Resumes, Networking, Headhunters – Useless without Marketing Sweet Spot

There’s no such thing as a bad job market, only bad
marketing. Know how to turn a frustrating job search into a
satisfying career find? You’ve got to cross-pollinate the right
elements of strategic marketing and remix all you know about the
job hunt and exposure to opportunity.

A career transition is no longer about getting your hands on
a list of contacts, networking with headhunters, or going online
to look for work.

It’s better than that.

Want to neutralize most of your rivalry? Hot-swap the
traditional means of securing a job with these new tactics and
you’ll warp-speed your search:

• Stop looking for a job

• Increase your visibility

• Decrease your competition

• Create buzz and you’ll multiply your exposure to decision
makers

• Create need and you’ll generate quality interviews,
simultaneously

• Create solutions and you’ll gain an opportunity to design your
own position

Stir up the buzz and you’ll stand out in a saturated
market. Develop a reputation for being a subject-matter
expert. This time you’ll want to be the topic of the next water
cooler gathering. Make sure that you use your full name when
identifying yourself on any of these venues, not a pseudonym.
You can’t stir up the buzz about you, if you’re hidden behind
some funky moniker. Don’t forget to create an email address that
sounds professional wherever your name publicly appears.

There are eight over-the-top ports to gain higher
visibility:

• Chamber of Commerce (networking events and / or committee
participation)

• Local trade associations (meetings and / or committee
participation)

• Blogs (industry trade associations, online publications, job
boards)

• Teleseminars (trade association-sponsored, industry-oriented)

• High-profile volunteerism (civic, community, business projects)

• Broadcasting (radio and television guest appearances)

• Ask-an-Expert content venues (online and print)

• Newsletters, white papers (online and print)

Get employers drooling for your talents by demonstrating a
consistency in your marketing message. Recruiters and
decision makers routinely perform a Google™ or Yahoo™ key word
search to learn more about you. Put your name (and its
variations) into these mega-search engines to find out what pops
up.

If you’ve made disparaging comments about anyone or anything,
either on or off record, these will harm your marketing message.
For the sake of your professional branding, publicly, shut up.
If what you want to say or do communicate oddity,
inappropriateness, or lack of civility and good taste then you
become a liability to your industry’s culture and you’ll be
blacklisted.

Branding is a yardstick that measures not just what you do,
but who you are and the perception others have of you. Make
sure that whatever you say or do (professionally and personally)
sends a consistent positive message about your leadership,
industry competency, ethics, maturity, and interpersonal
relations. This constancy is your branding; an awareness of you
which captures an employer’s attention and interest in you.

Mastermind solutions and you’ll improve the odds of a
securing a customized job role. Borderless thinking solves
problems, particularly those deemed by others as too troublesome
or impossible. You’ll release yourself from dependency on open
or publicly-known positions when you pitch personalized remedies
for an employer’s toughest business challenges.

Annihilate your competition by doing the thing that they
wouldn’t dare to do…stop looking for a job. Concentrate on
subterranean research to uncover ‘spot opportunities’ — patterns
that would signal upcoming hiring activity. Yeah, it’s
labor-intensive, but the pay-off is huge in terms of edging past
Human Resource department screeners.

Classic market research involves S.W.O.T. Analysis.
Successful marketing thrusts are achieved using a thorough
analysis of Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats
for Growth. Can you count the times on one hand, your
buddies took the time to do this kind of extreme exploration
when they were on a job hunting expedition?

The more you know about a targeted company, its industry, and
the associated threats to its success, the stronger your
posture. Instead of seeking a job, pursue opportunity to use
your talents to better an organization’s own branding before its
employees, customers, and business relationships. Pitch directly
to first-string decision makers.

Slamming a baseball out of the park isn’t rocket science;
it’s about reading and reacting to the pitch — knowing what you
have to do, and when to do it. It’s also capitalizing on the
bat’s sweet spot to connect the raw capability of the bat to the
sheer force of the batter’s swing.

A professionally-run job search does the same things; you
pitch your solutions to the right target, at the right time,
using the right resource and strategy. The career marketing
sweet spot is that critical moment where targeting and timing
intersect. Goal sighted, energy harnessed, successful outcome
achieved.

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