Do this NOW if you're back in the job market:

I hate these times...financial instability, great people losing jobs...I'm just sick that it's happening again after the craziness of the last three years.

So here's a gift for all you who have fallen through the trap door and are out on the streets again...the ONE THING you should do before you do anything else in your job hunt.

Sit and think deeply about the actual human being you want to work for.

Now. Before you do anything else.

Especially if you're just kicking off your search and are feeling a little panicky, now is the PERFECT time to take an hour and just stop and get a picture of them in your mind that will guide all you do.

Seeing them clearly is the single biggest key to being sharply competitive if you find yourself in a career field where there's suddenly a lot of available talent.

Just do it.

Get somewhere quiet, get out a notebook. Spend an hour. Imagine the person you want to work for. See them going about their day. Imagine their meetings, email inbox, phone calls, hallway conversations. What's keeping them up at night? What are they angry about? Who are they angry at? What do they fear? What do they secretly want (but would only tell their best friends in a private setting.)

Get in there emotionally - what's the look on their face? What do you hear in their tone of voice? What's creating the stress in their lives? What's the one thing that could happen for them that would make them want to richly reward the person that made it happen?

And keep yourself and what you do OUT of the picture (for now.) They are NOT sitting around thinking about you, or even overtly about the open job you're eyeing, except in the most tangential way.

Why? Because they don't really think about the human being attached to the job.

They want the result of your work, and the CHANGE it makes in their daily lives. And that change revolves around the problems, pains, and opportunities that are haranguing them from the time they turn on the computer, til the time they can shut down their minds at the end of the workday.

You must focus on what they're focused on. And it's not the open job.

Most job seekers go into the job hunt like they're pushing around a wheelbarrow of personal data, trying to pick out and hawk the pieces they think someone will buy. Skills, job titles, buzz words, numbers, fancy words they copied from some 'how to make your resume shine' article.

These job seekers are making a tragic error: they assume that the people in the hiring company will ingest the data properly, put it through some theoretical formula that adds it all up, gets the right result and says, "Eureka! This is the one!"

You may not really think that, but you act like it. Your resume, your emails and connection requests, your interview answers, how you negotiate - all of them say, "Here's my data - if you do the math right, you'll see I'm the answer." You're assuming they are going to do the math a certain way and be competent at it.

But long established sales research tells us that this is contradictory to what happens when someone buys something (and hiring managers ARE buyers of talent.)

When presented with a 'product,' the potential buyer (who's walking around all day with the emotional pressure of their needs like a constant ringing in their head) instantly projects themselves into the future and imagines whether the product will solve the problem...THEIR problem, because every one of us sees the challenges and opportunities around us as PERSONAL. And personal = emotional.

Same for you right? Need to get a fence that's falling apart rebuilt around your property? You don't want a fence. You certainly don't want to pay the outrageous prices for lumber right now. You don't want to haggle with contractors, check their work, keep them on task and on schedule. What you want is NOT a fencing contractor or even the fence itself.

What you want is for the HOA to climb down off your back and stop sending you those nasty-grams. You want your neighbors (or your spouse, or whoever) to stop giving you the side-eye about it as you go about your day. You want to be able to sit on your deck and look out at the yard and not KNOW that your fence looks embarrassingly like something from an archeological dig.

As much as you want to see a new, beautiful fence, it's the pain associated with having it done that's the primary driver.

Buying is emotional first, rational second.

If a hiring manager believes you understand the emotional need behind the 'face' of the need, they 'feel' you as the solution - that first emotional connection.

Then, when they look more deeply at the data, they're stacking it up to support the decision they've already made. If they do not 'feel' you in that future, all the data they consider (IF they consider it) is connected to the emotional 'no' they've already made.

That's why you need to sit down and see them in their natural habitat and feel their emotional needs.

Before you reshuffle your resume one more time. Before you go into your next phone screen or interview. Definitely before you negotiate.

You sit and think about their problems because every time you START WITH THEIR END IN MIND, you're connecting in a way the data-pushers are not, a way that gives you power and leverage.

A hiring manager's 'end' is always something beyond the tasks, responsibilities and other HR data points we try to align ourselves to. And it's always emotional first...rational second.

Align your search to this reality and you'll be sharply competitive because you'll stop looking like a wheelbarrow of data, and start looking like the solution to the problem they most want solved in the next 180 days.

Want to make this shift in your job search?

PM me to book a free call.