Job hunting hints

I put an ad on Craigslist last week for some part time marketing help and then asked the applicants to write me a pitch in under 100 words.

Here's what I got:

• 52 applicants in 4 days
• only 9 bothered sending their pitch, 5 had bad grammar (IE: worse than mine)
• about 15 sent a CV with nothing else in their email
• about 20 couldn't spell or compose a sentence
• 1 was an aggressive Internet marketing guy who started blasting me about commissions (WTF??)
• 1 applicant told me (unsolicited) how confusing my website was and how horrible the color was and proceeded to send me a pitch targeted at geriatric people interested in surfing (double WTF???)
  

Only one was really enthusiastic, followed my instructions, was professional and wrote a decent pitch. The bar was pretty low but she did a great job and will probably get my business.

So here's some tips for any of you trying to get business from somebody else, this includes you guys/gals who are looking for jobs, selling companies, cars, services, websites, bandwidth, tomatoes or whatever;

PC = Potential Customer

• Read every word of what was asked and reply with exactly what the PC asked for
• Even if you have a form letter, add a personalized note that shows you actually understand what your PC wants
• Be professional, enthusiastic and positive
• Check your grammar and use your spell checker
• Throwing a compliment helps but don't blow too much smoke up your PCs ass
• Criticizing your PC really doesn't help even if you think it was constructive unless they specifically asked for it and even then you should be very careful with your words not to ruffle feathers
• Stand out without being a clown

Sounds simple right? Then why did only 4 out of 52 MARKETING applicants follow this? I could understand if the job was VP of Cleaning Earwax out of Phones but for fucks sakes why can't a marketing person market themself?

If they aren't professional with me, how are they going to be with my customers?