Marketing Yourself

Registering with agencies and job search aggregators are not the only ways to find a job. 80% of jobs never get advertised. A job search that includes advertised and hidden jobs will maximise your opportunities to return to employment. To achieve success, you need to know where and how to market yourself so that you can be found by recruiters and find job opportunities whilst they are hidden. 

Until you find your next role you are a marketer and a salesperson if you did this before great if not you need to learn fast. Be professional and thorough in your preparation and presentation, and if necessary ready to “fake it until you make it”. 

Marketing yourself is never easy, even if you are a marketing professional, objectivity is essential and if that means asking others for their objective opinion don’t shy away from it.  

So where do you begin? 
Gather information about your career, your master CV is a good starting point, but it is just that. You need to supplement it with more information, particularly about people you have worked with, worked for, and had a business relationship with. This network is probably the greatest asset you have for your job search. These are the people who will be able to refer you, recommend you, and verify and validate your key career points. 

People employ people and once you have your database of people from your career you can start your job search research to identify training requirements, the appropriate level of employment, opportunities in your same career track, or where you could make a sidestep into a new career. 

How and where do you present yourself to the employment market? 
This requires hard work to build your online presence, before you present yourself to recruitment consultancies, job aggregators, and search engines you need to build a profile that presents you as you want and need to be perceived. Some create a personal website, which is fine but 97% of recruiters go to LinkedIn and this is where you must have your shop window, dressed to impress and make you stand out.  

LinkedIn is ‘The’ online database for recruiters and job seekers be they actively seeking employment or passively presenting and promoting themselves. If you don’t have a LinkedIn presence you are setting a path to failure with job search. With a comprehensive LinkedIn profile, you can begin the next stage of marketing yourself. 

Other social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter can be used to add to your job search but remember that your profile needs to be business professional rather than social. It is also crucial that you strictly control who can see your personal rather than business content. 

According to various sources, there are close to 40,000 recruitment agencies in the UK. The recruitment sector employed 110,000 people in more than 30,000 businesses in 2020, slightly lower than the previous year. In 2020, recruiters placed an average of 980,000 temporary workers on assignment every day, around the same number as in 2019. They also placed 450,000 people into new permanent roles over the course of 2020. 

Identifying the appropriate agencies and building a relationship will enable you to be promoted to potential employers with whom they have established relationships.  

This can be supplemented online by registering with job site aggregators such as Indeed, Monster, and CV Library. Internet search engines such as Google Jobs have a job search tool that will simplify the process of finding appropriate jobs. In the UK Reed, Guardian Jobs, Haymarket, and Totaljobs.com are among those providing listings, to Google Jobs in addition to global sites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor. The facility automatically shows the “freshest and most relevant” openings based on a user’s location when they type relevant terms into Google Search.  

One of the most successful job search routes to employment is that of a speculative approach, reaching out to a company to promote yourself and what you can do for the company. This will require a high time investment, but the rewards are there. This is a route that needs careful planning and careful targeting with the right level and amount of information. Start with clarity of what you are seeking and at the beginning it is about securing a meeting to present what you can and will do for the prospective employer’s business. This is a ‘slowly, slowly catchy monkey’ method and never a machine gun information saturation approach. 

Elevator pitch
Practice, practice, repeat, and practice this until you are fully conversant with your career, and then adapt it to the situation to deliver an engaging 15-30 pitch that begs the listener to want to know more.