The same tried-and-true principles that work when marketing products and services can be applied from a job search perspective—if candidates take the time to follow the process. In a LinkedIn world, access to the information you need is readily available. Here’s how you can apply a traditional product marketing approach to get your product (you!) in front of the right audience and to ensure that you stand out in meaningful ways.
Identify, and Understand Your Target Audience
You know, of course, the type of job—or jobs—that you are interested in. But, if you’re like many job seekers, you probably haven’t taken the time to very specifically lay out exactly who your pr
eferred employers, or types of employers, might be. Not just in terms of the companies you want to work for, but in terms of the people you want to work for.
In marketing parlance this is referred to as segmentation. Which companies, among the many, many companies in the geographic area, or areas, you’d like to work, represent your target audience. What types of companies are they? What types of hiring managers, HR professionals or recruiters do they work with?
How can you find this out? Company websites are a good starting point, but you can also learn a lot by perusing social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, where company pages and posts can give you some great insights into recruitment strategies and techniques used by both companies and the people they employ to aid in their job searches.
So, for instance, for whatever company you’re interested in you can simply type in Name of Company + HR Manager (or VP, or Director) and you’ll get a list of names of individuals who you can follow. You can do the same to find and follow the management staff that represents the type of work you’re interested in. For instance: Name of Company + VP of IT. Reading through these individuals’ posts can give you some great insights into the types of candidates they’re looking for, as well as what things seem to be of interest, or importance, to them.
For instance, using this same example, what types of positions or roles do the HR staff seem to post about frequently? What sorts of issues or problems can you discern by reviewing the profiles and posts of management staff? Later, you’ll determine how you can position yourself in ways that address those issues or concerns and align with the types of roles the company seems most eager to fill.
Identify, and Understand Your Competition
Finding and evaluating your competition isn’t an exact science but today’s digital tools make it much easier to narrow down the potential pool of candidates.
Start by putting yourself in the shoes of the HR professionals at the company you’re interested in. In addition to what you’ve learned by evaluating their social media presence and posts, take a look at job descriptions or job postings that you can find on the company webpage or included with job postings on social media sites. What are the top criteria they’re looking for in candidates for the roles you’re most interested in? Make a list of these criteria and then make a trip back to LinkedIn.
On LinkedIn, you can conduct a “people search” based on criteria that can be very specific. This option is most frequently used by recruiters, HR pros and hiring managers, but job candidates can also use it to their advantage. How? By entering search criteria that corresponds to the geographic area and types of skills likely to be part of the criteria being used for jobs you’re interested in. The results will give you a good indication of what the “competitive landscape” might look like. It won’t be perfect and, certainly, all of the resulting profiles won’t be actively searching for jobs, but the results will give you an indication of how others like you are positioning and presenting themselves online.
As with your target audience research, this information will help you later when you develop your key messages and content.
Create Key Messages
Once you’ve done your research on your target audience and your competitors, it’s time to create some key messages designed to help you stand out from the competition in ways that are meaningful to your target audience. In other words, what do you uniquely have to offer that’s better than what the competition has to offer? How can you help your target audience address their pain points?
Your key messages should be benefit oriented: what’s in it for them? Not all about you. For example, suppose you’re looking for a job as a marketing manager and you have 20 years of experience. From the hiring manager’s perspective “so what”? You need to translate that experience into a meaningful benefit. Some examples:
- Through my 20 years of experience in marketing I’ve accumulated insider knowledge in the XYZ industry and have applied best practices to consistently meet and exceed goals. (Being able to outline, specifically, some of those accomplishments is even better.)
- Having spend 20+ years in marketing, I’m able to combine the best of traditional and digital marketing, strategically, to achieve organizational objectives.
The key, here, is to create messages that provide benefit to your reader. It’s not all about you; it should be all about them.
Create and Launch Your Campaign
Once you’ve got your key messages created, it’s time to launch your campaign. From a job seeker’s standpoint that’s going to include a number of important steps:
- Update your resume, making sure to include the keywords/phrases recruiters are likely to be looking for. (Keep in mind that a best practice, here, is creating unique resumes for each position you apply for so you can be specific and targeted.)
- Update your cover letter. Again, you should create a unique cover letter for each position, but creating a template can help you be maximally efficient.
- Update your social media profiles. LinkedIn is probably the most critical one from a hiring standpoint, but recruiters and hiring managers also are known to check out other social media profiles so you’ll want to make sure yours reflect the image (or brand) you wish to convey.
- Reach out: make connections, online and off, designed to generate awareness and inquiries from recruiters, HR professionals and hiring managers. You can do this by finding and following relevant profiles and people on LinkedIn and other sites, by joining LinkedIn groups that are aligned with your career goals, and even by paying for online ads through Google AdWords and the various social media sites.
The bottom line here is that, once you’ve done your research and created your key messages you want to get your name in front of as many relevant people as you can!
Rinse and Repeat!
Finally, you should have a plan and process in place to measure the results of your efforts. What’s working? What’s not? Digital marketing—for both traditional marketers and job seekers—is very measurable and makes it relatively easy to change strategy and direction based on the results you’re seeing (or not seeing).
Taking a traditional marketing approach in your job search can be a great way to get maximum traction from your efforts. By following the steps above, you can do just that!