Alan Stutts | BLOG | Education Author

Regardless of why you send out a resume, include a letter with it. A cover letter “covers” your resume and explains why you are sending the resume. An approach or prospecting letter is used in direct mail campaigns to introduce yourself.

Your cover letter lets you quickly show off your knowledge of the company to whom it is addressed and express your enthusiasm at the potential of working for them. Every cover letter is unique because every company is unique and every position you apply for is unique. Nothing is more obvious to someone reading cover letters than a “canned” letter.
Would you interview this person?

To whom it may concern;

I am seeking an assistant manager position that matches my qualifications and experience. You advertised a job that probably does that. My resume is attached so you can learn all about my education and experience.

I hope to get called for an interview.

Sincerely,

John Jobseeker

What about this person?

Dear Ms. Smith;

Great Big Hotel is a company I have followed throughout my university studies in hospitality management, so I was very excited to see that you have an opening for an assistant night manager.

From the reports in the press, it is clear your major remodeling has paid off in increased room rentals. While earning my degree in Hotel Management, I worked as a night auditor at Not-So-Big Hotel, where I successfully introduced a new auditing technique that reduced auditing time by nearly 20%. Since graduating Magna Cum Laude in June, I have completed an internship as a banquet manager at Fancy Restaurant, where I managed four wedding receptions of over 200 people each.
Working at Great Big Hotel would give me the opportunity to begin my hospitality career working with an experienced, successful management team in one of the state’s premier commercial hotels.

I would like to meet with you and tell you more about my skills and experience. I will call next Tuesday morning to arrange an interview.

Sincerely,

Jessica Jobseeker

Tell friends, family, and co-workers know what your career goals are. Making a goal public will help your resolve to achieve it. If you want to be general manager of chain property, don’t keep it a secret! (How you express your dream is critical. Never let ambition be interpreted as arrogance or cockiness.) There will be co-workers or family members or friends who say you’ll never make it or tell you to keep it to yourself so you don’t sound like a braggart, but if you let people know what your are aiming for and you back up words with action, you will earn the respect of the organization’s where you work and find allies in the industry willing to help you succeed.

Having a career plan is only a start; you have to implement the plan, too. Despite your best efforts, things sometimes things do not work out. You cannot control everything that happens in your life, but when it comes to your career, you need to take control over the things that can make or break your chances for success.

Some of the things that you cannot control are:

Economic conditions that reduce employment locally, regionally, or nationally.

Poor management at the top of an organization resulting in closures or staff reductions.

Natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, or fires) that destroy properties or cut-off visitor access.

Crises such as disease epidemics, war or terrorist attacks. The tragedy of September 11, 2001 resulted in over 350,000 jobs in travel and hospitality being lost in the three months after the disaster.

Measure the costs and benefits of each occupation, program of study, or job to: your self, your family, your cultural group and your community or society?

a. Rank occupations, programs of study, or jobs
b. Make a choice
c. Make back-up choice(s) in case there is a problem with your first choice

Implement Your Choice

d. Plan - Make a plan for getting education or training
e. Try Out - Get work experience (full time, part-time, volunteer) and take courses or get training to test my choice
f. Apply - Apply for and get a job

Your resume is a sales tool, not a job application. It can get you interviews, but it cannot get you jobs. A job application is a business form. Everyone who applies for a job at a company may have to fill one out. Everyone who is hired by the company must fill one out.
An application form contains facts organized in structured form which is the same for every person filling it out: name, address, college granting a degree, eligibility to work in the United States, recent employers and why you left those jobs, and so on.

A resume is your opportunity to present yourself in the best possible light. Your resume need not (probably ought not) contain a list of every job you have ever held. You include only those jobs that best demonstrate your experience, skills and achievements in the hospitality industry. You don’t repeat the formal job description of the jobs you held; you explain how you improved operations, increased profits, or achieved record sales levels. You list the year you earned your degree and the college that granted your degree, not the five colleges you went to over 10 years to get that degree.

Email has become a mainstream form of business communication. In some situations, it is a great way to introduce yourself to a potential networking contact.

Ease and speed are benefits of email. But it has its downside, too.
Many trade and professional associations list the email addresses of their leadership or of department heads in public relations or membership services. These people are inviting email contact, take them up on it.
If you know someone within a company who has referred you to a department head and given you that person’s email address, go ahead and send an email introducing yourself, telling them who referred you, and asking if you can call them.

Avoid sending cold-call emails! Emails coming from people they do not know can look like so much spam, and end up in the deleted email folder just as fast. Some companies have anti-virus filters or spam filters that reject emails from any email address that is not already approved.
And speaking of spam, sending the same email to multiple email address is spamming. Don’t do it! Just as each postal letter or telephone call should be personalized, so should each email. In addition to annoying the recipient, the email may never make it past their spam filter when it contains multiple email addresses on the To: line.
Email letters should follow the same guidelines as letters, as outlined above. In addition, follow these guidelines for good email communication:

Make your first email short and cordial.

End the email with your full postal address, just as you would in a postal letter.

Do not attach your resume. You are not asking them for a job, and many corporate email systems today automatically delete attachments to protect from viruses and spam.

Give the person a link to connections of mutual interest to indicate your familiarity with the industry or their company.

Do not set your email options to send you a notification the email was opened. This may require the recipient to respond to a screen message and rather than do this, they may decide not to bother reading your email.

Sending letters to networking contacts is the most formal means of making contact. Letters also give you lots of time to work and rework what you want to say to someone. If talking on the telephone doesn’t come easy to you, start with a letter. Letters are best for making the first contact with someone you do not know, do not have a referral to from someone the person knows, or to someone who you think is critical to your career.

The purpose of the letter is to ask if you can telephone them or set up a meeting. Each letter should be personalized. Would you want to talk with someone who sends the same letter to everyone? How did you hear about this person or this company? Name the person who suggested you write them. If you can make some other personal connection (Did they go to your college? Grow up in your hometown?) do it.

After the introduction, insert your well-crafted message, the same one you use at parties or in telephone calls. Close with a statement thanking them in advance for their help and telling them when you will call to set up an appointment for meeting or telephone conversation.

The biggest mistakes you can make when contacting a person with a letter are:

Misspell words, use improper punctuation, or make grammatical errors.
Address the letter to “To Whom It May Concern.”

Ask for a job or enclose your resume.

Fail to make the follow-up phone call.

In the 19th Century, people never went anywhere without a personal calling card. About the size of today’s business card, the calling card was handy for giving people you address or leaving behind when you called on someone who wasn’t home. You can use a similar technique in the 21st Century. Create a job seekers calling card!

A job seekers calling card contains your name, telephone number and the career position you are seeking. It can also summarize your skills and qualities as a worker. You can easily create one on any computer and print out several using special business card or index card paper. For a more polished, and more expensive, card, you can take your text to a quick-print shop and ask them to typeset and print it.

Your calling card can be given to people who meet during the course of the day, even if they were unable to give you any names of suggestions during a conversation. They might think of something tomorrow and can use the calling card to get your phone number.

Attach the card to letters you send requesting informational interviews, job sharing, or telephone calls for career advice. If you fill out job applications, attach your calling card. Attach it to your resume, as well. Your resume will get filed, but your card can be sent along to someone else the HR office thinks might be interested in your skills.

Your B List contains the names of people you don’t already know, but people you believe have information or other contacts that will help you in your job search. You need to spend time adding to that list to make sure the names on it are the right ones.

There are many ways to get names for your list. The ideas below are just to get you started.

Contact your alumni association and ask if there is a directory of alumni. These often include information on where a graduate is working.

Contact the local or national chapter of any trade or professional association related to the hospitality industry. Ask about getting a copy of the membership roster. Most associations restrict access to current members.

Go to the web sites of companies where you want to work and look for names in the “About…” pages or the press pages. These same pages will have the company address and telephone numbers. They may include email address for individuals.

Go through your company research notebook and pull out the names you found in company profiles or in articles.

Call a company’s main number and ask the receptionist if she can give you the names of people who hold jobs at the company in your field of interest. These might be department heads or others.

The people on your A List are people you already know. Unless you are already in the hospitality industry, the people on your A List wont’ give you a job. You need your A List to create your B List. Your B List is people who know about the hospitality industry and know the names of hiring managers.

Names are added to your B List when someone on your A List gives you a name, some one on your B List who gives you a name, or a name you find by doing some research. You need to contact each of these people, but you are not going to ask them for a job. Your task now is to let them know what you are looking for and ask if they have suggestions that might help you.

If you are making five or more contacts every day, your personal contact inventory will grow and all of those conversations will begin to melt together. You need a place to write down the names you get from each conversation. You also want to record the nuggets of information you learn or make notes to yourself about each encounter.