Stand out in a crowded Job Market

"There are 700+ applicants on a role posted 3 days ago. How will I ever stand out?"

It's a common plight among jobseekers, especially for senior leadership roles.

The pyramid converges at the top; there will always be fewer senior leadership positions available, regardless of the market.

The competition will always be stiff.

And opportunities will only come to those who know how to stand out from the crowd.

But how do you actually stand out?

One word = Relevance

People don't care about you. They only care about themselves. And that's okay.

The things that stand out to us in this world are the ones that solve our problems. The things that are relevant to us.

For example, I didn't care about housekeeping services until I had a dirty house, and couldn't keep it clean as I'm mostly working all the time. I had a problem... so I put up an ad for maid services and got about 26 applications with the standard offer.

Though I was clear in putting out the job description, describing my problem and my situation clearly, I was a little disappointed at the generic responses.

Until I did some deeper digging and found Christie(SO to you). She hadn't applied for my request(because she missed it), though her profile stood out because she met my criteria:

• Followed a custom checklist
• Could come in and work even when my wife and I were away
• They helped with organizing things, not just cleaning. Clutter bothers me a lot
• They consulted me on getting rid of the things, even took the stuff to donate to Goodwill themselves.

Turned out, Christie had been working part-time to support her education, and she lived closer to the Slabtown area in Portland, Oregon, which happens to be a high-density area of young professionals. So most of her clientele were like me, and so were their problems were just like mine.

That is to say, she was "relevant" to me, and they were the only person I talked to.

Could other applicants have gotten me the same satisfaction? Perhaps most. Maybe all of them... Who knows?

But like most busy professionals, I didn't have the time or the energy to find out.

This quick example is to illustrate the power of niching down to stand out.

Imagine you had a heart problem. Wouldn't you go to a cardiologist, even to a nearby city, regardless of how many general physicians are there in your area?

Because, of course, you'd like to talk to a specialist, not a generalist.

Now let's apply this concept to your job search to help you stand out for the right opportunities. Do this right, and you'll have recruiters and hiring managers chasing after you, not the other way around.

For every obstacle you overcome in your career, there is someone struggling with the same problem.

Have you helped a company in a hyper-scale phase? Have you brought a SaaS product to market? etc. etc.

Your specialty is your superpower, a game you dominate and can help others with.

Of course, you wouldn’t have solved all the problems in the world; nobody is an expert at everything. But you would have solved some key challenges specific to a particular space. All you have to do is Identify those patterns, which’ll give you your niche. It’s not that hard.

Understanding your niche isn’t just about what you’ve done so far but also what you can do...

It's your way to demonstrate your "relevance" to your future employer. And relevance makes you stand out because you're in a market of one. No competition.

Once they realize how well you potentially fit, their "buying temperature" is already high, and the interview conversations are way different. You can sense in their tone that they are rooting for you to win, not asking questions to disqualify you.

But more importantly, to you, niching down gets you two most important things:

• It gets you a negotiating leverage. Simply put, a cardiologist charges more than a general physician because they are a niche expert.
• It gives you a direction on where to go look. You don't just apply to any random opportunity that comes along.

So use this step-by-step solution to find out what your niche is. This is really actionable, so take your notebook out an ask yourself these questions:

Question 1: Am I an expert in a particular industry? eg: Healthcare IT, financial services, CPG

• Are there any particular Industry regulations that I've experience in : healthcare(HIPAA), Pharma(GMP), Fintech(FFIEC)
• Think of an Industry-specific challenge you have solved. Examples include: Developing ERPs for CPG(fast-moving goods + Large volume), Infrastructure for hospitals(connectivity+availability), Implementing Data Analytics for manufacturing companies(first-of-a-kind implementation) etc.
• Can I help adjacent industries with similar challenges? For example: If you are an IT(Infra) leader for a construction company with multiple field offices, you can perhaps set up the infra for a local/regional chain(eg, a car dealership).

Question 2: Do I thrive better in small, midsize, or large companies? Each kind of organization will have a different challenge.

• Small: Setting up the basic tech for the first time. It may require hands-on experience. Another challenge may include wearing multiple hats, rather than focusing on one specific function.
• Medium: Maturing the tech landscape of the company. Scaling teams, enabling hypergrowth, moving to enterprise-grade maturity, cost savings, etc.
• Large: Modernization, transformation, rationalization, cost savings measures, setting up of emerging verticals(cybersec, data, and analytics) or methodologies(ITIL, Agile, DevOps)

Question 3: What kind of customers have I served? Internal or external?

• If you have helped external customers, people would want to know that.

Question 4: Have I worked directly on the product that the company produces? Or do I enable the product?

• For example, Intel.com is an enabler for Intel's chips, vs. Facebook.com is the very product itself that sells.
• But even on Facebook, have you worked on the infrastructure or have you worked on the very product?

Question 5: What am I an expert at doing? What business problems have I solved? List out your big ticket items:

• Transformation: Have I brought any change in process, technology, or how we deal with people?
• Have I built a product, translated requirements, built the infrastructure
• Build vs. Buy? Can I do both. Am I good at building things, or am I good at getting them built cheaper through 3rd party vendors?
• Business Development: Am I able to work with customers and pitch them custom solutions that bring in revenue?
• Cost savings/operational excellence: Do I have an eye for spotting inefficiencies and fixing them?

Now that you understand how important your niche is in making you stand out, and how you can find yours, I'd say keep this chain of thought going.

Write down as you have ideas. Writing is essential as it'll marinate in your brain faster. What you'll experience next is as you look for the roles being posted, you can already see what value proposition you can bring to the table for those.

In next upcoming newsletter issue, I'll talk further about how to use your niche to your advantage in networking and making applications. Till then, cheers!

-- Varun Kirti

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