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The Dangers of Mass E-mailing Job Applications

Jan 13, 2010 / Job Seeker / Trackback

Guest Post by Heather R. Huhman

When fac­ing a stack of job appli­ca­tions, it can be tempt­ing to craft one résumé and cover let­ter and send them to out to mul­ti­ple recruiters/hiring man­agers to save time. They won’t know the dif­fer­ence, right? Wrong.

Recruiters and hir­ing man­agers can spot a let­ter sent to mul­ti­ple recip­i­ents from a mile away. Gen­er­al­ized sen­tences or lack of a per­son­al­ized greet­ing are dead give­aways that can instantly turn a recruiter/hiring man­ager away from your appli­ca­tion, no mat­ter how qual­i­fied you are for the job. Why should a s/he take inter­est in you when you haven’t even taken the time to show true inter­est in their company?

If you don’t per­son­al­ize each and every résumé and cover let­ter you sub­mit, you run the risk of seeming:

  • Dis­re­spect­ful: Mass mes­sag­ing shows a lack of con­sid­er­a­tion for the recip­i­ent. Not show­ing care and atten­tion now can sug­gest that you might be that way on the job, as well.
  • Unknowl­edge­able: By not even tak­ing the time to research the com­pany you are apply­ing for, it appears you may not be aware of every­thing your desired posi­tion may demand of you.
  • Lazy: This is prob­a­bly one of the worst traits to you can exhibit as a poten­tial new hire. Cus­tomiz­ing your résumé and cover let­ter may be time con­sum­ing, but doing so shows you have a true ded­i­ca­tion to the job.
  • Uno­rig­i­nal: Recruiters and hir­ing man­agers receive count­less résumés and cover let­ters each day. If you don’t use your appli­ca­tion tools to present how unique you are for each posi­tion you apply for, you are miss­ing a huge oppor­tu­nity to show your worth.

Remem­ber, cover let­ters and résumés are your first impres­sion with a recruiter/hiring man­ager. They can make-or-break your chances of advanc­ing in the hir­ing process. Get­ting the job you want takes time, dili­gence and def­i­nitely doesn’t start with the phrase, “To Whom it May Concern.”

Heather R. Huh­man is a career expert and founder & pres­i­dent of Come Rec­om­mended, an exclu­sive online com­mu­nity con­nect­ing the best intern­ship and entry-level job can­di­dates with the best employ­ers. She is also the national entry-level careers colum­nist for Examiner.com and blogs about career advice at HeatherHuhman.com.


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  • Falca MAMA

    Wow per­son­al­iz­ing our resume!!! This could be the answer to solve our mas­sive unem­ploy­ment, sounds like if every­body do this, everybody’s gonna land a job.

    • http://karlaporter.com/ Karla Porter

      Falca MAMA — I get sar­casm. The point is not job cre­ation, every­one will not land a job. There are more peo­ple unem­ployed than job avail­able. Do you do math? That is exactly the point. With such dis­par­ity, can­di­dates need to ensure their resumes get noticed, not lost in the sea of bul­let pointed to do lists. ~Karla

  • http://karlaporter.com/ Karla Porter

    @JobCannon I agree that reach­ing out to your net­work is a great move, you never know who knows of an oppor­tu­nity or con­tact that can help you in your job search. I also think my site just got used for free adver­tis­ing but I’m not tak­ing down your post because I believe in free­dom of speech.

    @Alex Your math skills rock. That’s exactly what one needs to do… treat a job search as a full-time job. I pre­fer a more strate­gic approach in who I reach out to and I think it should be per­son­al­ized.… I would pick up the phone.

    @woollylanc Resumés are cool doc­u­ments that serve as a career snap­shot to make some­one inter­ested in you. It’s like dat­ing. If I don’t like your pic I’m not call­ing to chat with you.

  • Wool­ly­lanc

    Great post­ing! and how true! after all we would not wish to be treated like that per­son­ally! Take the view that every let­ter is your handshake!

    Peter

  • http://twitter.com/AlexBlom Alexan­der Blom

    Karla,

    Great post. Boo to the bloke spam­ming below.

    I was argu­ing about this with a ‘mass mail­ing con­sul­tant’ (or what­ever they hell we call them) last night actu­ally. He was try­ing to attract stu­dents for $300 upfront and $700 on com­ple­tion. As far as I am con­cerned receiv­ing a mass e-mail puts you in the bad bin and makes future appli­ca­tions harder.

    On top, if you don’t have a job that’s all you should be doing; and not hem­or­rhag­ing money either. You work what? 8 hours per day. 2–3 appli­ca­tions per hour is rea­son­able. That is 24 appli­ca­tions per day; or 120 in a nor­mal work week. Save your money and put in some elbow grease.

  • http://twitter.com/JobCannon Job­Can­non

    The head­line on your blog post drew my atten­tion because we pro­vide a tool which uses email mar­ket­ing tech­niques to aid in a job search.

    I was pleased when I read it to find that we agree with ALL the points made in the post, but I would like to take this oppor­tu­nity to make the claim that there are ways in which “mass” email­ing can be use­ful dur­ing a job search.

    Cer­tainly you should not send a form let­ter when apply­ing for a posi­tion and each and every appli­ca­tion should be tai­lored to the com­pany and posi­tion being applied for. That is what you are address­ing here.

    How­ever, we have found that broader emails can be use­ful in reach­ing out to your net­work and keep­ing your friends and con­tacts informed regard­ing the progress of your job search and what you’re look­ing for. If you don’t let as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble know what you’re look­ing for, you are mak­ing lim­ited use of your network.

    Our approach involves reach­ing out and politely and tact­fully ask­ing your friends and con­tacts if they’d be will­ing to assist you in your job search. If you have hun­dreds of peo­ple in your net­work, this ini­tial email should prob­a­bly not be cus­tomized to each and every per­son. Those who do not wish to assist you need to be hon­ored in their request not to be part of your effort and be removed from your list. If they respond per­son­ally to offer assis­tance, you should send a per­sonal reply back.

    Once you have received people’s per­mis­sion to help them out, you can then send occa­sional (but not too fre­quent) emails with infor­ma­tion about what you’re purs­ing and where you’d like to get your foot in the door.

    This approach to a job search may be very effec­tive. You can do this using your stan­dard email pro­gram or using a tool such as ours at http://JobCannon.Com. We man­age the process so that you will not make any errors when peo­ple choose to opt-out and we pro­vide tem­plates to use as start­ing points for your communication.

    If you do use our tool, in the spirit of this blog post, we highly rec­om­mend that you cus­tomize our tem­plates so that they sound like your­self and not like a mass email.

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