"Theirs a Problem With Youre Email" (sic)

A lot of folks these days are unemployed or underemployed. We’re looking for new or better jobs … for ways to “Triumph” more in our careers. It’s a tough market out there and we need every bit of help we can find. Following is just that—an informative help I received this morning from one of the newsletters to which I subscribe. I found it both insightful and entertaining. If it helps you or you can pass it along to someone who it does, I’ll be grateful. For many of us, if we’re not Triumphing in our work or professional lives, it’s difficult to be able to focus and do so in other areas as you know.

Mark Cenedella, CEO of The Ladders, an online job search assistance service, wrote the following on how to make your resumes and cover letters more effective. It agrees with my recent comments on focusing on what’s important and on being more concise in what we write. “Less is more” is usually true, as I keep saying. I continue to try learning this myself.

Enjoy the lesson. It’s a good reminder for us all.

SIMPLER IS SAFER, by Mark Cenedella

"A lot of the bad e-mails I see aren't bad because the person writing them is unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They are bad because an intelligent person is trying to say too much, in too complicated a way, with too many words, in a bid to sound qualified for the job.

But that is just exactly the wrong approach. Because, in fact, what employers and hiring managers are looking for is somebody who can communicate clearly and effectively. Rarely do long, complicated words and complex sentences make you sound easy-to-understand.

And those longer, more turgid e-mails have a much higher chance of a misspelling, grammar mistake, or unclear meaning, than a simple e-mail.

It reminds me of a famous exchange between two Nobel Peace writers, William Faulkner (famous for complex, dense prose) and Ernest Hemingway (who rarely used words greater than two syllables): Faulkner: "Hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner! Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" 

If you're trying to get a job, simple, clear communication is far more effective than big five-dollar words.

As an example, which of these two people would you rather hire?

Sally Simple writes, "I work well with teams that might not necessarily like each other in order to get them to understand the other side's viewpoint. I like to use a bit of humor so that we can all work well together and be successful as a company."

While Terry Turgid elucidates, "My background indicates a capability to bring together disparate elements of the organizational structure in which inherent tensions arise due to the substance of the work output, the cross-utilization of organizational resources, and competition for allocations and prioritizations that occur as a result. And I try to always be ready with a quip or bon mot in order to enable those elements to optimize their effort co-ordination and process implementation in order to achieve synergistic outcomes on behalf of the global organization."

Now both of those say the same thing (I think), but which candidate would you put in charge of getting sales and marketing to work together? Or leading the product and logistics groups on an important new initiative?

I'll take Sally Simple every time.

Okay, folks, that's my two bits on e-mails.

I hope you have a clearly successful and simply wonderful week!

I'm rooting for you,

Marc Cenedella, CEO & Founder" 

TheLadders.com is a private United States-based company providing an online job search service. It launched listing only vetted job offers with annual salaries of $100,000 or more. On 19 September 2011 they removed the $100k minimum salary requirement, opening the site to jobseekers who didn't meet the previous experience/value qualification. Unlike other employment sites that charge companies to post entries, TheLadders.com charges both job seekers and employers for their listings, and states that they confirm the authenticity and quality of each listing on the site.