“Look at this job ad,” my friend Amelia said. “It’s ridiculous. This not-for-profit association is looking for a PR person, and all the job ad says is that you’ll be performing PR tasks in conjunction with the rest of the Marketing department. Duh! Of course I’ll be performing PR tasks. Why don’t they tell me something useful?”
“It would have been more interesting if the ad said ‘You’ll be raising baby chicks and learning to walk a tightrope in conjunction with the Future Farmers of America and the Barnum & Bailey Circus,” I added. “For sure,” said Amelia. “Then I’d know what to write in my cover letter.”
“Amelia!” I practically shouted. “You’re still writing cover letters? Girl, you’ve got to write a Pain Letter. Pain Letters rule.”
“What the heck is a Pain Letter?” Amelia asked me, so I told her. A Pain Letter is a letter that goes with your resume to a hiring manager — but never through the Black Hole. We don’t send a Pain Letter into the gaping maw of a corporate applicant-tracking system. That’s a waste of time. We send a Pain Letter directly to a hiring manager. We find the hiring manager’s name on LinkedIn or on the company’s own website. Finding the hiring manager’s name is easy, unless it’s a vast employer like IBM. The more interesting part of writing a Pain Letter is figuring out the pain. The pain is the business problem lurking behind the job ad — the one thing a job ad never talks about.
“What’s the pain for this not-for-profit agency?” I asked Amelia, so she told me. “From what I can tell, the agency was doing okay until the recession hit,” she said. “It’s been tough going since then. Their mission has to do with childhood illness, but the agency isn’t focused on a specific syndrome or disease, so they don’t have the parents of the kids with one specific health issue to support them and get their friends to donate.”
“So they need a PR person to get the word out?” I asked. “Did they have a PR person before?” “They did,” said Amelia, “and she left in August, according to her LinkedIn profile. I found her in two seconds on LinkedIn, and I reached out to her and we talked by phone. She said they’re nice people at the agency, but they don’t understand PR and how important it is in raising money. As she was getting ready to bail, she had a few big wins, and that’s why the agency is looking to hire a new PR person now. She wasn’t really interested in not-for-profit work, so when a PR agency called her, she jumped. I know I could help these guys. They aren’t doing themselves any favors running a totally opaque job ad that includes nothing of any substance about the job.”
“You don’t need anything more than what’s in the ad,” I said, “because you were clever enough to find Miss Thing, who did the job before, and pick her brain. I’ll bet they wrote that say-nothing job ad because they’re scared witless over at that agency. They don’t know a thing about PR and they know it. All they know is that they need it. You’ll have an easy time at the interview, turning the conversation around to talk about what’s really going on in their business.”
“in their agency,” Amelia corrected me. “They’re a not-for-profit organization.” “I said business,” I said, “because they are in business. Every not-for-profit agency has the same problems businesses have, time a million.”
“Good point,” said Amelia. “So the pain is around getting everyone they can — donors, people in the business community, recipients of their programs, and people in the community — involved in their mission, reading their newsletter and coming to their events, is that fair to say?” I asked. Amelia said it was. We started writing a Pain Letter, and here’s what we came up with:
Dear Janice,
Congratulations on the matching grant you received from the Wonka Foundation. What a feather in your cap and testament to your hard work! It’s wonderful to see the Childhood Illness Association’s influence growing.
I can only imagine that having to raise $100,000 in six months to receive the full matching grant is a major item on your radar screen. When I ran PR for the Frog & Toad Society, we were likewise under pressure to launch the country’s first in-depth study on frog & toad population declines in time for the Frog & Toad Symposium, the biggest event of the year. We got the study done and got news outlets in seven countries to cover it – including CNN and MSNBC in this country – and met our budget handily for the year.
If building buzz to grow your donor base and community participation is worth a phone call, let’s talk. Hats off to you and your team on building a vibrant resource for childhood-illness researchers and activists, and enjoy your weekend.
Yours,
Amelia Breezeheart
The Pain Letter worked. Amelia got a call directly from the Executive Director. She bypassed HR entirely, got the interview and got the job. Why? Her letter didn’t say (in the manner of a traditional cover letter) “I saw your ad and I’d like to be considered for the job.” Amelia didn’t offer to grovel and climb over piles of broken glass to get the offer. She merely wrote to the person with the pain and said “Oh, yes, you’ve got that pain? That’s a bad one. I’ve seen that before.”
Try writing a Pain Letter yourself and see what happens. The era of the grovel-ly job-seeker is over; in this economy, pain-solvers rule!