I came across this news article recently and was impressed by this thought by Stephen Covey thoughts on creating job opportunities.

Now you’ll still need a resume, you just won’t need one to snag the interview (look at your keyboard, and now look at me in disbelief, and repeat).

I thought it was refreshing to hear a bold new step in obtaining a job and keeping it. To wrap up Mr. Covey’s points:

1. Be prepared to do something different
2. Write a contribution statement (more like a plan resulting from research)
3. It must be humble and modest; double check for tone
4. Find out what’s going on with your prospect’s industry and competitive forces
5. Be very courageous, creative, analytical, and research oriented

This call to action suggests several different other strategies to help you become more successful:

• Put yourself in a position to find out and experience problems that you can identify and solve that the prospective employer can quickly identify with. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t know about the issue or not. It does matter that someone from the outside can plainly view it and come up with a solution. One way is to call the target or prospective company’s #800 and pretend to be a customer. When you can speak to customer issues and concerns in any setting, you will score. 
• Focus on relationship building with the prospective and  become familiarized with the company’s culture and its challenges.
• Know who the competitors are and sit down to compare and contrast. Good companies will hire people who fill in the gap, and by coming in with a plan will do so.

An out-of-the-box suggestion for your resume: Make that “Objective” or “Career Summary” a “Contribution Statement” in two or three lines and be specific about what you researched and project results. The rest of the resume should breakdown how your experience embodies what you can produce and results that you’ve achieved.

Adopting this strategy into your cover letter would really attract even more interest. Don’t tell everything, but just enough to tease the reader (Hiring manager) into calling you. 

Are there other ways you can bring this to life? How bold and courageous can you be in implementing these strategies? Please feel free to comment here or on Twitter.