Knock Em Dead Job Search Letter Templates

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780991270439
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Unique in the world of job search books, Knock 'em Dead Job Search Letter Templates teaches you the latest tips and tactics for writing cover letters and job search letters for every job hunting challenge. In addition, you get 125 samples of different job search letters, and also 125 cover letter and job search letter templates, each ready to use in Microsoft Word format. The 125 cover letter and job search letter templates include: cover letters for recruiters, headhunters, hiring managers, and blind job postings; professional networking and LinkedIn connection request letters; telephone and face-to-face interview follow-up letters; negotiation, rejection, and reconnection letters; and finally, those glorious acceptance, resignation, and thank you letters. Written communication skills are a key requirement of every professional job today and represent an essential skill set that defines every successful professional career. Demonstrating effective written communication skills can add a whole new dimension to your candidacy: they help your resume get read with serious intent, and help your candidacy stand out throughout the selection cycle with demonstration of thoughtful written communication skills. The advice in Knock 'em Dead Job Search Letter Templates will give your job hunt powerful ammunition and help you improve the written communication skills you need to succeed in this job search and throughout your career. This book includes the text and letter samples from the latest edition of Knock 'em Dead Cover Letters, but also delivers something unique in the world of resume writing: 125 Microsoft Word letter templates, ready to use and move your job search forward. Is there a better resource for your needs than Martin Yate CPC and Knock 'em Dead?

1	Cover Letters: The Secret Weapon of Your Job Search

Letters can play a critical role in a successful job search, they are far too often overlooked or under-utilized.

When you build a great resume but don’t learn how to use it properly, your job search will take longer and the job you get may not be the best your skills deserve. You can use cover letters even when you don’t have a contact, but, if you develop a plan of attack that includes reaching out directly to hiring authorities, you’ll get more interviews more quickly. Whenever someone in a position to hire you reviews your resume, the odds of getting that interview increase dramatically, because you have skipped right over getting pulled from the resume database, sidestepped the recruiter’s evaluation process and you are pitching directly to the hiring authority.

The primary goal of every job search is to get into conversations, as quickly and frequently as possible, with people in a position to hire you: without conversations, job offers can’t be made. Rarely reaching hiring authorities with your message is one of the major reasons why many job searches stall out. This stall-out happens because most job searches occupy themselves, almost exclusively, with posting resumes to resume banks and responding to job postings by uploading resumes into other resume databases.

However, when you can get your resume, personalized with a cover letter, in front of hiring authorities, you differentiate yourself. And by differentiating your message and your brand you dramatically increase your chances of landing an interview. Differentiating your initial contacts helps differentiate your candidacy.

If all you are planning to do is load your resume into resume databases, a cover łetter can always help, but its main strength is in personalizing your message to a specific company and ideally to a specific person. When you develop a plan of attack for your job search that includes reaching out directly to decision makers, the personalizing touch of a letter really increases your bang.

Who to Target in Your Job Search

The hiring titles to target during your job search are:

•Those titles mostly likely to be in a position to hire you. Usually these will be managers one to three levels above your target job.

•Those titles most likely to be involved in the selection process. Usually these will be managers working in related departments.

When an email or envelope is opened, your cover letter should be the first thing seen. A cover letter personalizes your candidacy for a specific job in ways your resume can’t, given its formal nature and structure. The cover letter sets the stage for the reader to accept your resume, and therefore you, as something and someone special; it creates a context in which your resume is then read. It can create common ground between you and the reader, and demonstrate that you are well qualified and suitable for this job with this company.

Your ideal target for direct communication is always someone who can hire you, although any management title offers opportunity for referral. Even HR contacts are valuable: they can’t make the hiring decision, but the pivotal nature of their job means HR professionals are aware of all areas within a company that could use your skills.

Any name and title you capture in a job search is valuable. With the Internet at your fingertips there are countless ways to identify the names of people who hold the titles you need to reach, and if a name and title is of no use to you, it might be just the contact another job hunter needs, so it can be a valuable commodity to leverage in your networking activities. There is a whole chapter on how to find the names of hiring authorities later in the book.

Five Tactics That Help Your Cover Letter Work

Address Your Target by Name

Your first step is to grab the reader’s attention and arouse interest, so whenever possible address the letter to someone by name.

Approaching hiring authorities directly is one of the very best tactics for getting job offers, because, as I noted, it cuts out many of the recruitment screening steps: the resume, databases, the external recruiter (headhunter) review, and the internal recruiter review (HR recruiter). Right now, just get it fixed in your mind that names are a powerful secret weapon in your job search. Whenever you can find the names of any one of these titles involved in the recruitment and selection cycle, approach them directly and address them by name.

Make Your Letter Readable

Your customer, the reader, is always going to be distracted, so your letters need to be easily readable, focused, clear, and brief. You can also grab the reader’s attention with the appearance of your letter, which should echo the fonts and font sizes of your resume, giving you a more professional look.

The font and font size are important concerns because they must be legible to hiring managers. Anyone who has been staring at computer screens for ten or more years and has ten other priorities pressing for attention is likely to have problems with tiny font sizes and elaborate but unreadable type faces. I recommend a minimum of 11- or 12-point font size. Remember to apply these rules of matching font and font size to email and print letters, it is easy to do and yet so often overlooked.

Emphasize Your Personal Brand

Branding is the process by which you consistently draw attention to the ways you are special, these special attributes makes you unique and define your brand against your competitors. The cover letter is part of the packaging that captures the professional you. If it looks good, carries a succinct, relevant, readily accessible message and shows you to be a professional with a clear sense of self, you’re well on the road to establishing a viable professional brand. When your actions differentiate you from others, your standing as a candidate is improved.

What makes you special?

•Getting your resume directly under the nose of a manager, who just wants to make a good hire and get back to work, makes you special.

•Getting your resume to the hiring manager in a creative way and showing that you know what you are doing makes you special. Your letter might say in part, “I sent my resume by email but thought you might appreciate a screen break, so you’ll find it attached to this letter…”

Your email might also note, “As well as attaching my resume to this email, in case you need a screen break I’ve also sent it by traditional mail.”

•Writing a strong cover letter that presents your resume and establishes connectivity between you and the manager makes you special.

•Keeping your message clear and succinct makes you special.

•Following up your meetings with thoughtful letters that continue the messaging of a consummate professional makes you special and confirms your professional brand.

•Making sure in all your letters and resumes that your paper is good quality and that the fonts are legible and coordinated makes you special.

•Making sure that in all your emails the fonts are legible and coordinated with your resume makes you special.

Note

We address the issue of creating a professional brand in this book as it applies to written communication in letters. This theme is followed throughout Knock em Dead 2011, The Ultimate Job Search Guide and Knock em Dead Resume &Templates.

Good brands are those that live up to their promise, or value proposition: “this is what you get when you hire me.” Integrate this brand-building behavior with the other strategies discussed and your candidacy is going to get more attention. To emphasize the consistency of your personal brand:

1.Use the same font choices and paper for your letters as you use for your resume.

2.Make the font you employ for contact information and the headlines you use the same in both your resume and your letterhead.

3.Use the same font you chose for your resume’s body copy for the message in your letter.

4.Use the same font choices for all your email communications. Smart idea: set the chosen font as your default email font.

5.Get matching paper for resume, cover letters, and envelopes. Every office superstore has them. You need printed resumes to take to interviews aside from any cover letters and resume you want to send by traditional mail when the opportunity arises (a great way to get your resume read since most job hunters don’t think to do it). This means that hiring managers get far fewer resumes by mail, and since busy managers like an (increasingly rare) break from the computer screen, more time is spent reviewing your resume.

Cut To the Chase and Stay On-Message

A good cover letter gets your resume read with serious consideration. Time is precious, which means recruiters and hiring authorities won’t waste it on a letter that wanders. Your letters should always reflect a professional whose resume will have something to say.

When you can, make a specific reference to a job’s key requirements. You want to allow the reader to move from your letter to the resume thinking, “here’s a candidate who can do this job”; referencing a job’s most important requirements does just that.

Remember, a cover letter’s job is to particularize your pitch to a specific company or hiring authority. If an advertisement, a job posting, or a telephone conversation with a potential employer reveals an aspect of a particular job opening that is not addressed in your resume (and for some reason you haven’t had time to update it), use a cover letter to fill in the gaps; the Executive Briefing is an especially useful tool for this job (you’ll see samples of this type of cover letter shortly). Remember: brevity is important. Leave your reader wanting more. The letter doesn’t sell you—that’s the resume’s job. Rather, the letter positions you for serious consideration: it whets the reader’s appetite, no more.

End with a Call to Action

Just as you worked to create a strong opening, make sure your closing carries the same conviction. It is the reader’s last personal impression of you, so make it strong, make it tight, and make it obvious that you are serious about entering into meaningful conversation. Your letters should always include a call to action. Explain when, where, and how you can be contacted. You can also be proactive, telling the reader that you intend to follow up at a certain point in time if they have not contacted you.

Every step of the job search and selection cycle offers opportunities to use letters to leverage your candidacy. A good, strong letter will get your foot in the door, differentiate you from other contenders and ultimately help you define a distinctive professional brand. Although the majority of your communications will be emails, stand out by sending letters on really important topics as both emails and traditional letters. If nothing more, your important communication gets read twice, which increases the odds of your point being understood.

“FREE RESUME REVIEW. Write an honest review on the bookstore website. Then send link to your review with copy of resume to [email protected]. He will review and send you suggestions for improvement.

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2	Five High-Mileage Cover Letters

Corporate America’s wholesale adoption of the Internet as the primary recruitment vehicle has completely changed the way you need to approach your job search.

Every year the number of resumes loaded into commercial resume databases grows exponentially. Currently the larger databases each house more than 36 million resumes. Many individual corporate resume banks have over 1 million resumes stored, and social networking sites like LinkedIn have over 70 million resume and professional profiles registered. This has made life easier for recruiters, since they can usually find enough qualified candidates in the top 20 resumes from any given database, and given the large number of potential candidates, they rarely dig deeper.

In resume databases that allow attachments to your resume, a cover letter helps you stand out by making additional and supportive comments about your capabilities. When you send your resume directly to a potential hiring authority by using their name and title, your resume and cover letter have even greater impact because you can differentiate yourself by addressing the hiring manager or recruiter by name and by customizing your message.

Below are five types of cover lett...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Read This First
• Chapter 1: Cover Letters: The Secret Weapon of Your Job Search
• Chapter 2: Five High-Mileage Cover Letters
• Chapter 3: Know the Job, Know Your Customer
• Chapter 4: Know Yourself and Develop a Professional Brand
• Chapter 5: Elements of a Great Cover Letter
• Chapter 6: How to Assemble Your Cover Letter
• Chapter 7: How to Polish and Edit Your Letters for Maximum Impact
• Chapter 8: Use Cover Letters to Get Four Times the Interviews
• Chapter 9: Sending Out Cover Letters
• Chapter 10: Sample Letters
• Appendix A: Internet Resources