Few things about inviting and responding to invitations

Some news from Sweden: Downtown Stockholm was filled on Wednesday (Feb. 26, 2014) with some 61,000 persons looking for a job.

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_307437/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=W010hcU7

The people were accidentally invited through a mass email sent out by Sweden’s public employment service that was trying to arrange a meeting between job seekers and potential employers. The machine that most probably sent the mass email made a small mistake… only 59,000 more emails or so. 🙂  Police was called to manage the situation and apologies were sent afterwards to those affected.

This news made me realize once more the value of couple of lessons that I have learned during the years working as an executive search consultant:

1 – In the line of business of identifying professional talents, if you can, try avoiding mass email invitations. Screw-ups can happen and apologies will probably work if you are a state owned agency controlling a particular interaction platform. Maybe in Sweden. Otherwise, if you act in the name of a particular client, you risk losing credibility and image for both your client and yourself.

I still have in mind such a mass email sent some time ago by a pretentious executive search firm to an undefined “wished-to-be-highly-educated” audience, without the slightest effort to cluster or personalize their communication other than inserting the name of the recipient at the beginning of the email. Quoting from memory, the message was saying basically “We have to recruit more than XX CEOs and non-executive Board Members for XX companies where billions of Euros are at stake. I insist that either yourself or anyone else you might consider relevant (???!!!) to occupy these positions… So much the better as some of that money go to good salaries and appealing benefits…(???!!!)”.  I remember this ended up, among others with tons of responses, most of them irrelevant, including people asking in the online forum how their CV should look like….. 🙂

2 – As a candidate, consider if you will respond to a mass email invitation and what should be your expectations when participating to such events. Do you want to be seen as a resource or as an investment? HR mass events are used for finding “commodity-type” positions that don’t leave room for too much professional differentiation. The time per reviewing someone’s candidacy is limited, so the only approach companies’ representatives will use on you will be the one of applying a standardized-evaluation-of-resources method through interpreting cost, education or age, none of which showing necessarily the real professional potential you might have. On the other hand if you want to be seen as a positive investment for a particular company, you have to understand that you’ll need the full attention of the interviewers (impossible at a mass event) for offering them a glance upon your potential future evolution and contribution to the company.

So why not to introduce yourself directly to the company that you want to work for (through its official career site), showing who you are and how your values and desire to succeed match in fact theirs? Or better, try to find out the most relevant non-HR counterpart within the targeted company (here LinkedIn can be of a real help) and introduce yourself to that person directly. Even if your information will be passed further on to the internal HR department, the attention you’ll draw upon yourself will be bigger than in a mass event, thus increasing your chances for succeeding in your endeavor.