What he meant by this is that, in any market, different customers have different needs. These different needs can be satisfied either by different products or by different positioning of the same product. That is where the relevance to your marketing campaign comes in. You need to divide your market into groups of customers in such a way that you can identify the different needs of the various groups. Having understood their different needs, you will then be able to market to each group more effectively.
Your split may be based on any one or more of a whole range of different factors. If, for example, what you want to market is your ability to sort out problems, you could approach not only organizations that are in financial difficulty and therefore need a company doctor but also those whose problems arise from very rapid growth, where the need is for someone to grab systems and administration by the scruff of the neck, and pull them up to the same level as the ever increasing sales. Both types of organization need a problem solver, but you would target your sales pitch differently in each case.
The same fundamental approach applies if your segmentation is based on business sectors. When marketing yourself to the kind of business you are, or have been, working in, you will obviously stress your many years of relevant experience. If, on the other hand, you want to target other businesses which have similar attributes, let us say you want to move from one kind of service industry to another, then you will play on the fact that you can introduce new concepts which have been proven to succeed in other businesses with similar problems, and you can point out that you will not be subject to the tunnel vision of people who have been in that one narrow area all their working life.
Whichever way you do it, just remember the vital principle of concentrating on what the customer needs. As one job seeker put it, 'You can land more jobs in two months by becoming interested in people's problems than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.'
Shooting for the Stars
Having sliced your list up into manageable chunks, how do you prioritize them? Do you aim first of all for your ideal and then gradually lower your sights if you are unsuccessful? Does that depend on your own individual position -- people who are in jobs may have the luxury of being able to wait for the right job, but what about someone who is unemployed with an ever growing pile of bills to pay?
In reality, the answer comes out much the same for all job-seekers, regardless of their situation. This is because the urgency of finding a new position tends to correlate with the amount of time available for the job search. People who are out of work can devote far more time to their search than those who have to spend long hours in the office, fitting the job search into evenings and weekends.
People at both ends of the spectrum should therefore start off by going for their ideal. The difference is that those who are out of work will, if they do not succeed in achieving their first choice, have both the time and the need to progress more quickly to their alternative options.
Those who are actually out of work, or under notice, may find it useful to divide the process into three stages. In the first period you look for a job which would represent a definite step forwards in your career. In phase two, you consider a sideways move. In the third and last period, you consider any reasonable option to tide you over, with a view to moving on to something better as soon as the opportunity arises. The timing, naturally, depends largely on your financial resources and the length of time you can afford to be out of work.
People who are in work will obviously go no further than phase two and that only if there is a good reason. For example, a sideways move may be required in order to fill a gap in experience which will then make it possible, in two or three years' time, to get the job you are really after.
In any case, when you are being proactive rather than reactive there is actually far less of a problem. If you have been truly professional about your marketing campaign up to this point, there should not be too great a conflict between what you seek -- the organizations on your target list and the job you ultimately get. If you have been accurate in analyzing your experience, skills, strengths and so on; if you have defined the kind of organization in which you are going to be most highly motivated; and if you have conducted your research thoroughly; then the organizations on your list should all be ones you would like to work for. Some more than others? All right, start with those.
Yes, but...
What if your problem is not that your list is too long, but rather that it is too short? These are the kinds of reasons people most commonly give for this:
- I've been in one type of business all my life, and it's at rock bottom - no one is hiring.
- They're delayering - they don't want any more people like me any.
- I've always been at group headquarters and now everybody is decentralizing.
- I'm too old at 55, 50, 45, and 40 etc.
- experience/background
- achievements
- skills/aptitudes
- strength;
- other assets - contacts, etc.
Turn again to your lists of organizations. Even if they do not appear to be recruiting, might there not be opportunities for someone with your abilities to help them out of their difficulties? Or have you been too tight in the geographical restrictions you have applied? For the right job in the right company, would you not be willing to travel a bit further to work? Or even to move home?
What about related fields? For example, one of the most marketable candidates is a poacher turned gamekeeper. The most highly publicized instances of such moves occur when government ministers in such areas as defense or health move, on leaving politics, into armaments or medical concerns, but such moves from a purchaser of products or services to a supplier are by no means uncommon and, when matters of public ethics are not involved, make a great deal of sense from both parties' viewpoints. Further instances of poacher turned gamekeeper moves include Inland Revenue staff going to join the tax departments of major accountancy practices and people joining the offices of ombudsmen or industry regulators on the back of their depth of experience in the business sectors in question.
Though not exactly in the poacher/gamekeeper category, there are many other opportunities to capitalize on the benefits of your knowledge in a given field. For example, firms providing management consultancy, training, executive recruitment and outplacement counseling all like to employ people with a background relevant to the sectors they are working in. So do organizations developing and marketing computer software.
By this stage, provided that you have really applied yourself conscientiously to the task, your list should already have grown significantly. Now it is time to expand it still further by looking at some of those objections that people so commonly raise. The first three were, essentially, centered on the belief that it is no good looking in the areas in which you have been employed because there are no longer any jobs there.
To some extent we have already demonstrated the fallacy of these arguments by showing that even companies which are in trouble and laying people off may be willing to hire someone who can solve their problems, and by illustrating how many options there may be to use your experience in a particular field by moving to a business that supplies goods or services to that sector. Now let us take an even broader look at the transferability of your assets.
On the Transfer List
Many people have been brainwashed by job advertisements into thinking that no one is going to be interested in employing them unless they conform to a rigid specification which normally involves highly specific experience in terms of both the industry and the job content. The reasons for these demands have more to do with the method of recruitment than with your chances of getting hired. Given that almost any advertisement for a mid to senior level post will attract a response well into three figures: recruiters write copy with the intention of ruling applicants out rather than in. And, because it is easier to do that ruling out on purely objective criteria such as qualifications, background in a given sector and - yes - age, rather than on subjective criteria like strengths and personality, these are the ones that are used, in spite of the fact that the final decision on whom to select will, almost every time, be taken more on the basis of personal chemistry than anything else.
Headhunters, by the nature of the way they operate, are a little less rigid, but even they start with, and largely work to, a specification which has a significant objective element to it.
You, on the other hand, are not confining yourself to responding to advertisements or to waiting for the headhunter to call. You are making direct, personal contacts with individuals who may be able either to offer you a position or to put you in touch with someone else who can. You can therefore home in on those USPs which, in combination with each other, are going to make you the best possible solution to a particular organization's problem. That takes some pretty accurate targeting, which in turn comes from thorough work at the analysis stage, but it is that kind of conscientious approach which is going to get you the job you want. Furthermore, in practice it is not nearly such hard work or so demoralizing, as continually getting rejection letters from applications to advertisements just because you fail to match one of the criteria on which the first vicious cut is based.
So, if your target list of organizations is still looking a bit thin even after the further work you have just done, give a little more thought to organizations which, though not in the same fields as you have been working in, may face similar difficulties. Since it is the ability to solve other people's problems which is going to make them want to hire you, examine the situations you have been in. What problems were involved? Where else could the ability to deal with that sort of difficulty be useful?
To illustrate the process, here are a few typical examples.
- Airlines, theatres and hotels all have one fundamental problem in common, namely bums on seats or - to put it less crudely - high fixed costs, low variable costs and the need to achieve a minimum percentage of bookings in order to break even.
- Accountants, architects and solicitors likewise have the problem of utilization, in the sense of needing to charge to clients a minimum percentage of each fee earner's working day. They also share another problem that of the partnership structure with all its attendant shortcomings in terms of communication and decision making or, cynics might argue the lack thereof.
- Clothes shops, farms and holiday camps are all seasonal businesses.
While most of you are getting on with doing just that, it is time to turn to the other problem we identified earlier on. Older job seekers may feel that it is all very well having produced a long list of target companies, but is age not still going to be a barrier to them getting a job? Like so many aspects of the job search, it is in practice far less of a problem when you use the hidden approaches than when you confine yourself to the conventional ones like replying to advertisements. It is, nevertheless, a major issue in many people's minds.
"The older you get the more important it becomes to concentrate on the hidden approaches."
