How To Pick The Best Career For You, Part 1: Positioning

By Author: Marta L. Driesslein, CECC
Total Articles: 4
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Want to gain the upper hand in a career marketing campaign? Try using these marketing techniques of Positioning, Exposure and Marketing.

In Part One we'll look at how Positioning or Coming to a Theater Near You simplifies and expedites your employment hunt by reinforcing employer buy-in through justification of the sale.

Rapidly gain employer agreement that you're the right person for the job by proving how their organizational needs are met through your specific abilities to solve their identified problems.

Your search shouldn't be about the money
Most job hunters passively seek a job by default rather than strategic design. If you do, you may be committing the ultimate career crime against yourself, your wallet, and perhaps your future.

Choosing a career because it pays bills puts you in a vulnerable position by exposing you to unnecessary hidden dangers. Your quest will be driven by your needs rather than the customer's (an employer's) requirements. The unfortunate result will always hold you hostage to the tyranny of the urgent or whatever pressing ...
... matter is controlling the motivation of your search at the time.

Wouldn't you rather transition to a new career that brings meaning and purpose to your work? Want to know how to make this a reality faster?

Solve problems.

Hot career tip
How do you save yourself hundreds of hours while job searching and potentially, over the course of a career life time, earn thousands more dollars in income?

Plan a career and target your search where you can position yourself to supply value by providing solutions to company challenges. Pick a job based on an employer's need rather than your own.

Create demand and position yourself as a problem solver
The compelling reason employers hire candidates is to generate tangible benefits for his / or her organization in terms of:

Saving money
Increasing revenues
Improving productivity
Streamline operations
Enhancing client relations

Your preliminary oral and written communications should be as electrifying and enticing as those high-adventure movie trailers that create convincing first round interest for you to see the film.

Tease them and then please them
We generally go to the movies because of a promotional marketing approach that presents the value of watching the moving before we actually do so. Right?

The tantalizer, or Coming to a Theater Near You appeals to our sense of emotional need (adventure, laughter, romance, etc.), which then compels us to want to see the movie. When we see the motion picture, we evaluate the degree of fulfillment of the emotional need, and subsequently justify our viewing.

This same Coming to a Theater Near You concept is Tier One of a powerful three-staged marketing approach that will revolutionize how you find your best career, sooner. Targeted Positioning obtains interviews with recruiters and key decision makers with greater ease. When you position yourself as the personalized solution to a company's identified need or challenge, you justify their investment of time and energy required to find out more about you.

Prove your value by front-loading your Wow!
The right mix of marketing strategies or Coming to a Theater Near You rapidly confirms your value to decision makers. Achieve this by front-loading the Wow! or sizzle of who you are, what you'll do, and how your contributions will have a positive affect their organizational growth. Your time-saving effort then auto-creates momentum, anticipated results and prevents the pursuit from getting bogged down in process.

If you've ever been ravenously hungry and caught a whiff of hot, steamy, mouth-watering Fajitas, you know what power front-loading the sizzle has on your appetite! The unique Coming to a Theater marketing tactic has the same compelling effect on employers and ensures your career search is hot-wired for success.

Make ‘em drool for you and your talents by changing your focus from what's in it for me to what's in it for them and you'll have stronger control over picking the best career for you.

A sneak peak into Part Two
So how do you tie the exposure to the solution of the employer's needs and then clearly communicate that linkage? How do you optimistically affect the perception of the employer's purchase of your talents?

Part Two will challenge your traditional thinking on networking and provide you a whole new way of exposing you to career opportunities.
About the Author
Marta L. Driesslein, CECC http://interviewing.com/
is a senior consultant for R.L. Stevens & Associates Inc., a career marketing firm and organization celebrating over 24 years of providing strategic marketing solutions for its clients' career transitioning needs.