Even if a company has no posted job openings, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a job there. Sometimes you can get your foot in the door by impressing someone in customer service.
Photo by CWCS Managed Hosting
If you have a great idea to help a company serve its customers better, customer service is right there with you. The Muse suggests this approach might be a different way of getting your foot in the door at a company:
Start by expressing your loyalty to the company (think: You’ve always admired this startup, which is why you feel so strongly that a particular product or process should be improved). Then, request to be connected with an appropriate person to discuss further, but make no mention of your career interests whatsoever.
Once you get to the right person and explain your suggestions, the conversation of employment might come up. That’s when you mention that you’d love to work there. If it doesn’t come up, you already have a contact at the company. Now that you know the name of a person in that department, you can send them your resume and a cover letter following up on the conversation.
3 Ways to Get Noticed by Your Dream Startup (Without Applying) [The Muse]
Comments
7 responses to “Call Support If You Want A Job”
As someone who works in customer service (now in leadership), you will never ever ever have someone who will take you seriously – especially in call centres – when talking about obtaining a job. They will just say “lol ok guy” in their heads and then say “Sorry we’re not hiring just now 🙁 but you can try sending a resume to x@x!”
^^^This. True. 100% of the time.
I get the impression that the career advice taught in these articles tend to exist in a vacuum and are not always practical in being applied in the real world.
“No I can’t help you and no the manager (I’m not giving you his name) can’t talk to you right now.
Send your email to (an email we setup for people like this) and I’ll forward it on to him but all our application go through our careers site .”
Surprising how many didn’t bother sending the email. If they were genuinely nice and sounded keen but not desperate I would actually pass on the details and say so but most just went to the ‘archives’.
Back in the day I worked in the client service side within an organisation purely to get my foot in the door with their IT department. As someone with a keen interest in IT however no solid experience for my resume, I thought learning their systems then working really closely with the IT department would get my name ‘out there’.
It worked! When a job came up I was already in the system and they advertised internally (and the IT staff pointed out the job listing) and by that stage I knew all the processes and internal lingo to help with the interview.
Absolutely true! I did the same thing in my current job. Started in the call centre, made nice nice with everyone, and then when a job was posted in the IT department, I had the IT manager come to me and say “You ARE applying for this job, right?” 🙂
Ugh I always hated demanding customers who were determined to get your direct contact details in the thought they were networking. It was ALWAYS one sided, with them wanting priority support. I mean why call support when you can ask the boss for help?