The Return Of Letter Writing (Yes, The Paper Kind)
from the so-much-for-the-paperless-office dept
Yes, we all know that the paperless office is a joke. All those digital technologies created a lot more paper, because it was so easy to create and print documents. Still, communications have gone electric. Email is obviously the favored method for most people to communicate (with some people still stuck to the telephone). However, some are taking a step back. Realizing that all that (legitimate and spam) email has become overwhelming, a small, but growing, number of businesses appear to be returning to their letter writing past. They find that actually writing out letters gets them attention from executives who otherwise might ignore random emails. It’s not as fast, and it’s not as efficient, but it certainly sounds effective. We’re not talking about direct mail, mass-marketing, but personalized letters designed to get attention. The article doesn’t say so, but I would imagine this strategy may even work for job seekers as well. While, for years, HR people tried to get everyone to submit their resumes electronically, that’s now resulted in resume spam inundated recruiters. I would bet that, especially with smaller companies, a paper resume would get more attention these days.
Comments on “The Return Of Letter Writing (Yes, The Paper Kind)”
Take a letter Maria ... and send it to my wife
Writing a paper letter is much more efficient in getting a valid response.
Taking the time to personally address a LETTER & not a quickie mispelled piece of email shows you take the issue seriously and reflects well on the writer. s a result, the response rate I have received when using snail mail is much better than that of email.
No Subject Given
I remember in the mid 90’s my manager used to joke, “We’re closer to a paperless toilet than a paperless office.”
… and we all worked in business process automation.
spam analogies
Did anybody else immediately think of the spam war when they read this post? One of the proposed weapons (and heatedly debated at that) is that of adding a “cost” to each message in CPU cycles. Some kind of encryption that would be negligible for even the most avid emailer, but unbearable for spammers. This seems like a synonymous real-world solution. We have to add some useless CPU cycles to our letters, to show the recipient that we consider them special.
I do intend to write some job inquiry letters by hand, when I resume the search in the future, as a result of this post. Thanks!
Re: spam analogies
Justin,
Excellent idea about CPU cycles !
It makes sense … in theory at least.
It wouldn’t impact those of us that send a few emails a day but would probably grind spammers to a halt.
Of course as soon as we would add something like this the spammers would just buy illegal CPU’s that don’t have that feature.
Nice idea though !
I tend to be “old fashioned” in believeing that snail mail is more personal. I had sent a type of “inquiry letter” to a local govt. agency (Work One). I eventually had a face-to-face with the woman and mentioned my email. Had she received it? Nope. She admitted that she went ahead and deleted it, thinking it was spam.
I rest my case…
I haven’t gotten any responses from employmemt inquiries by sending faxes, either. Simply put, I don’t trust them. I don’t trust that the actual person is going to get it in their hands. It also could get lost (this happened when I sent my doctor a fax this summer).
I think a person may have a better chance at coming across as serious, etc. if they would have the additional choice of sending a cover letter and/or resume in the mail versus through online application methods.
JMHO
Hoosier69