s eye with your short e-mail missive, there’s no question that it can still tip the scales in your favor.

The key?  Just don’t make them open any extra attachments or go through the apparently arduous task of scrolling down in their e-mail browser…