Marketing Myself: Why I decided to quit filling out forms and create my own marketing campaign

Applying for jobs the traditional way

Job searching is one of the vilest tasks you’ll ever have to do in your entire life. For most of it, it’s wasted time for many reasons.

Filling out different forms and customizing every bit of your deliverables is time-consuming and all around energy-sucking.

It’s hard to make your CV stand out: we all have access to the same tools and designing your CV using canva.com is no longer an insider secret. Considering the number of applications a recruiter receives for each open position, your chances look a lot like playing the roulette in the casino.

A lot of career coaches keep telling me most positions aren’t even advertised and networking is key to having the upper-hand. But, when you relocated away from your country and LinkedIn Premium is all you have, this is yet another challenge: to connect with people you never met to ask them something terribly personal. Will they advocate on your behalf?

There has to be a different way. During the past six months, I went to several interviews where I was asked to write a business plan for their companies. As you might imagine, these were mostly SMBs trying to fish for free ideas, that they would then have it (poorly) executed by people with CFC’s instead of Marketing Degrees and Masters - I live in Switzerland, where having a Federal Certificate gives you priority against bachelor degrees and masters, unless they’re from a Swiss University.

What to do?

Firstly, you need to really think about where you see yourself working in the future. It’s of no use to waste years of your life working for companies you don’t believe in and you don’t have a common thread. It’s important to speak the local languages, but if you feel that you won’t be able to work to your fullest potential in a local company, chose a place where you can use a language in which you feel more comfortable. In my case, having done the start-up rounds and working for a few local companies, I knew that I wanted to go back to work for international companies.

How to get in touch with them?

You can try the usual ways: filling out forms and networking like crazy. It’s been four years of changing my CV to several “Swiss formats”, whatever they mean since the above mentioned coachs each had their own method, or you can have an Eureka moment - or has I have been told the Swiss call it, a “déjà vu” moment - and decide to show what you’ve got. In my case, I feel it’s easier because having a marketing background, I just decided I’d do a marketing campaign and advocate on my behalf, as I would for any product.

Enter HireDiana.Org

I decided to create a simple website that would not only show what I can do when it comes to practical solutions, but also be more visually appealing than any CV I could send. Enter HireDiana.Org, a site created using the Universe App on my iPhone. There was no coding necessary and cost-wise I spend around 5€ per month for the hosting and custom URL. All the design was done using canva.com and I even manage to embed a Calendly API, that allows visitors to schedule interviews directly from the website.

That’s all well and good, but you can’t just do a pretty website and call it a marketing campaign. For this, I decided to go old school and first do a mailing campaign. Odd, but effective. You put your LinkedIn Premium account to good use, you find people in the right companies and the proper departments. You prepare your materials, in my case, an HireDiana chocolate bar and a postcard, you look for the companies’ addresses and you ship it.

I’ve just sent my first batch today, so I’ll keep you posted on the outcome. 

Nowadays no marketing campaign would be completed without social media, so I’ve also created Facebook and Instagram accounts for my project. It will spread the message, with the added advantage: you can create targeted marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

I have yet to see results of my efforts, but what I can say is that it’s rewarding to put into practice everything you learned in school. You not only show that you understand what it takes to do your job, whatever the product or service may be, while doing something you like. I decided to do my master’s in marketing instead of continuing my bachelor’s field of study (economics), because I’ve always known that the product side of the market, was the side I felt most passionate about. Working on this project made me fall in love all over again with my professional field of choice.

So that’s it: do what you love.