Although you can use Eudora or Outlook to send large numbers of emails, the best bet is to use a tool specifically designed for the task. We recommend that you try MailKing because it allows you to easily import a large number of addresses. They offer a 30 Day free trial which should be long enough to get you going.

Email Addresses of Recruiters and Employers

BullsEye Lists offers you the ability to purchase email addresses by searching through their database using key words. If you find all of the addresses in their database containing the words recruiter, employment, jobs and staffing, you'll end up with about 8,000 targets for your mail. The list will cost you about $25. Simply import the list into your email tool and send the cover letter.

Cover Letter

For Resume broadcasting, the simpler, the better. The following example is very effective. The objective is to get the recruiters to your web page!

Subject: Your Recruiting Needs

I found your email link on the web, and thought you might find this web page interesting.

http://www.blahblah.com/blahblah/yourresume.html

If you received this in error, please forward this email along to the correct individual(s) in your company that would benefit from this information.

Thanks,

Your Name
Contact Info

Finding A Job#14:
Build A Personal Home Page

January 22, 1998 If you're going to look for work on the web, you might as well go all the way. With your resume (and modules) in hand, it's easy to build a home page. You can use it to supplement the material in your resume. It will help build your credibility as a person who understands technology.

Yahoo! currently lists over 50 places that will give you a free home page. They also have pointers to other, more comprehensive lists of free web page services.

It's really no more complex than cutting and pasting your resume into pre programmed blanks.

We're particularly fond of the following places:

• Tripod
• GeoCities
• WBS (The Web Broadcasting Service)

Finding A Job#13:
Extra Resume Modules

January 21, 1998 A murder board is a group of advisors who help you by constructively tearing your work apart. Because your resume is such an important part of your job search, you'll want to build yourself a murder board.

Once you have a first draft of each of the forms of your basic resume (fax, email and paper), write a murder board directive. On a single page of paper, write a standard note that describes your job hunt, places you'd like to work and the help you'd like from a murder board member. (You want them to find any ambiguities, lack of clarity or evidence of uncertainty in your resume.)

Close your murder board directive with assurances that you want your advisors to be tough on you. You need clear feedback on grammar, approach and the things you might have forgotten. Ask for help.

Who should be on your "murder board"? Obviously, you want to bring all of your resources to bear on the question of perfecting your resume. Old teachers, friends, family work associates and customers can all add helpful insight to the development of a winning resume. Ask them. Give them a day or two to mull the question over. Try to get as many as ten different opinions on the quality and effectiveness of your resume.

As the feedback is returned, you'll see a very interesting pattern. Feedback generally tells you more about the person giving you the feedback that it tells you about your resume. So, you'll see lots of interesting (sometimes tough to deal with) information in the results from your murder board. The trick is to sort the useful from the non-useful.

Ultimately, the murder board will help you hone in on the real weaknesses in your package. Use it to develop extra modules for your resume.

Finding A Job#12:
Finish Your Resume

January 20, 1998 Software, like Career City's Fast Resume will help you put a fundamental resume together. (It also contains tremendous resources for waging a mail/fax campaign that we'll discuss later in this series.) Once you've finished the exercises from module 11, cut and pate your results into Fast Resume's software.

You're going to want to have several formats that include the same material.

• A very presentable paper version with distinctive formatting
• A faxable/scannable version for some electronic submissions
• A "text only" (email) version for online cutting and pasting

Computers are not as easily swayed. When your resume is submitted into a database, no one will ever search for words like led, implemented, created, developed, started, managed, responsible for, and so on. Databases are searched, almost uniformly for nouns.

In fact, if some one is looking for a Marketing Resume (or a Unix or Windows or sales Resume), search engines will usually return the resume that uses those words the most times. So, when you make the Electronic versions of your resume, you will do well to completely rewrite it.

If you take the time to create a resume for each of the different readers (computers and humans), you'll be surprised at the results. Most potential bosses are overjoyed to meet someone who can tell the difference between a person and a machine.

The "very presentable" paper version of the Resume is a marketing document. It showcases your skills and experience, your understanding of the opportunity and (not a small thing) your ability to use a word processor.

The email version of your resume is somewhat tricky. It's very tempting to simply attach your resume to a piece of email and ship it out. Unfortunately, many recruiters won't open attachments because they often contain viruses. The email version of your material should be limited to no more than 60 characters per line.