Ten Questions & Answers About Pain Letters

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Copyright Human Workplace 2012 www.humanworkplace.com Boulder – Chicago – New York

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Ten Questions & Answers

About Pain Letters™

By Liz Ryan

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2 Ten Questions & Answers about Pain Letters™

Pain Letter™ writing is a new experience for most of us. A Pain Letter™ is written out of a different frame than the standard job-search approach, “Please, your Majesty, accept your humble servant’s plea…” The Pain Letter™ frame says “I’m out here, you’re out here doing a lot of cool stuff, and I notice what you’re up to over there at Acme Explosives. I’m paying attention, because that’s what businesspeople do. I love what you’re doing. I can also imagine that it isn’t always a bed of roses over at Acme Explosives. You might have problem X, or problem Y. A lot of people run into those kinds of issues. If you’re dealing with X and Y, maybe we should talk.”

Some job-seekers are flummoxed at the notion of writing to a VP or CEO as though the job-seeker were a peer of that lofty executive. Well, guess what: you ARE that person’s peer, and until it hits you that there’s no difference between the VP or CEO or Purchasing Manager you’re addressing and you, the job-seeker, you’re going to be stuck in “Please, your Majesty” mode. That’s not good for you, your next employer, that employer’s customers, or anyone else. That’s why we are shifting frames for job-search (and HR, and leadership, and work in general) at Human Workplace.

The artificial hierarchy that we take for granted at work is a big part of the red-tape disaster, the biggest impediment to creativity and spark at work (not to mention profits and shareholder value) that we call Godzilla. Somehow, somewhere along the line, we swallowed a bunch of Kool-Aid that tells us the person who sits in the Supervisor or Manager seat is fundamentally better than we are. That’s a terrible message, it’s not true, and it’s no good for business. I wrote these Ten Questions and Answers about Pain Letters™ to lay to rest some of the fears and misconceptions about Pain Letter™ writing and long-accepted (but faulty and dangerous) job-search frames.

Why Do Your Sample Pain Letters Address the Hiring Manager by his or her first

name?

We write Pain Letters™ to Mr. Smith, Dr. Jones and Dean Wormer all the time. We usually use the hiring manager’s honorific (Mr., Doctor, etc.) when we’re writing to someone in academia, health care, or law. The rest of the time, we use Dear Joachim or Dear Sally to begin the Pain Letter™. It’s a matter of judgment and personal preference, of course, but it’s important to remember the Pain Letter™ frame. We aren’t saying “Your Majesty, I recognize that I am a poor commoner” when we write a Pain Letter™. We are showing up out of the blue as someone who has lived some of the same movie scenes our hiring manager is living through now.

We don’t instill confidence by being excessively deferential. Every hiring manager who’s had a job opening in the last year is deluged by resumes and cover letters from typically deferential (even fawning) job-seekers. That’s not the way we want to write a Pain Letter™. We are going to address this hiring manager as though he or she and we are on the same level, because when we address the hiring manager as a credible peer (versus a job-needing underling) we’re in a completely different frame, one

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that tells the hiring manager “I may be able to help you with the things that are causing you the most agita.”

Your hiring manager’s friends and colleagues call him or her Jack or Sally or Xiao, most likely. Why would you address the hiring manager any differently?

What if the Hook I found on the company’s website has nothing to do with the

job I want?

Your Hook – the opening to your Pain Letter™, in which you congratulate the hiring manager on something cool the company has done (or he or she has done personally) doesn’t need to have anything to do with the job you want. The Hook is merely a way of beginning the conversation, of encouraging the hiring manager to keep reading. By starting your Pain Letter™ with an affirmation that the person you’re addressing is already doing a lot of important things right, you’re opening an aperture to get the hiring manager to read the rest of your letter. Don’t worry that the Hook is unrelated to the job you’re pursuing. (Everything is related to everything else, anyway. All distinctions between one thing and another are man-made.)

How long should the Pain Letter™ be?

A Pain Letter™ is one short page long. The opening Hook is one or two sentences, and after the Hook comes a paragraph break. You offer a Pain Hypothesis™ in one or two sentences, then slide right into your relevant Dragon-Slaying Story™ in another sentence or two. That means your second paragraph – the Pain Hypothesis-Dragon-Slaying Story™ paragraph – is at most four sentences long. It’s very short. In a Pain Letter™, less is more. The Pain Letter™ ends with a one-sentence closing paragraph. The page will look very blank as you read it, and that’s a good thing. You’ll be tempted to write more. Don’t.

I struggle to come up with good Dragon-Slaying Stories™. Any tips?

We have been trained over years and decades to categorize things – like our experiences at work and at school. That hurts us in Pain Letter™ writing, or any right-brain exercise, because we’ve been so well trained to think in buckets and categories. When you share a Dragon-Slaying Story™, it needn’t come from the same industry or the same function as the job you’re after now. It can be a story from college or high school or elementary school. It can be a story from a summer rafting-guide job or a nanny job. Here’s an example of a Pain Hypothesis™ followed by a Dragon-Slaying Story™ with right-brain relevance, not left-brain (same industry/same function) relevance:

I can imagine that at times, building a customer service infrastructure without losing focus on your current clients is a major stress factor. When I taught preschool just after college, we inherited sixty new kids all at once one day when a neighboring program shut down suddenly. That required us to cobble together the infrastructure to support sixty new families and welcome sixty toddlers without missing a beat. We prevailed, by inches, and doubled our program without dropping the service level – in fact, we all got better in the process.

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Your Dragon-Slaying Story™ doesn’t have to be lofty or fancy. You are writing to the hiring manager as a human being, not as a nameless, faceless entity. You want to think about what’s keeping your hiring manager up at night, and speak to that concern in your Pain Letter™.

Can I mention more than one business pain in my Pain Letter™?

I recommend that you stick with one pain in your Pain Letter™. You’re looking to open a little aperture in the hiring manager’s mind. The Pain Letter™ isn’t intended to convey a lot of information. So we don’t want to distract the hiring manager or overcomplicate the message with more than one business pain.

Is my intention to let the hiring manager know I can do the job?

Not quite. We don’t know what the hiring manager wants someone to do, exactly. We know what’s in the job ad, but most of that job-ad jargon (if not all of it) came right off someone’s hard drive, left over from the last time they posted a similar job. You can’t rely on that. Very often what the hiring manager wants in a candidate is completely different than the list of bullets specified on the job ad. Our intention in the Pain Letter™ is to let the hiring manager know that you know his (or her) movie. That’s enough. You’ll cover more ground at the job interview.

Isn’t it kind of negative to talk about the business pain?

Not at all – it’s compassionate, in fact. When you run into your friends, you are happy to see them, and you’re even more happy if they say to you, “You know what? I was thinking about you, and the problem you’re having with your betta fish. I ran into my ex-boyfriend, and he knows everything about fish, and he said he’d be happy to talk to you and figure out what’s going on. Do you want his number?” That’s what friends do. Suggesting a business pain that might be vexing your hiring manager isn’t rude or out of place. It’s perfectly businesslike, and even better, it’s human.

What’s rude, if anything is, is to write to hiring managers with a litany of all the ways we are fabulous and all the ways we can help them. We don’t know the hiring manager’s life. We can’t make pronouncements like “I can help you solve your problems” with any authority. We don’t want to make the Pain Letter™ or any part of the job-search process an exercise in trumpeting our fabulousness. It’s about the person in pain – the hiring manager.

Do I send the Pain Letter™ by itself?

You will send your Pain Letter™ by snail mail to the company headquarters (or the local office) addressed to your hiring manager by name. In the same envelope, behind the Pain Letter™ and attached to it by one staple, include your Human-Voiced Resume™. The two documents go together.

Send your Pain Letter™ and Human-Voiced Resume™ in a white, 8.5 x 11 envelope, so that you don’t have to fold the Pain Letter™ or the Human-Voiced Resume™. If you don’t fold the documents, the hiring manager will be reluctant to fold them either, so they’ll stay in crisp white shape on the hiring

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manager’s desk until s/he has a chance to glance at the letter and realize that s/he’d really better call you. 

Do I mention the job ad or the job opening in the Pain Letter™?

No, we don’t mention the job ad (if there even is a job ad) or a job opening in a Pain Letter™. You aren’t writing about job ads. You are writing to say “Wasn’t sure you had this problem, but if you do, maybe we should talk.” That’s a very different message, from a very different frame. If you mention the job ad or the job opening, your time-pressed and stressed-out hiring manager is likely to send your Pain Letter™ - Human-Voiced Resume™ packet straight into HR and the Black Hole of Death. That’s not what we want to have happen.

When I send the Pain Letter™ to my hiring manager, do I also send a copy to

HR?

No. Your message is not for HR. They don’t have your hiring manager’s business pain. If you want to apply through the Black Hole as well as writing directly to your hiring manager with a Pain Letter™ and Human-Voiced Resume™, you can do that, but the Pain Letters™ you write are for your hiring managers’ eyes, not for anyone else’s. If you apply via the Black Hole (it kills me to write this, because I really hope you don’t take that route, as it’s fraught with red tape and indignities of all sorts) and the Black Hole software requires something like a cover letter, write a standard yada-yada cover letter for that purpose.

Where can I get more information on Pain Letters™, Human-Voiced Resumes™

and other job-search ideas?

When you have time, jump over to our site, Human Workplace, at www.humanworkplace.com, and join up as an individual member (it is free to join). That way you’ll get regular job-search and career tips, and be invited to our career and job-search webinars. We also have tons of information for HR people, hiring managers, entrepreneurs, students, career coaches and university folks. Our mission is to bring a human voice and human spark into the workplace. How fun is that? We need your help!