When You Can’t Get Through the Front Door

People ask me all the time how they can they get hired. They can’t even get an answer to their letter. This is not unusual. Big companies are hammered with letters from potential employees. I believe all those should be answered, but even when they are answered, it is usually with a form letter. So how can you break through? My bias is probably based a little on family history, but I believe you just keep knocking at the door and you do it as creatively as you can. More than forty years ago when Alberto was still a very young company, a young man wrote to my dad about thirty times. One day he showed up at the door. My dad’s secretary told him that he had a visitor named Mike Renzulli. My dad said he didn’t know any Mike Renzulli. My dad’s assistant told him that Mike was the kid who wrote to him every week. My dad took the time and interviewed this “kid,” who had come all the way from Philadelphia. Mike went on to work at Alberto for decades and eventually became CEO of our Sally Beauty Company. So, my approach to “being heard” is to do something creative—over and over again. Be persistent. It might not work, but if it can break through you might have a chance to at least get an interview.

So, think about something like the following:

• Can you tell the head of sales where he has distribution gaps in your town and how you would fix them, giving a detailed summary of the stores in your marketplace?
• Can you tell the head of marketing five different ways you might be able to increase market share on a given brand?
• Can you create a print ad that is more effective than what is running now and tell them why yours is better? Better yet, if the company has multiple products, do a new print ad and send one every week for six weeks.
• Can you write a PR story that is so good the company might want to send it to the media?
• Can you write a news story about the company and its good works? Make it something they have not seen before and present it in a way that shows your creativity and ability to write.
• Can you make a YouTube video on a given product?
• Are there five little creative gifts that you can attach to your letter, sent over five weeks—gifts that say something about how creative you are?

The concept here is to break through the clutter. It might not work, but in our family’s history the “squeaky wheel” became a CEO of one of our huge businesses.