@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.

Peter

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.

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.