Careers And Employment

Cover LetterProducts Relating to 'Cover Letter'

When Carla Mason studied advertising in college, she never dreamed that she would apply the principles of direct marketing to her cover letter.

After graduation, Carla dreamed of heading to Madison Avenue and making a Superbowl commercial. Instead, she landed at a Direct Response firm.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," she says. "Direct Response is the best training for getting whatever you want."Recently, what Carla wanted was a new job. And to get that job, she needed a killer cover letter. She used all of her direct marketing training to create the cover letter that got the job.

She wanted to move from the creative side in New York to account management at a corporation in a mid-sized city. She applied all of the direct response techniques she knew to her cover letter."If I was just sending out a few resumes, I could have tailored each cover letter for the specific company. But I didn t even know what city I wanted to move to. I just wanted out of New York," Carla says."I figured that credit card companies, newsletter publishers, and nutritional product manufacturers live or die on a 2 percent response rate. If I sent out 500 resumes, I should get 10 interviews."Her cover letter actually got Carla 14 interviews and from this, 4 offers.If you want to duplicate this cover letter strategy, you need to know how a direct marketer like Carla thinks.

"I first build a profile of the prospect in my head. I try to figure out what makes him 'tick' on both conscious and unconscious levels. I try to satisfy both their logical reasoning and their emotional triggers. The emotional triggers are where the decision is really made," Carla says.When applying to larger companies, Carla thought of her prospect as the Human Resources Manager. Carla s research found that Human Resources staff considered themselves an "invisible profession." They perform an administrative rather than profitable function."My letter showed them that they are a valuable part of the organization and that I personally valued them. I thanked them for reading my letter. And, when I followed up on each letter, I was sure to show my appreciation."Carla s research showed that 60 percent of human resource executives and even more of the supporting staff, are female. Even though odds were that her next boss was going to be male, she knew that her initial "target audience" was female.Then Carla tried to figure out what the HR Manager s biggest fear was. She sites a BLR study that shows the top four concerns of the Human Resource staffer were legal compliance, recruiting and training, managing performance assessment, managing spiraling health care costs.Carla tried to make her prospect s life easier by addressing these issues in her cover letter. While there was nothing she could do to lower health care costs, she still addressed this in her letter. And she made a point of helping them solve a recruiting issue right now.She proposed that the solution to their hiring problem was in the resume and cover letter before them. And for many companies, it was.

Article Published: Monday 17th December 2007