Targeted Marketing Helps Unemployed Workers in Tight Job Market

By Pat Meehan

How do you get a job interview? Hopefully your first attempt isn’t from looking in the newspaper, where everybody else looks, or on internet job boards, where everybody else looks. You might ask “where else can I look, what’s left?”

Actually, only 15% - 20% of career opportunities are posted on all of the above mentioned media. The rest of the career opportunities are ideas running around in other peoples’ minds. These people are the key people that make hiring decisions in companies.

Proactive job seekers are discovering how to find the 80% of job opportunities that others can’t find. They have simply figured out that there are many companies that employ people who have similar skills, goals, and achievements as them. Therefore, there may be an opening for someone like them.

They have discovered that there are directories with nearly every company’s information, including location, type of product, number of employees, key names of managers and directors, addresses, and phone numbers. These directories can be found at your local library. One of them is the Harris Infosource Company Directory. This is a free alternative to get good information on companies you want to market yourself to. Just ask the Librarian to help you find it.

Successful job seekers are sending their cover letters and resumes to a targeted audience of key people who make hiring decisions in these targeted employers of choice. This method of job searching is called targeted marketing. They are marketing themselves to targeted companies that employ people like them, and to people within those targeted companies who make hiring decisions.

These successful job seekers are taking a one day at a time approach and mailing two or three mailings per day to targeted companies in the unadvertised job market. Their mailing program is powerful because their cover letter and resume comes in an envelope with someone’s name on it. That is a rare occasion these days. People still love to open an envelope with their name on it.

If you take your cover letter and resume and send two mail outs per day, you will have mailed your marketing documents to 60+ targeted companies over a month, and 180+ over a quarter. You will be methodically evolving into greater opportunity in a relaxed and self assured manner. In three months time you will have hit 180 targets.

When your resume hits its targets, it will most likely be opened immediately. Of 180 targeted mail outs there are normally 10% - 15% of those targeted companies that need someone like you. In this scenario, based on my experience of working with thousands of job seekers that have started this targeted marketing approach, here are the numbers: 180 targeted mailings over three months would generate eighteen serious looks at your resume, ten initial phone contacts directly from the targeted companies, three or four face-to-face interviews, and one, two or possibly three job offers.

This system is predictable, measureable, and it works. All you have to do is start your targeted mailing program today.