Telling the Truth To Strangers

Last night I watched Life which stars Damien Lewis of "Band of Brothers" fame (which if you haven't seen you need to see) -- and a key line stuck out for me:

"you do that too. Tell the truth to strangers."

It's hard to tell the truth all the time. But without the truth we live incomplete.

Perhaps we think we're doing well, but actually, we're up to snuff - but no one tells us because they don't want to hurt our feelings, or it's too much effort, or they just don't know how, so we don't understand why we don't advance, or why we don't get invited to meetings.

Telling the truth to strangers can actually be easier -- we don't know them, we're not invested in what they think about us, it takes some time maybe, but not so much impact perhaps.

I got an email from a young woman the other day who sent me a cover letter and resume to apply for a job. She has excellent written communication skills - although a bit verbose - and clearly she's not a slacker. But she clearly hadn't read our website because a) if she had she would know that we don't ever have entry level positions and b) she didn't use any of our language. Frankly it pissed me off and I was going to ignore it and just not reply.

But now I'm going to email her back and tell her the truth, in the hopes that she can apply the truth to her job search efforts and land one that she wants soon. And here's part of what she's going to read:

1. Never ever send a cover letter and a resume as attachments in Word. If you insist on using attachments (which will get stopped by many email servers) ALWAYS PDF your documents. It's more professional, it can't easily be manipulated, and it says to the receiver that you know what you're doing.
2. If you insist on send a cover letter as attachment, make it easy to read. Serif font with not too tight kerning and SPACE please between the paragraphs.
3. Actually don't ever send a cover letter -- that's what the email body is for.
4. Always READ the website before you send an unsolicited resume. 
   1.  Know who you're sending to. If they say "experts-only" and "no junior staff" that probably means no entry level jobs.  
   2. Reflect the language of the company. Don't use the same language for every cover letter - hello! We can spot a form letter a mile away.
   3. Choose something on the website that appeals to you (for us: my favorite opera is ____, or I'll tell you my most embarrassing professional moment in person.)
5. Submitting your resume to an online job search service is NOT the same as sending it directly to a person at a company. All those words you chose that would pop out of the auto-software sifter that Monster uses don't read very well.
6. Please don't use transitive verbs or passive sentence structure.

This woman clearly has something to offer. Hopefully I can tell her the truth in a way that she can hear - because I'm not that different from all of the rest of the presidents of firms out there.