Do I Need a Cover Letter with My Resume?

Today, many job seekers feel their resumes seem to disappear into a “black hole” after applying for a position. This has many wondering if there is any point in sending a cover letter with their resume. That answer is absolutely yes! While a cover letter won't get you the job, it will give you a greater chance to be noticed among other applicants. Standing out can lead to an interview which is the only way you will get the opportunity to win the job.

An effective cover letter communicates so much to a recruiter and potential employer, specifically; from why you are interested in the open position to what relevant skills and experience you have to offer. With so many unqualified job seekers indiscriminately applying for hundreds of jobs, your resume will automatically stand out if you can demonstrate that you truly have a personal interest in a particular position and the qualifications and achievements to match.

Effectively explaining why you want the job requires you to cite those qualities and skills that personally make you a good candidate. Generally speaking, the likelihood that you would be a good fit for the position is directly related to your relevant experience and education; for example, a CPP could likely perform security management duties for a number of companies. However, telling an organization that you’ve “considered” obtaining a master’s degree in business administration makes your interest in the job personal, rather than objective and professional.

In an attempt to personalize their cover letters, job seekers often research a company by examining their website. While it’s good to know things such as what a manufacturing company makes or the volume of business a firm does annually, including facts like these in a cover letter is counterproductive. Hiring managers and recruiters already know all about their own company; what they don’t know is why you’d be an asset. Use the cover letter as an opportunity to sell your skills and ability. Save the facts and figures about the company for the interview. That's where you want to use them.

Your willingness to write a cover letter confirms for the employer that you have a serious interest in a specific position. However, to be effective a cover letter should demonstrate your knowledge of the company by relating your personal achievements and qualities to that specific business or role. The people reading your resume or application don’t know anything about you. Your cover letter needs to sell you as a candidate, while your resume supports your assertions with specific details.

So, brush up that resume with specific achievements and accomplishments from each of your previous positions and then write a tailored covered letter before you hit the send key.

Common Hiring Errors and How to Fix Them

Let's begin by defining a hiring error: if your standards are on the lower end of the scale, a hiring error is selecting someone who then gets terminated or quits during the first 6 months on the job. If you have higher standards, it’s someone who isn’t an achiever (an “achiever” would typically be a B+ or better person - in other words, someone who delivers high-quality results on a consistent basis, deals effectively with all types of people, can take on bigger tasks, and gets promoted into larger positions).

To me, not hiring an achiever is a mistake, regardless of the role. For more common rank-and-file positions, not hiring someone who performs as well as those already in the top-third of your work-force is also an error.

Not making these common hiring errors is sure to improve your company’s overall talent levels. Using this perspective, there are some common hiring mistakes that can be reduced and virtually eliminated with some basic processes, focus and effort.

Below, I have outlined some of the most frequent errors, along with some solutions.

Common Hiring Errors and Solutions
1. Not enough quality candidates to consider. On one level this is a sourcing issue as it clearly falls in the lap of the recruiting department to find enough applicants to make an appropriate hiring decision. On the other hand, if the company has weak leadership, a non-competitive compensation plan and/or a bad reputation, it’s unlikely it will see enough good people, regardless of the strength of the recruiting department. However, if the company’s resources are reasonable, then the recruiting effort might just needs fine-tuning. You need to have a strong sourcing and recruiting strategy that drives enough top talent to the organization in order to hire enough of them to fit your needs. When the supply of talent exceeds demand, this is easy to do, but won’t be once the recovery begins. Start your future recruiting efforts now!

2. We didn't hire the best candidate. This is a frequent hiring error that usually falls at the feet of the hiring manager. In this case, you never know about this mistake, so assigning blame for something that didn’t happen is tough to do. Perhaps it is the process used to compare candidates that is at fault. This problem is often enhanced by the informal decision-making process managers use to decide whom to hire among competing candidates. A candidate profile and candidate assessment will reduce the likelihood of this error. It is a great solution for using evidence vs. feelings to make the assessment.

3. A strong person was hired, but isn’t working out for a variety of reasons. This is a major disappointment, but usually attributed to hiring an achiever for the wrong job or lack of fit with the hiring manager. Other reasons include an inability to work with the team or some type of personality and culture clash. The job fit mistake is largely caused by not clarifying job expectations before the person was hired, resulting in selecting someone who is competent, but not motivated to do the work required. This is a serious mistake and fault should be assigned to the hiring authority. The good news is, it’s easily corrected with a little discipline. Require managers to prepare a candidate/ performance (not a job description) before beginning the hiring process. This profile summarizes the performance requirements of the job, not the skills required to do the work. Many of these can address the team, culture, and managerial fit issues, minimizing these types of mistakes, as well.

4. The position was a lateral move for the candidate. This is a variation of the “good person, wrong job” problem above, but with a different solution. During an economic slowdown, the best people aren’t looking, and those that are have lowered their acceptance standards. During a recovery, the best people are all looking for career moves, but are often swayed by a big jump in compensation or a “grass is greener” promise. Once on the job, however, sometimes the grass turns out to be just another shade of green. Formally implementing a career decision process for candidates to use when comparing their opportunities can ensure that the person is evaluating your position as a real career move. This will not only prevent the lateral move problem, but also allow you to hire more top people for the right reasons, not compensation and other promises.

5. A weak candidate was hired due to an improper assessment. Sometimes weak people get hired because there was no one else available at the time. More often a bottom-half person gets hired because the selection process was flawed. This is attributed to three fundamental causes. One, a decision was quickly made based on first impressions, intuition, or gut feelings. Two, managers overvalued certain skills at the expense of delivering results on a consistent basis. Three, managers and those on the hiring team made a flawed judgment based on their personal needs and biases in combination with a mix of unreliable interviewing techniques.

6. Weak managers don't hire strong candidates. Top people don’t want to work for someone who isn’t a leader or can’t be a mentor. Top candidates recognize the lack of these skills in managers from far away and are very likely to turn-down any offer your firm might make. This is another case where a candidate profile and formal assessment process can help. Also consider adding senior managers to the hiring process to elevate the weaker managers hiring skills. In this team-based style a weaker hiring managers aren’t making the decision on whom to hire alone, and the candidate has other people to seek out for career advice.

If you have more than two or three of these problems, the root cause is probably the lack of a cohesive end-to-end hiring process. In this case, implementing some of the ideas mentioned like a candidate/performance profile and a formal assessment process will have an enormous impact on improving your company’s ability to consistently hire top people across the board. Following are the steps involved.

Most are common sense. As you review the list you’ll discover that none of the ideas are profound or hard to implement. What’s hard to do is getting every manager to do them every time.

1. Don’t rely totally on skills-based job descriptions. Instead, have managers clearly define what the person will be doing on the job before the hiring process begins. As part of this include how the person’s performance will be measured.

2. Use the assessment to determine if the person has performed the tasks at the standards described. If you do this, you’ll discover that the person has exactly the skills and experience needed to be successful. This will be slightly different for everyone.

3. Don’t use job descriptions to write recruiting advertising. It’s better if you prepare career-oriented ads that focus on what the person can learn, do, and become.

4. Provide candidates with a decision tool to compare jobs based on their short- and long-term merits (e.g., job stretch, growth, team, comp, work/life balance, etc.). If you give this to them right after the phone screen, they can use it to ask questions and gather the right information to make a reasoned career decision.

5. Systematize the evaluation and comparison among candidates by using a formal evidence-based assessment process based on all job factors (e.g., technical, team, motivation, growth trend, consistency of results, problem-solving, fit, etc.). As part of this eliminate yes/no voting with a requirement that evidence is shared in an open forum.

While this list of hiring errors is not complete and the solutions proposed certainly aren’t the the only ones available, the idea of focusing on eliminating mistakes can have a profound impact on overall hiring results. If you'd like some free samples of these assessments please contact me david@pinnacleplacement.com.

Thank you!
David Lammert

Five qualities you must show in an interview

Try to picture yourself in the interviewer’s shoes and you should be able to gain a better understanding of how a potential employer thinks when conducting an interview. This is crucial in order to turn this critical meeting into a job offer. There certainly is a lot more to convey than just covering that you can do the job.

No matter what your profession, skill level, or current place in the professional world, every job interviewer will be evaluating you against the same basic set of criteria. Master how you present yourself against these five main points will dramatically improve your odds at receiving an offer.

The First Key: Capability and Chemistry
Successful candidates who receive job offers are always the ones who prove themselves capable and suitable to the environment; capable in that they can do the job, and suitable in that they understand the individual role their position plays in making a contribution to the overall bottom line. Each of us, as working professionals has a combination of skills that broadly defines our capability and personality traits and determines the work environment in which we best excel. It is useful to itemize your technical and professional skills and personality traits in relation to the requirements of a job, then to recall incidents that profile each of these skills and traits. These day-to-day illustrations of you at work, doing the job successfully, allow the interviewer to picture you behaving in the same way on his or her team.

The Second Key: Think of yourself as a problem-solver
Jobs do not get created for the sake of it; rather positions are created when the job will somehow help contribute to the profitability of a company. Another way of looking at this is to say that people get hired to prevent problems from occurring within their particular area of influence, through their professionalism and industry knowledge, and to solve them when they do occur. In reality, this is the first and most important part of the unwritten job description for any job. A simple illustration we can all relate to would be the receptionist: without them, calls would go unanswered and that company's business would slowly grind to a halt. So regardless of job or profession, we are all, at some level, problem solvers.

Think of your job in terms of its problem-solving role and responsibilities. By identifying the particular problem-solving role you are in, you will have gone a long way toward isolating what the interviewer will want to talk about. You might identify the typical issues you handle on a daily basis. Come up with plenty of specific examples and recall how you solved them. These steps can help you to develop useful problem-solving examples from all areas of your responsibility.
*State a problem or situation you typically face in your job that required your special efforts.
*Share relevant background information and the tasks' needed to resolve the challenge.
*List the actions and professional behaviors that you employed to provide a solution.
*Outline and quantify the results in terms of impact to the organizations bottom line, such as, money earned, money or time saved.

With plenty of these types of examples at hand, you can use them to effectively illustrate your answers to those tough interview questions. Additionally, when you ask about the initial tasks that will need your immediate attention in the early months of the job, you show that you are focused on the problem solving elements of the job. This type of question will also get you the information necessary to give answers more carefully tailored to the employer's immediate concerns.

The Third Key: Your Professional Conduct
You've seen the t-shirt or sign before that read: YOUR MOTHER DOESN'T WORK HERE, PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF. It's a reminder that in order to succeed, it's necessary to have and develop a whole set of professional behaviors. Making employers aware of behaviors that make you effective in your work, like time management, communication and analytical skills increase your odds of receiving a job offer. However, simple statements don't leave a lasting impression; illustrations that show you employ these professional behaviors in the work environment do leave that lasting impression.

The Fourth Key: Show Motivation
In a tightly run job race, when there is little separating the two top candidates, the offer will always go to the most motivated.

When you communicate that you want the job, demonstrate that you can do it and show your enthusiasm for that job and the company. You make the hiring decision that much easier, because the interviewer will correctly surmise that a more motivated employee will turn in a better performance.

The Fifth Key: Manageability and Teamwork
Avoiding nightmare employees is a major concern for employers. They are looking for any little sign of it during the interview process. Being "manageable" and a team player is defined in different ways: the ability to work alone; the ability to work with others; the ability to take direction and criticism when it is carefully and considerately given; and the ability to take direction when it isn't carefully and considerately given.

Show yourself as a team player with your every word and action. Make sure to identify your role as a team member when you answer interview questions. Don’t forget to insert the pronoun "we" when appropriate. If you are asked how you handle criticism, explain that you listen, confirm understanding and agree on a course of action and follow-through on it.

Another aspect of teamwork is the ability to work well with a diverse workforce in terms of their sex, age, religion, appearance, disabilities or ethnicity. Don't bring up these issues during a job interview. Even the most casual reference to such topics demonstrates insensitivity to the rights of others and will likely put a question mark to your candidacy.

With knowledge of these five tips you have the needed secrets to take to the interview. Mesh this knowledge into how you prepare for and answer questions, and you will reap the rewards of a polished interview performance.

Good luck!
David Lammert

Does your organization’s top talent have one foot out the door?

While unemployment continues to hover around the 10% mark and most of us find ourselves reeling from the deepest recession since the great depression, the idea of a blog on "Talent Wars" may seem like a strange topic for me to be talking about. However, savvy employers should ready themselves for the coming battle.

As people, especially the most talented people, prepare themselves mentally and reassess their professional positions, there will be a significant shift in their thinking. They will actively be seeking new positions to make up for lost earnings and a fresh new beginning. Because many organizations eliminated pay raises and reduced or eliminated bonus payouts (except Wall Street) many people feel pressure to stabilize their financial situation and rebuild their family’s financial future.

We live in a new reality as a result of the economic decline and the evaporation of much of the wealth across our country. People have new priorities. There is less certainty around holding high paying jobs into your mid 50's, let alone to retirement at 65. This will create pressure to earn more right now, which will lead to changing employers as soon as possible in order to increase earning potential.

Define Talent
It is important to note the difference between the demand for talent and the demand for people. I like to think of talent as the top 20% of performers in the labor pool. There is a large labor pool - many who are out of work - but, there is a limited supply of really talented people.

The top performers are those who generate a greater amount of output. They know they generate a disproportionate amount of the workload compared to co-workers, and they will demand to be rewarded as the economy grows. When they don't receive those rewards from their current employer they will basically declare themselves free agents and begin, passively and/or actively seeking new job opportunities. In fact, this is probably well underway right now.

Reward Talent
Rewarding your talent will pose a challenge for traditional business practices and policy that they are not designed to address. Most organizations have a narrow range of compensation with very little difference between the average producer and the top performers.

Here are some thoughts and ideas for your consideration:
*Great people deserve income and recognition more than average performers.
*Redesign your compensation plan. If performance is not the same, rewards should not be the same. Build in compensation that rewards the success of the organization and outstanding individual results. * Make sure your top talent is working for your best bosses. Perhaps you have heard the saying that people join organizations but, quit bosses. As a recruiter I can vouch for that. Don't let a bad boss drive today’s talent and future leaders to your competitor. Top talent will not tolerate incompetent or abusive leadership for long.
*Be sure your top talent is working on your organizations most important work. This way, you are maximizing your return on your investment. Top talent wants to feel empowered and to face challenging work.
*Provide your best employees the resources to stay current and develop professionally. They will reward you with loyalty.

Act now! Don't wait till your top performers begin to leave.
David Lammert

5 tips to help you identify and define your personal leadership brand

The fact that we all have our own personal brand is not a new trend. However, understanding the importance and actively managing that personal brand is of new importance. Since you probably already have a personal leadership brand, the more important question is, do you have the right one?

While some might dismiss the importance of this, the question is not trivial to your career. A personal leadership brand conveys your identity as a leader. It communicates the value you offer those around you. If you have the wrong leadership brand for the position you have, or the position you desire, then your efforts are not having the impact you might hope or expect. A strong personal leadership brand allows all that's powerful and effective about you to become known to your colleagues and subordinates, enabling you to generate maximum value.

On top of that, choosing a leadership brand can help give you focus. When you clearly identify what you want to be known for, it is easier to let go of the tasks and projects that do not help you deliver on that. Instead, you can concentrate on the activities that do.

So how do you build a leadership brand? Let’s consider these 5 tips.

1. Identify the results do you want to achieve.
Begin by asking yourself, "Over the course of the next 6 to 12 months, what are the major results I want to deliver at work?" You might want to consider the interests of important groups such as:
* Customers
* Boss
* Shareholders
* Employees
* The Organization
Remember, a leadership brand is outwardly focused. It is about delivering results. While identifying innate strengths is an important part of defining your leadership brand, the starting point is clarifying what is expected of you.

2. What do you want to be known for?
If you are policy oriented and hardworking, you may come across as somewhat aloof. These traits add up to a leadership brand that would not take you very far in more interactive role.
With that in mind, pick descriptors that balance the qualities that came naturally to you and that would be critical in more interactive position. Test your choices by sharing them with your boss, peers, and some of your most trusted allies. Ask them, "Are these the traits that someone in this general role should exhibit?" Their responses can help you to refine your list. It might include some of the following traits:
* Collaborative
* Good Listener
* Deliberate
* Independent
* Innovative
* Results-Oriented
* Strategic
A key is not to get too many words or your message becomes difficult to define.

3. Define your identity
The next step is to combine these words into two or three word phrases that reflect your desired identity. This exercise allows you to build a deeper, more complex description: not only what you want to be known for, but how you will probably have to act to get there. For example, calmly driven differs from tirelessly driven. Experimenting with the many combinations that you can make from your chosen words helps you crystallize your personal leadership brand.

4. Write your leadership brand statement and then test it.
Pull everything together in a leadership brand statement that makes a "so that" connection between what you want to be known for (Steps 2 and 3) and your desired results (Step 1).

Fill in the blanks:
"I want to be known for being ______________ so that I can deliver __________."
Your leadership brand statement might read: "I want to be known for being independently innovative, deliberately collaborative and strategically results-oriented so that I can deliver superior financial outcomes for my business."

Next, ask the following three questions to see if it needs to be refined:
* Is this the brand identity that best represents who I am and what I can do?
* Is this brand identity something that creates value in the eyes of my organization and key people around me?
* What risks am I taking by selecting this brand? Can I deliver on this brand?
After going through this exercise, you should be fully satisfied that you have crafted a personal leadership brand that is appropriate to your role and within your power to deliver.

5. Make your brand identity real
If you fail to live up to your personal leadership brand it will create cynicism around you because you do not deliver what you promised. To ensure that the brand you advertise is embodied in your day-to-day work, check in with those around you. After you identify and define your personal leadership brand, share it with others. Let them know what you brand is and invite their feedback.

The exercise of forging a leadership brand and the day-to-day discipline of making it real will help you stay focused on the most important challenges of your role.

To be sure, your leadership brand is keeping up with the times, it should evolve in response to the different expectations you face at different times in your career. Try this and see if it helps your awareness and your long-term success.