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Piebridge版 - Forget the Cover Letter: Write a Pain Letter
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话题: letter话题: pain话题: your话题: job话题: manager
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1 (共1页)
a*****y
发帖数: 33185
1
征婚广告跟求职找工作本质是一样的,列举“我有多少”,不如把重点放在“你有什么
痛苦需要解决“上。
学会换位思考,这话说说容易,做起来很难。
分享一篇文章
Forget the Cover Letter: Write a Pain Letter, Instead
As much as we feel sorry for job-seekers (and I do, in spades) I feel sorry
for hiring managers and resume screeners, too. Can you imagine reading
letters all day that begin with “Dear Hiring Manager, I saw your job ad and
I was intrigued…?” We read about Motivated Self-Starters and Results-
Oriented Professionals and Leaders of Cross-Functional Teams until we want
to stick pins in our eyes. It’s atrocious. A stack of resumes attached to
cover letters a foot high might yield two micrograms of actual human spark,
if we’re lucky.
Let me be quick to acknowledge that it’s not a job-seeker’s fault the
stack of cover letters and resumes (See Resume, attached!) yields so little
life or individuality. Job seekers have been trained to write a cover letter
and a resume in Zombie Language, or what I call Boilerplate Corporatespeak.
It’s the language Darth Vader writes in, and every bureaucrat on the
planet. It’s the language job ads are written in, and the language policies
are written in (you know the ones: “Effective April 15th, it will no
longer be permissible to use the back entrance between the hours of eight
and six…”).
That’s a horrifying way to communicate, and as bad as it is to read that
stuff in corporate life (or to get a Zombie memo from your kid’s school) it
’s even worse to read about a person described that way. Zombie Language is
not the way to bring across a brilliant and vibrant job-seeker’s heft and
spark.
We don’t have to use that kind of language to describe ourselves. We can
put a human voice in our resumes, for one thing. And when it comes time to
write a cover letter, we can ditch the tired cover letter format and write a
Pain Letter, instead.
What’s a Pain Letter? It’s a letter that doesn’t go into the Black Hole
of Death, for one thing — it goes directly to your hiring manager. You’ll
find your hiring manager in two seconds on LinkedIn, by using the People
Search page to find the person at your target employer who’d most likely be
your boss in your new position.
Let’s say you’re a purchasing agent. In that case, your boss is likely to
be the Procurement Manager, Purchasing Manager or Materials Manager for the
company — or Director of one of those things. If it’s a small company,
your boss could be the Director or VP of Operations. You’re going to find
your prospective boss’s name without much trouble on LinkedIn. That’s
fantastic, because then you can write directly to that guy (or woman)
instead of pitching your resume into the abyss. You can get the company’s
street address from its website. A Pain Letter goes right through the mail (
yes! We still have mail delivery in the U.S.!) from you to your hiring
manager. How awesome is that?
In your Pain Letter, you’re going to congratulate your possible-new-manager
on something cool the organization is doing, and you’re going to mention
the business pain your hiring manager is likely to be up against. Then you’
re going to tie that business pain to your own background. No muss, no fuss,
no painful-to-read self-praise, and no Mad-Men-era cliches like “ability
to work well with all levels of staff.” A sample Pain Letter is below.
Note that the Pain Letter doesn’t mention the job ad (who cares? You’re
writing to talk about business pain, strictly. If you mention the job ad,
your letter & resume go straight into the Black Hole to die.) It doesn’t
say that you’re smart and savvy and had a 3.8 GPA in school. Who cares
about those things? You have a more important message to convey:
I’m out here, noticing what’s happening in the business ecosystem and who
’s doing what. My eyes are open. I’m a businessperson like you are, and I
notice that you guys are rockin’ it over there at your company. I know
something about the movie you’re living, because I lived that movie, too.
If the things I’m writing about are on your radar screen, maybe we should
talk.
It’s a new day. We can communicate like human beings (and with other human
beings, leaving the machines to communicate amongst themselves) in the human
workplace. We can write to our quite-possibly-new-bosses as though they
were people with real problems, ones that we just might be able to
understand. Some of them won’t like the fact that we colored outside the
lines in daring to reach out to them. That’s awesome, because you don’t
have time to waste (or mojo to squander) working for a person who’s
horrified by color-outside-the-lines types, anyway. The ones who get you
will call you or email you to continue the conversation. What kind of
conversation will it be? No telling, but it will be human, and that’s at
least half the battle.
SAMPLE PAIN LETTER
Declan McManus
Vice President, Marketing
Exclusive Chocolates, Inc.
4840 Whispering Pine Road
Boulder, Colorado
Dear Declan,
I was lucky enough to catch your speech at the Boulder Natural Foods Expo
last month, and delighted to learn about Exclusive’s plans for expansion
into dessert toppings. You’ve hit a chord with the chocolate-loving public,
and the Wolfgang Puck deal announced last week is a wonderful green light
from the market for Exclusive’s take on organic chocolates.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that those opportunities are taxing your
talented Marketing team as well.
When I led the new-products efforts for Angry Chocolate during its high-
growth phrase (just before the company’s acquisition by Nestle) we had at
least one major launch per month. Among other things, we were on the hook to
create a sugar-free version of Angry Choco-Mints in time for Chocoholic
Expo ’07 and serve our loyal domestic partners during two years of 25%
growth.
We prevailed – our Sugar-free Angries took Best New Product at the show –
and if Exclusive is in need of hands-on go-to-market, channel-marketing and
new-product-launch-related Marketing help, I’d love to look at ways to help
your team.
If you have time for a telephone call or email correspondence to see where
we might have an intersection of interests, I’d be delighted to learn more
and share a bit of my background with you.
Yours,
Mike Myers
f***n
发帖数: 615
2
Long...but read and found useful in certain occasions.
That's true. One solidly built connection is better than maybe 50 aimlessly
throw out applications.
------
PS:when I saw sawy, thought I don't know that word. After copy-pasting, it
clearly occurs as savvy. A little funny.
f***n
发帖数: 615
3
Well, back to your original concept, also true:做起来很难。
我如果发帖,八成仍是传统式。
a*****y
发帖数: 33185
4
Anatomy of a Pain Letter
by Liz Ryan
CEO and founder, Human Workplace
www.humanworkplace.com
very tangential to the real reason the job exists. For our letter to have
impact, we have to use it to speak to what’s really at work when a hiring
manager places a job ad. That more-important-something is some sort of pain
- some sort of business pain.
No Pain? No Job Opening
The economy is not in the best shape right now. CFOs and the people who
control the purse strings in organizations are not dying to hire people.
They would rather lay people off, if they could, in order to save money. If
there’s a job ad posted, then we know that somebody has some very serious
and very expensive business pain going on.
Something’s not working. Either people aren’t picking up the phone and the
customers are getting angry and leaving us to go to the competition, or
products that are critical for revenue generation are not getting out the
door, or accounts receivable are out of control and the company’s cash
reserves are getting very low.
Something bad is going on. And that’s a really powerful realization to make
because it means that we as jobseekers have some power in the equation. We
have more power than we may know because if we’re the one who can come in
and solve that business pain, then we become a very, very important person
for that employer to know.
But we’re really not taught to go after jobs this way. We’re taught to say
, “Oh, you want someone who types and sews and spins and weaves and churns
butter. I do all those things.”
I Do This, I Do That – No Good
That’s no good. There are going to be tons of people who do all those
things. We can’t win that way. We can’t get any higher than the level of
‘as good as X number of people.’ We have to virtually ignore the
requirements in the job ad and we have to figure out, why did they place
this ad in the first place? What is the pain? It’s exactly like selling a
product or service. You will sell people successfully on products and
services when you’re able to show the buyer that purchasing your product or
service will relieve their pain. It’s the same way in a job search. We’re
not trained to think about business pain in terms of a job search, but the
notion of spotting and digging into business pain is very, very relevant for
job-seekers.
Let’s Write about the Pain the Hiring Manager is Feeling
Once we have a sense of the business pain that the employer is facing, we
gain power. Now we can write a letter – we don’t call it a cover letter,
because it’s got a lot more heft than that. We call it a Pain Letter. We
will write directly to the hiring manager and in our letter, we’ll talk
about the business pain that we imagine the employer to be facing -- the
thing that’s actually keeping him or her, the hiring manager, up at night.
When we do this thoughtfully, very often we can get an interview over people
who have more of the listed job requirements than we do. So this is a very,
very important notion. We’re not going to job hunt to speak to the listed
requirements in a job ad. We don’t even have to confine our job search
activity to responding to job ads.
We’re not going to write any more cover letters that are basically just a
piece of paper that says, “Well, here’s a resumé” because the resumé’s
job is very, very different than the cover letter’s job. A resumé’s job
is to say, “Here is a person whose strengths and accomplishments are X, Y,
and Z, and who’s been particularly successful in areas A and B.” Our
resume describes the product known as you.

sorry
and

【在 a*****y 的大作中提到】
: 征婚广告跟求职找工作本质是一样的,列举“我有多少”,不如把重点放在“你有什么
: 痛苦需要解决“上。
: 学会换位思考,这话说说容易,做起来很难。
: 分享一篇文章
: Forget the Cover Letter: Write a Pain Letter, Instead
: As much as we feel sorry for job-seekers (and I do, in spades) I feel sorry
: for hiring managers and resume screeners, too. Can you imagine reading
: letters all day that begin with “Dear Hiring Manager, I saw your job ad and
: I was intrigued…?” We read about Motivated Self-Starters and Results-
: Oriented Professionals and Leaders of Cross-Functional Teams until we want

f***n
发帖数: 615
5
会仔细阅读的,谢分享。不过再这样贴下去,就会忘记这里是pie了。
1 (共1页)
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Life is like a box of gift (转载)勇敢的心~~~申明给所有写信给sunshinings的朋友,谢谢!!
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推荐个电影大部分人都是将就凑合就行吗?
征男友心里堵得慌
准备去搞个MD了Can you feel my pain
分特loveandhope,你应该听最聪明的人的建议。
相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: letter话题: pain话题: your话题: job话题: manager