Most Job Seekers Make This Simple Mid-Career Mindset Mistake

Landing a job is increasingly difficult for older, mid-career professionals. Many workers in this demographic are surprised that somehow, seemingly all of a sudden, they are out of work for months at a time, vs. nailing down jobs much more easily and quickly when they were younger.

As a mid-career job seeker, one way to improve the odds of landing your next job faster is to adopt a different career mindset: think of yourself - and market yourself - as a product.

Why a Product Mindset is More Compelling

As a mid-career professional, you’re more than your resume. Your skills and achievements are important, but your greater experience offers wisdom, insight, and strategic thinking that younger, less-experienced workers don't yet have.

Employers, customers, or clients now expect more value from you. If they’re considering you for a position, they want you to bring the advantages associated with age and experience. You have to be more proactive, adaptable, and strategic.

When we shop for a product, we don’t invest our hard-earned money (especially these days) in something that we kind of need or that’s just nice to have around the house. To make a significant investment in something, we want to know precisely what solution it will provide to make it worth the price.

Shifting your career mindset to seeing yourself as a “product” forces you to define, articulate, and market your value in a more mission-critical way.

A Product is Not a Brand

Job seekers are often encouraged to create a clear personal brand to support their professional identity and represent their value.

PersonalBrand.com provides this definition:

A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their?experience, expertise, competencies, actions?and/or achievements.

So, to create a brand, you have to present a clear and consistent picture of what you do or have done. A brand is a general representation of what you do. It identifies you and segments you, but it doesn’t differentiate you.

A Product is Not a Value Proposition

Creating your Unique Value Proposition is a step up from your personal brand. It helps better differentiate you from your competition.

From the employer perspective, here’s how the job board Indeed sets it up:

A personal value proposition is a statement or letter detailing your skills, background or expertise that makes you stand out to hiring managers as a strong candidate. Your personal value proposition is a great way to demonstrate what makes you unique and why you're the best fit for the position. Personal value propositions should be brief, catch the hiring manager's attention and differentiate you from the competition.

So while the brand can be a way of getting in the door, a well-crafted and properly targeted value proposition can get you into consideration for a position (and hopefully a coveted interview).

Three Components of a Product Mindset

Neither the personal brand nor the value proposition provides the employer or client with the certainty that will truly move the needle and get you into the final round of consideration.

Again, in mid-career, you need to bring more to the opportunity. You have to shift your career mindset beyond that of an employee. Seeing yourself as a product means that you are the solution.

Niche Solution

Increasingly, employers and clients want you to solve a particular problem. This is why thinking of yourself as a product is more and more important.

Your challenge is to stop thinking about everything you can do and focus on the single most important solution (or set of solutions) you do best. That’s your “product.”

You’re not “leaving money on the table” by crafting a single solution/product. You’re identifying and meeting a market need. You’ll then use your network to find the right buyer for what you offer.

Complete my “4 Questions” exercise to identify the intersection between your best work and what the market needs.

Focus on Performance

This is another important career mindset shift: your success is not about what you do; it’s about what you deliver. And what you deliver has to be strategic.

With your experience, you can take a “50,000-foot” view of most situations. You’re able to anticipate problems before they arise and build your solution/product to mitigate risks and obstacles.

Use your LinkedIn profile to represent your solution/product as a comprehensive approach to the problem.

Data-Driven

Collect concrete examples and metrics to back up your claims for your solution/product wherever possible. These can include actual statistics from your prior positions as well as qualitative examples of how you effected change and delivered results.

Consider creating collateral materials like case studies or research reports that provide additional specifics and demonstrate your commitment to delivering results based on objective information, not hype or promises.

Three Mistakes to Avoid

Making this career mindset shift can be challenging. Don’t shortcut the process!

Don’t Forget to Prepare

All this is going to feel new and awkward. Spend some time planning and practicing before you get out into the world of networking and interviewing.

Work on new versions of your elevator pitch or mission statement so you can eloquently talk about your solution/product.

Work with friends and colleagues to help you polish your presentation and to run debriefing sessions from events and interviews so you can track your performance and build your effectiveness and confidence.

Don’t Focus on Roles & Responsibilities

Talk about what you deliver, not what you do. In job interviews, especially, describe how everything in your experience has prepared you for this moment and laid the groundwork for your solution/product.

Stop Telling War Stories

Stories are great, but be careful how you tell them. No one wants to hear how wise or smart you are. Try to avoid using “I” and instead, say “we” as much as possible. Be a servant leader motivated by the mission or the benefits of completing the project. Talk about how you supported your team and your colleagues. Make them the heroes of your success.

Your Product-Centric Career Mindset Checklist

Do your homework on the following topics to round out your solution/product shift and present even more compelling evidence that you are the right person to lead the initiative for a prospective employer or client.

Pain/Pill

It is crucial to identify the problem you are looking to solve. Too often, this step is rife with assumptions about what the employer or the industry may be facing. The clearer you understand the employer or client’s problem, they more they will trust you to provide the solution.

Stats & Metrics

Amplify your understanding of the problem you’re there to solve. Show that you’ve done the research and are up-to-date on all of the costs, marketing/sales, and other data that can validate your expertise. Study competitors, supply chains, industry experts (and their books) and other sources so that you can back up your plans and approaches.

Testimonials

Finally, provide references before they ask for them. Make sure that your LinkedIn profile Recommendations are recent and, most importantly, relevant to your solution/product. If you currently have recommendations that don’t clearly address and praise you for at least some aspect of the solution/product you are focusing on, try asking your recommender to rewrite their post so it can be more helpful. See this article for some further thoughts on using social proof and your LinkedIn recommendations to serve this goal.

Start Taking Orders

Not everyone will be a buyer for your solution/product. That’s good! If you've crafted a truly useful solution/product, you want only the right people who really need it to contact you to learn more.

Reframing your value as a solution/product is the way to ensure a more rewarding and more sustainable career.