Unsolicited Pitches May Not Be Worth the Time

Conventional wisdom is that a good way to get hired is to pitch the person with the power to hire you at a couple dozen target employers, whether or not an employer is listing a job opening. You simply call or email to say you'd like to meet with them or offer a proposal for what you could do for them, and then follow up diligently.

That has worked better for my clients in the past than it is working today. These days, I've had clients send compelling pitches to dozens of employers and get very few responses and the few that respond say no or give a meeting but it doesn't lead to a job.

Why is cold contact working less well today? I believe these factors are at play:

• Bosses are busier than ever.
• Hiring is slow overall in our jobless non-recovery. If an employer is going to hire, s/he'd rather hire a friend, someone referred by a friend or colleague, or cast a wide net and choose the best person among hundreds of applicants. It's cheap and easy to do so.
  
• Affirmative action hiring procedures are being followed more strictly: employers are ever more often precluded from hiring the person s/he wants without going through a closely monitored hiring process involving many interviewers.

Those reasons are on top of the usual reasons that cold contact isn't a magic pill:

• The employer believes that if a person is pitching himself, s/he can't be that good.
• The employer believes s/he wouldn't be getting the best candidate because s/he's not picking from a broad range of people, as s/he would if s/he placed an online ad and/or emailed current employees to ask for recommended candidates.

These days, what's working best for my clients is getting a job through their existing personal network, not including LinkedIn--those connections are too tenuous. Usually, it takes too long to turn such connections into those that actually result in your getting an on-target job. And that assumes you're great at converting even 1 of 50 such people into such a powerful advocate--no mean task. Most job seekers would end up burning up too much of their job search energy on that and, before it paid off, would have become a bag lady.