Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [17]
Anita Martel is a partner of Perry-Martel International and a Certified BarOn EQ-I administrator. She is devoted to helping leaders, individuals, and teams increase their effectiveness and attain their full potential. For more information or to take the test, e-mail anitam@perrymartel.com.
Part I
Your Guerrilla Mind
Chapter 2
Personal Branding Guerrilla Style
Shape Up Your Brand with Attitude
If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him. Of course, no one would have remembered him either.
—UNKNOWN AUTHOR
Embrace this fact: it’s rarely the best qualified person who wins the most coveted position. Instead, it is often the person who “packages” themself best to meet the needs of employers. This all comes down to how you look on paper initially and the attitude you bring to your job search. You have 100 percent control over both. We’ll discuss branding guerrilla style first, then your attitude.
■ “YOU INC.”—YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
More than ever in our history, huge value is being leveraged from smart ideas and the winning technology and business models they create. In the years to come, as companies strive to hire fewer but better people, employers will try harder than they ever have to attract and retain smart, boldly entrepreneurial overachievers. In the new world of work, value is not salary—not for the employer, not for you. With millions of dollars at stake, an employer’s search for an employee will be value-focused, not salary-driven.
As a job hunter, you need to comprehend that the production of value is the most important criterion for an employer when hiring. Articulating your value is your key to successful job hunting; it separates you from all the other job hunters. Understand, value is not salary; worth does not flow from a job title. Knowing what’s important to a company means looking beyond job descriptions and compensation tables, especially today when sudden changes and uncertainty are the norm.
You need to comprehend:
• What value is a company expecting from an employee’s contribution?
• How do you communicate your value to an employer?
Especially for management and senior positions, companies are rarely looking to fill in a box on a standard employee recruitment form; they are looking for something nebulous and more important. They are searching for a person who can deliver a quality, not a quantity, someone who can explode outward from an open-ended initiative-driven space.
Qualities are difficult to find, measure, or test, and you don’t find these qualities by searching for specific salary levels—the qualities that make up the new value table are money-resistant, as initially explained in Career Guide for the High-Tech Professional: Where the Jobs Are Now and How to Land Them, by David Perry (Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2004). The new value table (Table 2.1) goes beyond skill sets and resumes.
In its simplest form, Table 2.1 represents the base elements of your personal “brand.” Building your brand—making a “name for yourself”—need not be expensive.
➤ Create Your Brand Guerrilla Style
Personal branding is not about projecting a false image. It is about understanding what is unique about you—your accomplishments, experience, attitude—and using that to differentiate yourself from other job hunters. Your brand is your edge.
Do you buy generic beer, clothes, cars? Do you buy any no-name large ticket items at all? Not likely. If you are like most people, you buy a brand because of the security and peace of mind that come from the quality and reliability of a known brand. Employers do the exact same thing when they hire people.
Table 2.1 New Value Table™
Personal branding is critical for guerrilla marketers because:
• Employers are looking for results.
• Your results demonstrate your qualities, which satisfy an employer’s value requirements.