To succeed in 60 seconds

When I was writing a cover letter, I came to understand one thing. People who have to read it will devote only a few seconds to it. Not minutes or an hour. Only a few seconds. I was very much interested why this is so and I decided to use mathematical methods.There were already 500 candidates for the job ad that I decided to apply for, who had already sent their cover letters . Yes, but the positions were three more and a candidate had to be chosen in the same term. Let’s presume that the candidates were also the same number for every position. These were 1500 applications more.The employee who was supposed to review these materials had an eight hour working day. The advertisement was valid for a week. My calculations:

5 working days x 7 hours (everybody has a lunch break, am I right?)= 35 hours.

35 hours x 60 minutes = 2100 minutes.

If I divide those minutes 2100 : 500 (cover letters) the result is 4.2 minutes for a cover letter. Or in the end 2100:2000 (500+1500) =1.05 minutes (these are only 60 seconds – WOW!)

But  let’s not forget that most probably there would have been even more candidates. The manager has another job to do in the company. To liaise with potential clients, to prepare reports and carry out his/her daily duties. What if somebody from the family calls on the phone? What if the employee got stuck in a traffic jam in the morning? If the last evening he was out at a party till late? How many different versions were there in my head! How the hell swiftly melted the seconds?

That’s why I turned to a simple principle from the advertising business: ad slogan. It represents one purposeful sentence which has to attract the consumer’s attention. We come upon it every day, when we watch ads on TV, in internet, when we read newspapers and listen to the radio. This is that certain sentence in the creative text, which literally “gets you by the ears”. Those words which you see and read and that embed deeply in your head. The thing that makes you buy a “Coca Cola”, possess an “iPod”, drive a “Mercedes”

In other words it struck me that my first sentence of my cover letter should attract the attention of the person, who would start reading my letter and he should hold his attention until the last sentence of the page. In the ad slogan is used the so called Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is similar to the Archimed’s lever, by which to turn the attention of the consumers to the advertising of the product or service. What are the main elements of the USP:

1. Proposition – it shouldn’t be ordinary. Its aim is to deliver predefined benefit, it shouldn’t be boasting and it should be meaningful.

2. Exceptional – what does that mean? Two simple things: the competitors should not be better or shouldn’t make propositions at all;

3. It should encourage purchase (action) – this is an extension of the previous two elements.

Here are the conclusions that I reached:

• My introducing sentence had to contain a proposition;
• It had to be exceptional;
• It had to encourage action – the employee had to read the cover letter till the end.

The result: “Do you need your company to save more than 50 000 $ with a simple move – my appointment?”

Picture by:Coachline