How to market yourself as a candidate for a job?
Getting a job that you applied for and want to work – is a challenge. We hear you. The ocean is red and filled with other applicants just as eager as you. Many candidates are waiting to get a chance to land the job for each job posting out there. And it is not enough to just have the hard skills that the job requires or even relevant experience.
How you present yourself and your skills on your application, on social media, at network events, or via private messages is something that you, as a candidate, need to learn if you want to be noticed and get hired.
In the following lines, we will guide you through a new perspective of how to look at your job search process, and we offer you 4 ways to increase your chances of landing your dream job.
Summary (TL;DR)
Table of Contents
01 A new perspective: create a marketing plan for your career
Just as marketing teams prepare a plan on how to market a product, you can think of how you can do a marketing plan to promote your skills and expertise. After all, you have a skillset, intense competition, and a “buyer” – the hiring manager. So why not make a detailed plan to help your present yourself better and stand out?
02 Do you know what the ideal job for you is?
Starting with the basics – do you know what kind of job sparks your interest? Have you figured where you excel? Even though the current times are hard because unemployment is blooming and stressful, in the long term, doing work that you dislike would not make you happy. Instead, you can begin questioning what kind of job would align with your values and create a roadmap for getting the career path your desire.
Here is a list of considerations to pose yourself:
Workstyle
How do you want to work? The traditional 8 am to 5 pm, or with flexible hours?
Do you want to be 5 days a week at the office or to work remotely?
Or work hybrid?
Work orientation
Do you prefer working alone or in teams? How frequently do you wish your interaction with colleagues and supervisors to be? Or do you want to be your own boss?
Skills and experience
what skills are you good at? What do you do with ease or can learn without much effort? Are any of your hobbies with the potential to give you income?
Culture
How important is it that you align with your place of works’ mission, vision, and values? What are you passionate about?
03 Do you know what employers are looking for in your industry?
In other words: do market research. Before companies launch a new product or develop one, they test the market – find out if there are already too many competitors with no gap for a differentiation that could bring competitive advantage. Marketers also ask the product’s target audience if they would buy it, how they can improve it and so forth.
Think about your job search in the same way. Once you have cleared out your ideal job and in which industry, reach out to people who work in that industry or career counsellors as they already have direct experience with the profession. Ask them in a hypothetical scenario if they would hire you. Then when asking “why” or “why not”, you can figure out what skills you lack and what jobs you should be applying for or instead. This is how you can prepare yourself before applying for jobs.
Also, do market research on what the industry demands when it comes to resumes. Check this blog for more insights on how to optimize your resume for ATS-friendly screening that employers do.
04 Do you know your strengths and weaknesses?
Do a SWOT analysis on yourself. Ask any marketing student or professional marketer, and they will tell you: SWOT analysis is a fundamental tool that they use to get an overview of both the internal and external environments. SWOT stands for: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threads. In your case: you are the internal environment, and the external is your competition plus the job market’s conditions. SWOT analysis is helpful in identifying where a product can differentiate and if it is possible to do so based on the market and its available resources.
You can reflect on your skillset in the same way: see where you have control over (S) and where you have difficulties (W). Are you looking for a copywriter position as you know that writing content is something you enjoy and comes naturally to you (S)? On top of that, you also have WordPress and coding skills (S)? However, compared to the candidate pool, you have no prior experience writing SEO-friendly content (W)? Think of these reflections as a way to notice your strengths and see what you can work on to develop your gaps (W).
A good alternative in your self-reflection time is to take a personality test with different tools that employers use in their recruitment process. The difference between just going online and doing any personality test available and one like the Whaii Candidate Report is that you get to see what recruiters will get when they screen your application.
You can use that knowledge to get better insights into your hard and soft skills and understand what your target audience knows about you through that test. Knowing this can help you better prepare yourself; it gives you insights on what to highlight even better or where you can work on improving. This is how you increase your chances to rank higher and leave better impressions with your application or interview.
See how you can be better prepared with Whaii Candidate Report
Attracting talent at your doorstep is only half way of the recruitment journey. For the interview and selection phase, there are tools available that help you get a grasp of the person behind the application.
If you liked this blog, you might find these interesting:
“How to create an ideal candidate experience?”
“The state of AI in recruitment in 2021”
“Hiring for personality – why you should include it when recruiting candidates?”