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Market Yourself: Start With Your Feature Set

What do you see when you look at the label on a computer box?

You see product specifications – information about the components that make the computer work.

Computer manufacturers do this to help us make a buying decision. It’s a way to prove that the expensive system in the box will meet your needs as a consumer. To demonstrate that the system will perform as we expect it to.

And computer manufacturers aren’t the only places this happens. Food has ingredient lists and nutritional information. Cars have those stickers on the window that tell us what’s included and what we can expect for gas mileage. Your favorite sweater tells you that it’s 50% wool and dry clean only.

Marketers know that often what makes people buy is the sizzle more than the steak, but when it comes to items we expect to perform a certain way, specifications can be hugely persuasive by creating trust that a product has everything it takes to meet our expectations.

Job search is much the same way. Job descriptions often list requirements, such as five years experience or a specific computer proficiency. These requirements are ways that the company can help to guarantee that you’ll perform as expected. You can have all the flash and style that you like, but if experience tells a hiring manager that you need 10 years of management experience to succeed and you don’t specifically include that, you may miss out on the opportunity.

Now, if for every job you applied to there was a list of requirements that you could just check off to show that you’re qualified, life would be a little easier. The problem is that job descriptions more often than not do not actually reflect the requirements for the job.

• There’s only so much space.
• Recruiters and HR staff – the people who write the descriptions – only know so much about what a given role really requires.
• The requirements will often change during the hiring process.

So as a job seeker you can’t expect to be specifically asked if you meet these requirements so you can just agree and move on. You have to do three things:

1. Know all of your “features”
2. Anticipate which features are likely to make them want to buy.
3. Communicate those features in a way that motivates them to buy.

What are your features? What will an employer want to buy? How are you actively selling them?

Kristi Daeda shows professionals easy, workable ways to build effective personal brands. She is a Marketing Job Wire preferred partner and provides coaching and resume writing services. Kristi also blogs on job search, leadership, professionalism and social media at Career Adventure.

Photo Credit via Flickr: William Hook

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Job Search Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.