Brand Yourself -- What's Your Story?

Interviews are story-telling sessions.

To give a great interview, to be a great candidate, you have to have two things: great experience and a great story. Great experience without the ability to pull together a coherent tale to contextualize that experience, will at best position you as a do-er, not a leader. Contextualizing experience and making it relevant is how you help someone see why you are better for the role than someone else. By the time you have an interview, you have been filtered for broad experience, the context of that experience and how you present your unique story and its relevance is what you have to do to get the job.

Context is everything.

Great brands are not great because they represent great products and have great features and benefits. Lots of products have great features and benefits just like lots of people have an education and skills. A great brand connects. This connection happens through value proposition that makes you care.

Your story can express your value proposition which is more than a list of skills and experiences. Making a connection between a brand and people is not done through a list of anything, it's done by connecting on an emotional level. How can you connect yourself to the interviewer and to the kind of role you want next?

Passion with reasons to believe.


Let's assume you're smart, educated and have worked at great places. The next thing you need to is passion. Passion -- really caring -- makes other people care too. If you are passionate about your work,  it holds a lot of sway on how people will feel about you as a candidate. But where passion can hurt instead of help is if you fail to marry passion to context. Interviewers don't want to just hear how you love something, but why exactly you are great at it in a way we can believe. Really being passionate about the role you're interviewing for is great, but only if you can be persuasive about how it fits with your previous experience.

Reasons-to-believe is where the rubber hits the road.

Passion without reasons to believe is like someone being excited about the prospect of winning the lottery -- unrealistic and tedious to listen to.




Shannon Mullen Copyright ©

 

Can LinkedIn.com get me great senior talent?

If you are recruiting inside an organization +LinkedIn might have seemed like the answer to your recruitment problems just like +Monster.com looked the answer 12 years ago. But some things don't change. No matter how many people I know through Linkedin, (my 1st degree connections are now in the many thousands) a shout out there doesn't work for senior searches for three reasons:

 

1. Unemployed people and junior people respond to shout outs

If you want strong senior talent, you have to know where they are and you have to actively seek them out. They are busy working somewhere and while they may be open to a new challenge, they are not going to put their name out to HR departments all over town in most cases.You need to locate them and understand them.

 

2. Check-lists don't work with senior talent

A check-list of skills works well for delivery role jobs. Do you need a social media analyst who can use Radian6? Someone who can use InDesign to make you better presentations?Then you can hire someone to troll around and find someone who matches a list of criteria or post a job and see what comes back. Senior talent don't conform to check lists of skill lists. Innovative talent is even less linear. Where they worked, what they accomplished in that time, the range of experience they've developed by working across a range of brands, target audiences and media situations, is what you can use as indicators before meeting someone.

 

3. Senior talent needs to be attracted to a new role

Talented marketers don't make a move to do what they've just done. This means you need to make a leap in judgement to even locate who you could attract to the role. If you go looking for people who are currently doing a very similar job, you will only attract people in fear for their current role, or people without the talent to go onto a new challenge. Recognizing what kinds of experiences would make someone an interesting candidate for a new challenge both from the organization's standpoint, and from the candidate's standpoint it the trick to senior recruitment.