Welcome to Career Crashers, for Retail The Stories of those who are not content to weigh around following rules and helping for good things to happen. Great Careers aren't found, they're forged. It's time to crash the party. Hey everybody, it's Joel from Crash.
Hope you are having an amazing day. Let's dive right in. I want to remind you that we have the Daily Job Hunt newsletter, Crash.co.com. And you can get on that email list, which is one of the shortest snappiest email newsletters in the world, I would say.
Six mornings a week, I am the one creating those emails, and we're giving advice, we're giving empathy, we're giving funny tweets and memes, lots of articles and links. Sometimes we're giving job opportunities. Definitely check it out, it's going to be your cheerleader, it's going to be your daily dose of butt kick on your job hunt, Crash.co.com. Speaking of email, I want to talk about the power of email today on your job hunt and bypassing the conventional job postings.
The conventional job posting and conventional resume process by using email, email is an incredible tool. You can reach almost anyone in the world by finding their email address. You can use different tools that we'll talk about, Hunter.io, for example, but really thinking about the intentionality behind the email approach and finding the right person to email and sending them something that is too good to ignore, skipping the entire resume job posting process. So what's the first way you might do this?
First way is to email a decision maker at a company. Go on LinkedIn for that company's page and click on people and figure out who the decision maker might be. Talk about this last week a bit, but it can always be helpful to remind you. Find decision makers through that LinkedIn page could be the head of sales, it could be recruiter, it could be the CEO, if it's a smaller company.
Figure out the name of that person and then send them a personalized email. Even just expressing, hey, I love your mission. I love this and this about your company. I would love to work for you.
Here's why a great fit. Even just a couple of sentences in a custom email is going to help you stand out. It's going to put you in the top 10% of job candidates. We had a tweet a couple of weeks ago on the career crashers Twitter.
My colleague, Cornay wrote this one and he says, standing out can be as simple as sending a cold email to the hiring manager in which you explain in three sentences what you love about the company and what you think you can bring to the table. This takes 15 minutes tops and will easily three times your chances of getting in a view. 15 minutes, 15 minutes tops. Send a few sentences about why you love that company and what you can bring to the table.
Give an example of a project that you've created in the past and how that can apply to their company be creative, but also don't overthink it. Don't think you need to put in hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of labor in order to stand out on the job hunt. Of course, the general principle of you get what you put in applies on the job hunt as well, but the bar is fairly low. So he spends 15 minutes sending a cold email to the hiring manager, a decision maker at the company, you're going to be able to bypass in all likelihood by bypass that job posting process.
So that's one way to engage in the power of email to stand out is cold email to a decision maker, write a few sentences. Now you could also include a custom video pitch, which is what we are preaching, of course, like crash, include a URL to your pitch. If you're using crash, you have a URL like crash.co slash your username slash company's name, you can customize that last part of the URL for that company. So if it were me pitching Apple, if you crash that code slash Joel blind slash Apple, you can just create a custom URL and include that in the email, a little video pitch, we have 30 seconds, 60 second video pitch.
And that's your chance to look into the camera and smile on the camera and tell that company why you love them. Again, give them a few sentences about what you can bring to the table. Same concept as writing a few sentences in email. In this case, you just do it on a video.
And so in that email, you say, Hey, Steve, I'm so excited about your mission at Apple. I made you this short video about why I'd be a great fit for your marketing role. Thanks so much for your time. Talk soon.
And then you include the link, right? So I'm pitching Steve Jobs in that case. I know Steve Jobs is no longer alive, but you got the point. It's a short email, by the way.
And when you include that URL, you just have a little opening hello. Here's the link. And then thanks for your time. You can get right to the point and you want them to click that link.
And the video pitch is going to speak for itself. Now, there's different ways to do it. There's no exact one right way to write this email. You could explain more about specifically why you love the company in text in the email and also include the video pitch link.
Don't overthink it. There's different ways to do it. We're going to link in the show notes to this episode, several articles we have on the crash blog about emailing people, about how to find the hiring manager, what to say to the hiring manager, different email templates, the power of follow-up emails. So take a look at the show notes and click those links and you'll get that information in written form.
So I've talked about emailing a decision maker, whether that's a cold email in text or a cold email with a video pitch. How else could you employ email to facilitate and help your job hunt? Another great way is emailing employees. And maybe it would have been better if I had mentioned this one first because this is maybe like a warm-up stage to actually pitching the company.
But either way, it's helpful. So emailing an employee at the company to build a connection and build rapport with them. It's pretty simple, actually. Just be genuine when you reach out to them.
So let's say you're looking for a sales development representative role at a company. Well, again, you go on LinkedIn for that company's page and you find current SDRs at the company. You click on one of their profiles and you learn a little bit about them by looking at their LinkedIn page. Figure out what's something interesting to you.
Maybe they have a creative, interesting story in their bio or they have certain people, influencers that they follow that you also follow. Figure out some way to establish rapport by identifying their values, their interests on their page. Again, let's take two minutes. Just something that's going to show that you did a little bit of preparation and that you're looking to personalize your message to them.
And then you could write a message to them on LinkedIn, but also just use email. And we'll talk more about the email tools in a minute to verify the email. But if you're going to email this employee, again, pretty simple email. Say, hey, Sarah, I came across your LinkedIn.
That's awesome. You've been at company X for the past eight months and that you've hit your quota and surpassed your quota 40% of the time, whatever the case may be, whatever they might have in that profile. Say something personalized. Then, hey, I'm also interested in potentially becoming an SDR at company X.
I'd love to hear more about your experience there. Connect with you. Hear more about the company's values. What it's like to be an SDR.
Would you be up for a 15 minute call on Tuesday or Thursday? Something along those lines, right? Short email, establish rapport. Say you'd love to learn more.
You're curious to connect with them. Maybe you're curious to say, I'm curious to hear your story. Maybe you see that they were in a previous industry, then they switched industries. You can make a comment on that.
You have to hear your story about how you made that transition. That makes people feel seen, right? Oh, yeah. I put it, they might think, yeah, I put in some work on that career transition.
I would love to tell that story because people love to talk about themselves and feel seen. So you'd be curious about them genuinely. Then you make a little ask. Can we meet for 15 minutes?
People also want to help. If you ask them, they'll likely say yes as long as you're genuine. Then you get the chance to connect with someone at the company and you get more information than you build a little rapport. They might refer you to somebody else.
They might vouch for you. They might talk to the hiring manager. You're already making yourself more well known. Then when you do pitch the company, you have more of an in.
It's actually not as cold of a pitch. We talked about number one, email the hiring manager or decision maker directly with your pitch to a company. Number two, email a current employee to build rapport, build connection, learn more, get yourself wedged into that company a little bit. Now let's talk about what tools you do, you use to do this.
I mentioned hunter.io. The way this works is you enter the website for a company and Hunter will list many people who work at that company and they will give you, most likely, give you an email address. Now it's not perfect. Some companies are going to have more results and more verified emails than others.
You might get a confidence score they call it of 90%. We think this is the email. We haven't 100% verified it, but this is a great base in the patterns. Hunter's algorithm picks up.
They have an email address for you for a certain person. You enter in the company's website. You can enter in a certain name of a decision maker as well and they're going to give you high likelihood of what their email address is. Sometimes they can verify it right there because they can pull it.
They've seen that this email is listed on this other website. Sometimes it's not 100%. It's a really powerful tool, Hunter.io. The other tool that I use is neverbounce.com.
Everbounce.com is where I double verify. So maybe I get the best guess from Hunter.io and it says, oh yeah, it's John Smith is JSmith at companyx.com. So then I put that email into neverbounce.com and that's going to verify if the email is valid, if it's going to bounce or not, if it's going to hit, it's going to tell you if it's a valid email or not. Again, it's not perfect, but you can do is, yes, maybe it's not JSmith, but it's J.Smith at companyx.com and then you verify that and then, oh, that's the one.
Ding ding ding. And then you get, it could take a couple of times, but it's very helpful and it works, I would say about 90% of the time you're going to be able to find their email address using Hunter.io and neverbounce.com. So those are the tools. Talked about who to email.
So the question is, are you going to go ahead and do it? Again, talked about last week, the power of execution. So this is the way to bypass the job posting resume approach to crash the party, go in the side door, stand out by showing that you are creative and thinking for yourself, taking initiative. Cool.
So that's the podcast. So I want to let you know we get crash offering hands on one on one coaching for your job on all this approach. We will share with you in a personalized way through our proven job coaching system. We've helped thousands of people with this approach getting awesome jobs without a resume, proving your value through pitching.
I totally get that sometimes it's a little uncomfortable and you might feel apprehensive about taking this creative approach where you're not following the rules. And so one of the value adds we bring to our coaching service is that encouragement where if you might be feeling hesitant, we're going to reassure you, no, no, no, no, this will work. If you, if you, I mean, don't guarantee is for anyone pitch, but this approach works and that it is okay to break the rules. Sometimes you might need that person who's your number one advocate on your job on who's going to meet with you and give you that support and that reassurance that, yeah, you got this and then giving you specific advice for your situation.
You have a certain company in mind, you have a certain role in mind. What can you send them? What can you say in your video pitch? What custom project can you send?
That's type of stuff we offer in our one on one coaching system. Go to crash.co and learn more or you can just go to crash.co. And you can fill out the little interest forms at four or five questions and that's what you get you started. And from there, we'll give you, if you, we think that you're a good fit based on the interest form, we'll give you a free 15 minutes job hunt consult and just give you some advice right there.
So anyway, that's our little pitch for our coaching program. I hope this podcast has been valuable and beneficial to you and worth your time. Really appreciate you taking the time and attention. There are tons and tons and tons of podcasts.
You could be listening to us. I appreciate you taking the time and go out there and send an email to someone that matters and make your job hunt happen. Cheers. Like what you hear?
Go to crash.co and join the career revolution. You want to share your own career crash story? Send it directly to me at Isaac at crash.co.