Bypass HR and Get Your Resume to the Right Person
by Peter Vogt
You can get around this problem by doing some detective work to identify a specific employee -- not in the HR office but in the department where you want to work -- to whom you can mail, or even email, your resume. It's rarely easy. Usually you have to invest a fair amount of time, energy and persistence. But it can be done. Here's how:
Call the Company and Ask
Sometimes you can simply call the company and ask for the best person to contact. Unfortunately, many administrative assistants and receptionists are masters at deflecting your request and steering you toward HR. Still, the potential success rate is high enough that you should always try this strategy.
Visit the Company's Web Site
This approach won't always work either. But it takes only a minute or two, and enough companies list employee contact information on their sites to make your virtual visit worthwhile.
Read Articles About the Company
At your campus or local library, you can often access massive periodical databases like Lexis/Nexis, ProQuest and ABI Inform. Use them to do a keyword search for the company you'd like to work for. If you're lucky, each database will find articles mentioning the company. Scan the articles for the names of company personnel who are quoted. One of them could be your initial point of contact.
Ask Your Career Counsellors, Professors and Fellow Students
Most campus career counsellors have extensive personal networks among employers. In many cases, if you ask, they can provide the name of an appropriate contact person at a specific company, especially if the organization is located nearby. Professors can often name names for you, as can fellow students -- those with internships at your target company or recent graduates of your program.
Join a Professional Organization
If you get involved in a professional organization in your field -- whether on the local, regional, state or national level -- you'll almost always gain access to contacts at dozens or even hundreds of companies. Often, professional groups even publish membership directories in which you can easily find names and contact information.
Find Internet Discussion Groups
These days, there's an Internet discussion group or forum for practically any subject you can think of. If you find a group related to your field, you can join and start listening in to the virtual conversations. You may spot the name of a specific person at your target company, or ask fellow group members to help you pinpoint the right person.
Talk to Your Family, Friends and Well-Connected Acquaintances
According to some estimates, each of us knows at least 250 people. So your parents, your best friend's cousin or even your dentist can often help you identify the person you want to contact, or offer you the name of another person who can give you the information.
Try the Back Door
In certain situations, a little creativity is all it takes to find the person you seek. If you want to work as an editorial assistant for a particular book publishing company, for example, you usually need to approach a senior editor or the publisher. How can you determine who they are? Often, you can find the contact information you need inside the front cover of a book published by the company. Or you can see who the author has thanked on the book's acknowledgments page. More often than not, the editor and publisher the author has worked with are listed there.
You won't generally find a quick and dirty way to identify the person you need to contact within a specific company. But with a little ingenuity, you can almost always track them down eventually, and thus put your resume in the hands of someone who might invite you in for an interview and, hopefully, offer you the job you really want.