Commandments for Conducting a Successful Proactive Job Search Campaign 5

5. Understand how to leverage an electronic email campaign tool.

© Copyright 2005, Ron E. Bates, Executive Advantage Group, Inc.

Take charge of the campaign by not simply relying on resume postings and recruiters to make your phone ring. Reach out directly to as many hiring authorities as possible. How? It starts with having the right tools again. Get Group Mail, the email campaign management tool that allows you to send formatted html emails with attachments. Outlook email merge does not allow you to send attachments.

Who do you send your resume to? Ideally you’d want to cover the earth by sending your resume out to every hiring authority/executive on the planet. Again, remember this being all based on timing? Only a fraction of the available job opportunities ever go out side of the employer to contracted search entities (retained or contingent).

Most employment openings are fill directly through the efforts of an employer’s internal staffing departments or the employer’s hiring authority/executive directly.

OK, so how do I identify “everybody on the planet?” This comes back to #2. Have right tools for the job. You want to think about everything you touch as a possible source of contact information and names.

Think like a recruiting researcher. You want to be able to identify a contact’s name from one source (e.g., EVP Technology, John Doe speaking about XYZ technology from a trade show website speaker’s list) and identify an email of someone else at the company (the press contact for the company: jane.doe@company.com) and be able to put the two together: john.doe@company.com.

Will these really work? 70-80% of the time they will. You can go into some sites and identify literally thousands of employee names. Paste them into a spreadsheet and do some simple manipulation to create thousands of contact emails. Buy a cheap email extraction tool such as Email Address Collector to pull all the email addresses you’ve communicated with or saved (e.g., in the spread sheet you just created) from every document, file, and email (To, From, CC, and BCC) on your computer.

Identify as many relevant sources of contact information as possible. There are many that are industry specific and free (e.g., Media Post will expose you to tens of thousands of media & entertainment direct contact emails for free). http://www.lead411.com/ is a relatively inexpensive database of direct downloadable contact information for 50,000 Companies and 200,000 executives. http://www.hoovers.com/ will expose you an unbelievable amount of companies and names, but no direct contact information.

The PriceWaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree Survey is the definitive source of information on emerging companies that receive financing and the venture capital firms that provide it. Many sources of information will also lead you to other sources of direct contact information. And there are many, many more that you can identify on the Internet. Some are free, and some are subscription based. If you are looking to save money, you can even trade business contacts at Jigsaw, an online business contact marketplace where marketers, recruiters, and sales people can buy, sell and trade business contact information.

Jigsaw has over 1.5 Million contacts at over 100,000 companies.
Dump all of these contacts into your email campaign management tool and send your “pin sharp” resume out to the world.

Ron E. Bates is a Managing Principal with the retained executive search firm Executive Advantage Group, Inc. His Ecademy profile can be viewed at http://www.ecademy.com/user/ronbates. Ron can be reached at rbates@executive-advantage.com

Question? Give me a call, as an NLP'er I'm always interested in NLP business best practice.

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PPI Business NLP Ltd