Recession-Busting Job Search Strategies
An Exclusive Interview with Mary Elizabeth Bradford, Internationally Certified Advanced Resume Writer and Tactical Job Search Coach
 Mary Elizabeth Bradford
Mary Elizabeth is the author of two guidebooks: Secrets of the Unadvertised Job Market… Revealed! and Phone Networking Secrets Revealed. She is the publisher of the bimonthly ezine, The Career Insider. Her guidebooks have been lauded by both clients and colleagues as “powerful,” “comprehensive” and “highly effective.”
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Mary Elizabeth is an active member of Career Directors International and serves on their Membership and Marketing Committee. She obtained her Certification as an Advanced Resume Writer and Master Career Director through CDI, and in 2009 was one of four honorees to receive CDI’s inaugural Master Career Professional Lifetime Achievement Award.
She has been published in multiple law and Business Journals and career-related websites throughout the world. Additionally, Mary Elizabeth is an alumnus of Leadership Orlando, past Board Member and Vice President of Membership for the Downtown Orlando Partnership and Junior Achievement volunteer. As a Special Events Committee Member for The House of Mercy in Nashville, she created their first Annual Benefit at Nashville’s Famous Bluebird Café. She served on the Disaster Relief Team for the Nashville Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Total Picture Radio Transcript – Mary Elizabeth Bradford
Welcome to a success strategies podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting.
Joining us today is author, speaker, internationally certified advanced resume writer and internationally certified master director, Mary Elizabeth Bradford.
Mary Elizabeth, welcome to Total Picture Radio.
Mary Elizabeth: Thanks for having me on, Peter; I’m a big fan of your show.
Peter: Thank you so much. First of all, you have to tell me what a certified master director is; I have no idea what that means.
Mary Elizabeth: That’s a certification from Career Directors International, which is one of the gold standard programs out there for resume writers and career coaches. A master career director is a fairly new certification they came out with, you have to go through a very stringent qualification and testing process in order to garner that certification and it basically is soup to nuts – you better be an expert in everything, career coach and job search related to get it. I was really honored to receive that.
Peter: That’s great. The title of this podcast on your feature page is Recession Busting Job Search Strategies, and that’s a title that actually you supplied me in your email with the following: Learn what industries are hiring and two powerful strategies to quickly and easily get in front of them and make a powerful and positive first impression.
First of all, who's hiring?
Mary Elizabeth: First of all, let me just say the historical data that’s out there right now shows that finding a job today – and this is no secret – is more than twice as difficult as either of the last two recessions. It’s vital that job seekers know where they can get the highest job finding odds. That’s the idea here is that you want to fish where the fish are.
In the United States, based on my sources, largely come from the Bureau of Labor and Statistic Data, right now the industries that are the most buoyant, if you will, are healthcare. Most states are hiring in healthcare, followed closely by education and then followed by government, and then utilities. I’m going to give your listeners a source where they can get this information themselves in a minute.
That’s followed by spotty growth in some parts of the US – and this is current, so you can consider this for the month of May and June – in mining and logging, professional and technical services, and even the information industry, and there are a couple of states that are even growing for financial industries.
So to really get detailed and get a breakdown, I use a source (and you may know of him) called JobBait.com and that’s Mark Hovind. He just happens to be a real whiz at putting together these monthly reports; they’re free, people can go and sign up to get these free reports on his website. I strongly recommend because what it’s going to do is it’s going to show you where you can fully leverage your marketability.
Peter: Thank you very much for sharing that with us. Tell us about two powerful strategies to quickly and easily get in front of hiring managers.
Mary Elizabeth: The strategies that have been working for my clients – and again, going back to looking at what we’re dealing with right now, the climate and the job hunting environment is fierce, so you need to employ strategies that are going to get you out of that pool of where the most competition is and that is to tap into the unadvertised job market. If you have a source where you can get good step by step instruction on exactly what this means and what it is, then you can do this with a lot of success.
So getting right down to it, overall the two unadvertised job market strategies that have been working for my clients, done right, are direct mail campaigns and what I call growth opportunities. I’ll briefly touch on both.
Direct mail campaigns is simply a strategy where a job seeker sends out unsolicited – either a value proposition letter and/or resume or direct somebody to a website – a key decision maker in their companies of interest that might fall within their industries of choice. So for example, if you were in the medical device industry and you were a marketer, then you would, of course, want to first of all, identify the companies that would fall within your specifications. Maybe you want to work for a small start up or maybe a more established, then you would want to identify where they were in the United States and then launch a direct mail campaign to the decision makers – key decision makers – not HR (no offense to my HR friends out there) – that would be in those companies. There is a couple of different ways you can do this.
Of course on a smaller scale, you can do it but it’s not as effective because usually we can’t by ourselves hit the numbers you would need in order to garner results; so I suggest some type of a company that – and I recommend a few of them that I know work on my website – they can do that heavy lifting for you. Then usually what I recommend is pouching that with your own smaller scale direct mail campaign that a job seeker could do 10-20 a week that would be a more intimate campaign, usually to what I would consider someone’s A-list of companies – those top companies that they’re really, really excited about and keen on that they would send more of a more intimate letter and a follow up phone call to. So that would be an example of a direct mail campaign.
Why does this work? Of course, because as you know, Peter, 85 percent or so of jobs are filled before they morph to that place where they need to be advertised, so this gets a job seeker into that window of opportunity where there is less competition, more open jobs and it actually, when you flush out the numbers, works much, much better than conducting a job board search, which usually yields 1-3 percent response.
Peter: What are the best ways, Mary Elizabeth, of finding those individuals within organizations to launch your direct mail campaign to?
Mary Elizabeth: Good question. With the Internet, it’s really easy. You’ve got sites like ZoomInfo.com, Manta.com, or even Google, where all of a sudden, finding your key decision maker is just a click away. You’ve got social networking like LinkedIn.
Let’s say I was interested in going to work for Pepsi, and all I would have to do is key in Pepsi and in LinkedIn, it’s going to then shoot me back a whole list of decision maker names that are on LinkedIn that I can then network with either right on LinkedIn or I can then Google their name and address – I guess the point is is that these things really take seconds; whereas even just a few years ago they might have taken us hours or days to come up with this information; now there is no excuse for not knowing how to do these things. It’s very basic, very easy, and very quickly, decision makers can get the information they need and then connect with the people that they want to talk to.
Peter: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the clients you’ve been working with right now, specifically those who are in career transition. What kinds of challenges and what kinds of things are they finding that’s working for them?
Mary Elizabeth: As you know with every job search, it’s a little different; your strategy is going to be tailored for what you need. With some clients, I’m recommending that they use resources that I connect them with to connect with recruiters that are in their industry; others, I’m recommending intimate direct mail campaigns – it is just based on whatever their driving motivators are in their personal job search.
Overall, the two strategies – and I’ve yet to mention growth opportunities (I’ll wind back around and give a short synopsis on that and what that looks like) – but what they’re having success with are these two strategies primarily to tap into the unadvertised job market.
What they’re finding and what I’m seeing is that their contact ratio, that the amount of companies they’ll reach in other words, needs to be about double what it was last year to get the same results that maybe my clients were having last year. So it’s taking longer, they’re working harder, they’re having to double their reach, in other words, so double the amount of companies they need to contact in order to obtain the same or similar results.
Growth opportunities is the second strategy that has been really successful for my clients in finding and following up with hidden job opportunities. Just briefly, this is where you would tap into your industry, sort of portal of knowledge, whether that’s your trade journal or your associations or even the business journals, to find information on your industries of interest and their growth modes, if you will. Growth opportunity can be a company that is moving, growing, expanding, even a merger or an acquisition, smaller start up, maybe a second round of VC funding or maybe even an excuse to connect with a company like an award that’s been given. A lot of companies are getting awards right now for introducing sustainable methodology into their operations, or maybe even somebody that just got a promotion that you read about in the business journal that’s in your industry or company of interest. All of these things are great reasons for a job seeker to reach out and say hey, I saw that you just acquired this particular company and this happens to be in my area of expertise… or I just saw you launched this new product and again, it’s in my area of expertise, or this is of great interest to me because …
The reason that this works so well is because it has an intimacy to it and an initiative that it demonstrates that’s instantly attractive to a potential employer. With job seeking – we’re talking about a whole mental exercise here too that so often with job boards creates this sort of passive receptivity, so when you take initiative like this, it shifts the focus of power and control and puts the job seeker in a real leadership position so it does something for them pragmatically, it also does something for them mentally; it’s taking that initiative and having a good excuse to follow up with somebody in an authentic way, it changes the tone and pace of the whole job search.
As you can tell from the excitement in the way that I explain this, this is one of my favorite strategies to coach job seekers on because it works so well, it’s so flattering, it’s so empowering to the job seeker, and it’s so well received by the potential company.
Peter: I think that’s some great advice, and you’re so right, Mary Elizabeth. Anybody who is doing nothing but surfing the job boards, they’re going to have a very, very, very long and very disappointing job search.
Mary Elizabeth: Yeah, they’re going to be really depressed. I talk to a lot of really deserving and intelligent executives that just don’t have the right information to get off the job boards. It’s more than that too; I think that the thing about being able to tap into the unadvertised job market is you really need a system because that’s what job boards are. I think that’s why people fall back on them is because you get out there with this abundance of information and you wonder as a job seeker what am I supposed to be doing, what is the right thing, why aren’t people connecting back with me, is it me, is it my resume – and then it starts this whole process. They’re looking for a solution and answering job ads – you know, in a way, it sort of satisfies us, even if we know rationally it probably is not the bright thing to do because we fit piece A into piece B and voila, we at least are doing something that has some semblance of moving forward. I think that there is that facet of it too that is not talked about as much but it’s one of the reasons why job boards are so tempting is because it’s the lack of understanding exactly step by step what to do. That’s why I’ve really devoted my whole career to showing job seekers how to set it up step by step so that doing the right things is as easy as answering job ads. That’s been my goal.
Peter: As you well know, it’s a lot easier to sit there and submit your resume to jobs on these job boards than it is to pick up the telephone and cold call, which people really don’t like to do. I want to get to this a little bit later in the interview because you’ve written a very interesting little book on how to go about networking on the telephone.
I want to kind of back up a little bit and get into tapping into some of your resume writing expertise and get some indication from you on how you approach this and there is so many people that are confused about whether they should do a chronological resume or a functional resume, depending on how many years they’ve been in the job market. What is your advice and how do you go about developing a resume? Let’s say somebody that’s been working for 15 or 20 years, do you do a functional resume, or do you do a chronological resume?
Mary Elizabeth: That’s a good question. Chronological or functional basically depends on the industry. Certain resumes are going to look different depending on you know, if somebody is in academia, they’re going to have a CV, that’s going to be really long, it’s a whole different format.
Chronological resumes are certainly appropriate for some people, but usually it’s when you want to stay in the same industry and you want just a straightforward resume. Recruiters like chronological resumes because they have to match up exactly what their clients are looking for with candidates, so they want something they can very quickly look at and figure out who is this person, what do they do, are they going to be a match. In law firms, you’re going to have a very formal looking resume that’s going to be less flash and marketing and more chronological.
For the most part, functional resumes are good, of course, when you are changing industries. If you look at, for example, the resume samples on my site, most of my resumes are hybrid of functional and chronological primarily because it gives me that first page to market my client, their quantifiable achievements, their hard and soft skills and done correctly, it can be really, really compelling. Whereas just chronological, as long as there is quantifiable achievements in someone’s job history, that can be compelling too, but I really like that first page so I can appropriately market to the industry that my client has told me they want to focus on.
Peter: Another thing that you keep hearing is that a resume needs to be on one page.
Mary Elizabeth: I’ve done all kinds of different resumes for my clients. Sometimes the one page is appropriate. I would say for my clients that have 15, 20 or plus years experience, the standard I do is a two page resume, and then maybe I might create an addendum for them, or even a third page of project work or some type of achievement highlight or an executive overview. And then a one page resume might be more appropriate just to give somebody sort of a quick snapshot of what that executive’s achievements are.
I would say the average for my senior level client is two page, and I’ve even done three page resumes; it’s not so much the length of it to me as it is the content that’s in there is relevant and it’s targeted and it’s focused. I think that’s more important than the length.
Peter: Well you bring up something that I’d like you to comment on, and when you start working on someone’s resume, when they send you their resume, what most often is left off of resume?
Mary Elizabeth: The two things that I see, even with people have – they’ve really worked hard to maybe write the resume themselves and they’ve done a pretty good job – the two sticking points that I see over and over again are (1) a lack of good keywords at the top of their and (2) a lack of quantifiable achievements, or if the achievements are quantified, they’re buried in the resume.
Why is this important? Let’s say we’re looking at a resume; what do we look at at first glance? We’re looking at I want to know what this person specializes in, so I want to be able to look at their resume and in just a couple of seconds, figure out who are you, what do you do, what are you good at. And second, why should I talk to you, which sounds harsh, but that’s what a resume is, is it’s supposed to communicate the value of an individual to a potential company.
These are things that a professional resume writer can instantly pinpoint and draw out in an objective way. It’s really hard to be objective – I mean I couldn’t write my own resume, so it’s really hard to be objective when we’re trying to represent ourselves in a resume.
Peter: As you well know, if you’re submitting a resume to any company online today it’s going through an applicant tracking system which is looking for specific keywords and if it doesn’t find those keywords, it never makes it to HR, let alone a hiring manager.
Mary Elizabeth: That’s right, yes. If you’re going to submit your resume using some traditional job search methods, then you definitely want to make sure that you’ve got all those correct keywords in there so you can at least be considered.
Peter: I want to discuss your eBook titled “Phone Networking Secrets Revealed” because I found that really interesting. You actually use the techniques in this book to reach out to me to get this interview because you called me up and said “Hey, I’d like to be on your show,” which is very unusual. So much is done these days over email, which I find to be – I call it frictionless; you can send people emails all day long and let’s face it, we all get so much spam now in emails that I think calling somebody up on the phone is a really, really great technique to reach out to someone. Most people are afraid of doing this, making phone calls is hard, especially cold calls.
What are some of the techniques that you’ve developed for making this an easier process and a more productive one?
Mary Elizabeth: I love this topic because prior to my seven years of resume writing and job search coaching, I actually had my own executive recruiting firm for eight years and worked in the building industry and so all day long, I have to market myself. As you know, when you have your own business and like you just pointed out, I called you, I’m constantly job hunting, if you will, and looking for ways to market myself, so I’m always trying to fine tune and hone these techniques. It’s a fascinating topic to me.
My clients, of course, tell me that this is one of the top three most difficult things to do in terms of a job search. And of course, the more executive you get, the harder it is. You’re a senior VP and you have to make that connection. These job seekers are so used to being in that place of leadership and control, this is a total reverse situation for them.
And so you’re looking at several different things that are working simultaneously – you’re looking at a fear of rejection. There is usually a preconceived notion that the call must end up in some type of an interview, which really puts a lot of pressure on the job seeker, whether they realize they’re thinking that way or not and of course, it puts pressure on the person that you’re calling.
As you know with marketing, usually you have to connect with someone several times before you can actually get something going, or someone has to present us several times with the image of that product or service before we’ll show an interest. The same principles apply, as far as I’m concerned, in the job search.
The third thing that I hear a lot is people, they don’t know how to get pass the gatekeeper – again, no offense to anybody, or the secretary, the administrative assistant, if you will.
Peter: Their job is to make sure that you don’t get through.
Mary Elizabeth: Absolutely. Again, I dealt with this – I’d have to make sometimes 20-50 calls a day as an executive recruiter, so I talked to a lot of gatekeepers and it was actually the basis for that book that I wrote because a lot of the things that I learned how to do as an executive recruiter, I handed over to my clients that were seeking a job. They used these very simple strategies quite successfully to get pass the gatekeeper.
I totally agree with you, Peter, that we look at this as antiquated, but direct mail and following up with a phone call are two of the most successful high touch methods that a job seeker can use as they are connecting and working on the job search.
A couple of tips on getting pass the gatekeeper. First of all, don’t tell them you’re a job seeker. What you don’t want to do as a job seeker is spend a lot of time making these follow up phone calls saying that you’re following up with your resume, only to get put through to HR because it’s going to defeat your purpose. So this is a really important component to tapping into the unadvertised job market and reaching key decision makers.
I coach my clients to say that you’re following up a correspondence; you can say it’s private, you can say you’re working on a project – all of these things are true, it just puts the job seeker in a little bit more control.
Peter: Because as soon as you use the word resume, you’re off to HR, right?
Mary Elizabeth: You’re off to HR, it’s good bye decision maker. And it’s not difficult. “I’m working on a project…,” “I’m following up with some correspondence…,” and if they say what kind of correspondence, you can say private correspondence.
Worse case scenario just say “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to cause a problem, but can I at least have their voicemail,” and that’s a whole other subject – understand what kind of voicemail to leave.
Let’s look at this first of all, more broadly in terms of – I always kind of relate back to I would like to hear somebody say to me if I was an employer. What keeps us on the phone, even in general, with any kind of call with a person we don’t know. What do we like? We like clarity, we like kindness, we like humility – all these things – again, they don’t get talked about, but think about what we like. And then of course, there is the element of why should I talk to you.
So a job seeker, first of all, their primary goal in terms of – we’re talking right now about the call where you’re following up with your resume – would be connect with the decision maker not to get a job offer right there on the phone or to get an interview right away, you’ve got to be a little less eager than that – at least that’s my style of approach. A realistic goal would be to put a nice professional voice to that nice professional resume you’ve just sent them. Let that percolate for a while and just give that window of time – just give things a chance. Of course, as a job seeker, you are going to run across those nice serendipitous situations where the person on the other end of the line says “wow, it’s amazing that you called because we just so happen to have this particular thing available…,” or “what you are saying is interesting to me, I’d like to talk more…” these things can and do happen. My clients have told me they do.
Going back to exactly what to say, I like to start out these conversations with “hi, my name is… and perhaps my name sounds familiar because I just sent you some correspondence and I specialize in…” so you tell them right there what you specialize in. “I specialize in generating additional revenue streams, or opening up new territories for new products and services in the blankety blank industry…” or “I specialize in galvanizing team – optimizing operations or reducing costs in manufacturing processes…” whatever that person’s niche is. It’s really a good idea to niche. That’s the whole thing about branding.
Really, to me, branding simply means get specific, don’t generalize. I think there is a temptation to generalize, I’ll get more responses if I look good to a wider pool of people, when really the opposite seems to have a more genuine and a better result, which is tell them exactly what it is that you’re good at, what are you best at and market that. And that’s what gets a better response.
Peter: Here’s a little pushback for you – “Thank you very much for calling, Mary Elizabeth, we’re not hiring right now.”
Mary Elizabeth: “Okay, great. Well, I just wanted to follow up and give a courtesy phone call because I know right now in this economy, many companies in this industry are concerned about this ______ and ______, and so I wanted to introduce myself and also share that I’m not only interested and available (or currently interviewing might be even a better statement) for full time positions, but I’m also taking on and considering project work.”
Peter: That brings up a whole other topic right there. I think you’re absolutely right, I think in this market and what’s going on right now, if you can go in and get a project assignment within an organization, that’s a great way to get in the door.
Mary Elizabeth: And independent consultant has grown, I think – don’t quote me on this – but I want to say 300% in the last ten years and I’m sure even more in the last year or two.
Project work and consulting work – you can even pitch “hey, take me in for this particular project; I know so many companies in our industry are struggling with this thing right now. Bring me in and let me help you with this and if you like what you see and what I do for you, maybe we can talk about doing some more work later.”
Peter: What about common phrases such as “is this a good time for you” or “how are you?”
Mary Elizabeth: I don’t like them and I don’t use them. “Is this a good time for you” to me sounds clunky and it opens up a whole can of worms.
Peter: “No, it actually isn’t; I’m very busy right now. Can you call back in maybe three months.”
Mary Elizabeth: Thanks for asking, it’s never a good time. Exactly.
The second to me, is just too familiar – “how are you.”
Peter: Especially if you’ve never ever spoken with this individual before in your entire life; it is kind of off putting isn’t it, when it’s not really intended to be.
Mary Elizabeth: Exactly. I was just talking to one of my executives – my VIP clients – the other day, and this is a wonderful person, an HR executive that has incredible achievements to their credit, and we were talking about follow up phone calls. He was expressing how nervous he was to make these follow up phone calls, and as we were talking he says “you know, I realize in all of the great executives that I’ve had the opportunity to hire over the years, the three best hiring decisions I ever made were people that took the initiative to call me.” He says “I’ve got a prejudiced about calling people, that’s a preconceived notion that I’m realizing now is not realistic, it’s not really true.”
Peter: There are so many people out there, as you well know today, that have never ever been in this position before, they’ve never had to look for a job, they’ve always been recruited and they’ve always had their phone calls returned, and they are at a complete loss of what to do.
Mary Elizabeth: Yes, that’s right. And again, you don’t want to make the job search process into a big monster that no one can wrap their arms around. I promise every listener out there, there are simple solutions to your particular job search needs if you know where to look and just to take this opportunity to – if you don’t mind, Peter – plug my site. I provide a lot of free information for job seekers at all different levels in their career so they can start to get a handle on what they’re going to need to do for their particular situation.
My website is www.maryelizabethbradford.com
Peter: Mary Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today on Total Picture Radio. It’s been fun having this conversation with you.
Mary Elizabeth: It’s a pleasure, Peter. Thanks again, and as I said before, I’m a big fan.
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