A client recently had a breakthrough moment I wanted to share with you.
He was, like most job seekers, struggling with people not responding back to his applications online. Also, they weren’t responding to him when he’d drop by and hand his resume. All he got was the website, which is of little help when trying to make a connection.
I asked him how he introduced himself when asked the question “Hi, who are you, what do you do?” and he started mentioning his skills in persuasion and customer service. I told him that would categorize him as a job seeker and if he wanted to stop getting the brush off he would stop acting like a job seeker. “Stop looking for work, and stop telling them you want to be treated like a job seeker” I said. He gave me a blank look as to what to do next, so I continued: “Don’t be a skill, that’s what job seekers do, and job seekers get treated like they have the plague. Instead offer them value.
Unfortunately, in America, we tie our identity to our jobs. If someone doesn’t have a job, we tend to consider them as socially worthless, or at least not a contributing member to society. Just consider how the phrase welfare mom is regarded in this country and you’ll get a sense of what I mean. This is doubly unfortunate because most job seekers in my experience think that they are worthless if they don’t have a job. It’s not true, but we’ve conditioned our society to believe it, so in many respects we make it true for ourselves.
I explained the following diagram to him http://srkinc.com/employeevalue.pdf. As you can see, most people start explaining who they are and what they do by talking about their skills, or at best, their processes they have managed, which is the second column: Process Knowledge.
When people ask “who are you, what do you do’, ideally they’d like to hear that you can solve a problem they have, which is the third column: Results. Results are what others really want to hear. I encouraged my client to share what results he obtained for others as a result of what he knows and what industries he’s worked in (the first column). The formula is: Experience X Processes = Results.
I encouraged him to identify and introduce himself to others by the results he’s gotten for his previous employers, NOT by his skills nor by his experience. As it dawned on him I continued with the suggestion that he identify short stories about times when he actually obtained those results for previous employers and to talk ONLY about the results. When they ask “How did you do that?” I told him that was the time to say something like “Well it’s really too complex to go into here, but I’d love to tell you exactly how we did it, would there be a time we could meet next week?”
The Career Expert is a highly sought after business and career coach. His perspective and advice is sought after by career changers, employees and executives across the U.S.
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