The days of cold calling prospective employers until a flustered receptionist accidentally patches you through to the CEO are over. The era of renting a tuxedo right off the rack and walking into the lobby, demanding to speak to someone in charge with the stipulation that, “I’m not going anywhere without a signed contract and a freshly printed W-2 form” are also a thing of the distant past. Posing as an inquiring journalist working on a story about one of the executives sordid personal lives to glean any relevant information is too often considered a low-grade felony.
Standing out from the seaweed of applicants is no easy task, especially among an ocean littered with plastic bags, krill, and inebriated body surfers. How does a person get noticed from a single email? Cover letters aren’t even tossed onto a pile anymore. There’s no pile in sight. The letters aren’t printed out and parsed, read aloud and marked up. They are scanned by an underling and sentenced to Internet purgatory, never to be read again.
Most job seekers are satisfied after two emails, the initial cover letter plus one more follow-up. That’s not going to move the needle. You want to get noticed? Then two measly emails aren’t going to remotely cut it.
You need to lose your sense of social propriety and shame. Instead of modeling your email etiquette after the ghost of Emily Post, go with Robert McNamara instead. Bombard them with missives, diatribes, and short queries. Eventually, they’ll lose patience with you, their employees, as well as the authorities. Wear your restraining orders like suspenders. Launch an all-out assault on inboxes, maintaining a surgical campaign with new, longer emails every day. That includes the weekend. Yes, even Sundays.
Let God take a day off, he already has a job. You don’t.
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