Marketing your personal product

Lights…Camera…Action! Yes, here comes yet another movie star, Brad and Angelina, Madonna, Tom Cruise, Nichole Kidman. Each and every one an attractively packaged ‘product’ designed to appeal the widest possible audience.

My apologies for the dramatic opening paragraph but there is a serious point to be made here. As we all know people can be packaged and branded just like cans of Coca Cola. This concept becomes important at a time when you may need to “sell” yourself and look for a new job. This is particularly true now as we have a very competitive job market. Yes, there are still plenty of good jobs out there but there are also many more people chasing them. So the message is clear, you need to sell yourself and make sure that your ‘personal product’ stands out from the crowd.

Now if you carry out a review of your own product (that’s you) then you may very well conclude that it is perfectly positioned to take the market by storm, in that case you can stop reading here! But more often than not a close inspection reveals that your particular personal product could do with some serious development.

It’s a golden rule of marketing that you don’t start developing your product until you are quite clear on exactly what it is that the market requires. Sometimes that’s not an easy task, but in this case there should be plenty of data available to you in the form of a job advertisement or detailed job description. Your Search Consultant (if you have one) will also be another source of information on precisely what it is that the “market” (your future employer) requires. Be careful! What appears in a job advertisement or job specification may be very different from what is actually required. If an organisation is in difficulties, is about to lose a major client or has fallen way behind on a major project they are not about to advertise the fact in their job specification. That’s where the market research comes in. You really need to know everything there is to know about your target ‘market’ if you wish to become the market leader and sell your product ahead of the competition. But so many people just don’t take the trouble to do their market research. Search Consultants and Recruitment Managers routinely discard up to 70% of the CVs they receive “at first sift” because candidates don’t bother to tailor their application and simply send off the same old CV and cover letter to every job application.

So the first part of your marketing “package” is to produce a CV that, while succinct and readable, is designed to address each and every one of the employer’s requirements. Avoid a long list of duties and responsibilities and focus instead on your unique selling points and in particular on your career achievements that closely match the requirements of the employer. If your research indicates a need to turn around “distressed” projects, restructure organisations, improve customer satisfaction or increase sales then these are the aspects of your experience that must be highlighted. You need to show real quantifiable strengths and successes in each role that closely match the needs of the employer.

That kind of CV takes considerable time and effort to produce and usually needs to be written from scratch; a rehash of your old CV just won’t do. Many senior managers don’t have the time to do this and decide that it may prove to be a sound investment to pay a professional to do it for them. The upside is that a well written and targeted CV and application letter will massively increase your chances of getting short listed, which takes us to the next critical phase of your personal marketing campaign; the interview.

Let’s assume that your CV has done its job and you have now been invited to interview. Astonishingly this is another area where senior candidates let themselves down. Well qualified, experienced managers who believe that they can turn up on the day and walk through the interview. I’ve heard the feedback so many times. “He obviously hadn’t taken the trouble to prepare”. That simple question “What do you know about us?” can floor even the most experienced senior manager. A waffled response guarantees that the rest of the interview will just be a formality, you won’t get the job!

So, as with the CV, research and preparation are the keys to success at interview. The research element will need to go a little deeper than for your CV. For example who will you be meeting? HR Director, Finance Director, CEO or quite possibly all three. Each of those individuals may have a different agenda and will be focussing on different aspects of your fit for the job. Find out who they are, and try to establish what they may expect from you.

In addition to research there is another critical element to the interview and that is “practice”. An interview, after all, is a performance and just as you would practice an important business presentation, so you need to practice your interview technique. It may have been quite a while since you last attended a ‘proper’ interview (or interviews) and the days when an interview consisted of a chat with the CEO are long gone. These days, interviews tend to be a highly structured series of carefully planned ‘competency questions’ (probably from the HR Director) and searching scenario or “critical incident” questions. Yes, it’s easy to talk about all the successes in your career but much tougher (and more revealing for the interviewer) to answer questions about the times when things didn’t go according to plan. What exactly did you do to turn around that floundering project, re-motivate that under performing sales organisation or restructure the delivery failure at your shared service centre? It would be useful to have a good idea of what sort of questions you might expect to be asked at the interview but also to have some specific techniques to help you answer them and then the opportunity to practice (rehearse if you like) your responses without the pressure of a real interview and with constructive feedback from a professional with many years of experience of interviewing.

This brief article sets out only some of the challenges that you will face in your job search but I hope it also establishes that the “flying by the seat of your pants” approach might have worked in the past, but certainly isn’t going to succeed now. If you would like to learn more about just how you can dramatically increase your chances of success in your next job search then a call to Career Advantage may well prove to be a good investment.

Jeremy I’Anson – November 2009