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job? Everything! Landing your dream job is all about closing the ultimate sale, where what you are selling is yourself. Applying QBS techniques minimizes your exposure to mismatching and increases your ability to close the sale. This doesn’t mean that you will no longer need persistence—quite the opposite. In this day and age of e-mail, voice mail, beepers, cell phones, Blackberries, and caller ID, prospective employers can effectively block your call.

QBS makes use of 4 strategies to reduce the risk of mismatching by showing you how to:

1. Ask more questions and make fewer statements.

2. Establish your credibility with the prospective employer from the start.

3. Pique the prospective employer’s curiosity to neutralize mismatching.

4. Build momentum to quell the mismatching instinct.

➤ Strategy 1: Ask More Questions and Make Fewer Statements

It is nearly impossible to mismatch a question. Aside from helping you avoid mismatching, asking more questions uncovers the very opportunities you need to showcase your experience and accomplishments. Asking the right questions will not only help you validate an employer’s current opportunities but could change the employer’s perception about latent opportunities.

A prospective employer might be considering hiring someone with your skill set sometime in the future—what we would call a “hidden job”—but after listening to your thoughtful questions, the future need has gained an immediate urgency.

Question based selling applies to finding the ultimate job. It is about getting prospective employers to want to hire you, to eagerly answer your insightful questions and be more than willing to listen to you.

➤ Strategy 2: Establish Your Credibility with the Prospective Employer from the Start

The challenge job seekers face is that they need to communicate a sense of the value added they can bring to a prospective employer. This can be particularly challenging when they have no common relationship to leverage, that is, someone who can be used as a personal reference.

Asking questions will reduce the prospective employer’s need to mismatch you. But asking the right questions will go a long way in establishing credibility.

Salespeople are trained to ask open-ended questions and to give the impression that they’re interested in what the customer has to say. What they’re really doing is fishing for an opportunity to explain that they can provide the solution, or answer, to a problem that the prospect has described.

You establish credibility by avoiding open-ended questions like: “What does your company plan to do in the next five years?” and replacing them with short diagnostic questions. Diagnostic questions are close-ended and designed to elicit specific answers. In the following dialogue, a high-tech job hunter makes use of diagnostic questions:

Job hunter: May I ask you a question?

Prospective employer: Sure. What’s up?

Job hunter: How many net-native applications in the CRM field do you now consider as direct competitors to your standard desktop product offering?

Prospective employer: Uum. . . . At this time, there are probably three net-native applications that offer functionality similar to desktop software.... And that’s aside from all of the other net-native applications that keep popping up every couple of weeks.... Some of them being open source too.

Job hunter: How many months would it take to move your current application to more of a net-native model?

Prospective employer: Well, we did evaluate the ASP model several years ago and at the time, we felt it would probably take about 12 to 18 months to reengineer our software.

Job hunter: At what intervals are new upgrades being offered by your net-native competitors?

Prospective employer: On average, perhaps every 4 months.

Job hunter: Have you looked at the .NET framework or other Web services platform to port the functionality of your software so it can be delivered via the Web?

Prospective employer: Yes. We formed a task group a couple of months