How to get hunted

It’s the bee that comes to the flower. AND it’s when the flower blossoms that the bee comes down. Call me simplistic, but this is the way nature appears to be programmed. It’s the firm that hunts the talent. AND the talent needs to look and smell good. A headhunter will value most what he/she has fought to bring home rather than what has fallen in his/her plate.

This is the school I follow when I market my clients. I want them to look their best and speak with ease about their great achievements. This is what we call Product Positioning and here are the steps I use when I apply this strategy to selling talent.

Who do you want to impress?

First, find your target. Once we know who we are “attacking” we can develop the strategy around that person. We read all about our target, we follow them on social media, we study their entourage, their interests, their professional parcours and we also make informed guesses on what keeps them up at night.

What are their unmet needs?

We want to be the answer to their prayers. We are all looking for something or someone. Some people are looking for jobs, others are looking for clients, some are looking for investors, some others even are looking to impress their management team in order to get promoted. We just need to understand what are the unmet needs of our target and the conversation will flow easily.

The conversation will flow when we are extremely clear on what benefits we offer to the target. What do you sell? Is it operational excellence? Is it impeccable customer experience? Why would anyone want you on their team?

We all have at least 3 things we do well. Most of the time we tend to focus on the current title we have and we forget that a Sales Manager can be well versed in Business Development and maybe also in Account Management. A Strategic Partnership Director could be successful in a role when he/she needs to fundraise or manage donor’s relationships or even act as a Campaign Manager. Now, more than ever we are lucky to work in cross functional teams and we can’t expect people to be good at just one single function. Find your tri-force and let that be your selling proposition.

Next thing you need to be clear on is: WHY? Why do you work so hard? What are you trying to achieve with your powerful tri-force? You are looking to market local products at global scale so that anyone anywhere can access good quality products at a fair price? Maybe you are driven to realizing sustainable and cost-effective solutions. We all should have some greater sense of WHY we do things. Disney is not the place where you can buy toys, it’s the place where dreams come true. Nike is not where you can get sports gear, Nike is where you JUST DO IT. I am not selling CVs, I am in business because I want to help outsiders belong.

What dream are you selling? You are a brand and you need to make people dream. Having you on board will make them go faster? Having you on board will help the company conquer a new region, new clients, launch a new product? What magic do you hold?

There is nothing dishonest about making people dream. The dishonest part is overstating and underdelivering and when you do that too often you lose credibility and no dream can help fix that.

There is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect and I think a lot of professionals suffer from it. It states that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability. Does it mean you need to understate and overdeliver? Maybe. Does it mean that you are perhaps underselling yourself and making less money than what you should be making? Could be.

In my experience, the market bets heavily on confidence and places less emphasis on competence. If you want to be bought, being consistently confident will increase your job-appeal. If you want to be hunted, sounding more confident will go a long way.