Taking Yourself to Market in 2022?

Ten tips for standing out in your search for a new job in the year ahead

With an overcrowded market for new jobs and with many talented individuals looking to move on, if you are contemplating your next job move in 2022, it is more than ever vital that you stand-out in you search for your next important opportunity.?

Based upon our long experience at Brosna Career Consulting in helping career-minded individuals to succeed in this journey, here are our top ten tips for projecting yourself more impactfully in the year ahead:?

Tip 1: Know What You Want, What You Really, Really Want - before you go anywhere near a job application or discussion with a recruiter or network contact, make sure that you have thoroughly worked out what it is that you really, really want from your next career move. Develop some clear criteria in terms of scale and challenge of role, type of organisation, location, culture, development potential etc. Then use these criteria to carefully evaluate emerging job opportunities at each recruitment stage. In this process, be clear with yourself which of your criteria are non-negotiable and where you do have some flexibility - most significantly avoid settling for second best. Most importantly make sure in your written and verbal narrative that you can succinctly and impactfully describe to others what you are now looking for.?

Tip 2: Refresh Your Documentation - today's recruitment processes increasingly rely upon both technology and human scrutiny for making short-list decisions at the early stages of recruitment. So make sure that your documentation (CV, LinkedIn Profile and Cover Emails etc) are all fit for purpose and tell an impactful story about your combined capabilities, experiences and stand out successes, so making you a compelling candidate for a targeted role. Be prepared to adapt your documentation for each new opportunity.

Tip 3: Be Your Own Advocate - whilst there will be many others who know, appreciate and can confirm your personal qualities, in a tough recruitment world it is you and you alone who will influence the recruitment outcome by the power and authenticity of how you protect yourself. So be bold about yourself and your achievements. Avoid the habit of understating yourself: describe with pride and confidence the impacts you have made in your career to date.

Tip 4: Tell Your Stories - the power and persuasion of your verbal narrative is at the core of successfully marketing yourself to recruiters and potential employers. Make sure that you are well-practised, confident and succinct in how you describe yourself and your relevance for any role. In particular make sure that you can articulate your specific career success stories i.e. the important examples of what you have achieved, how you went about it and the impact you have had on the stakeholders around you. These stories are prime evidence of your capabilities in action and greatly help a recruiter form a judgement on how, based on your past performance, you are likely to perform in the future in any new role.

Tip 5: Leverage Who You Know - get very active with your network. Reach out to people who are already connections and let them know, confidentially, that you are looking to move on. Seek their advice and ask them if they have contacts in their network who might know of suitable opportunities. Go back over your career and play the “where are they now?” game i.e. for people you valued in the past ask are you still connected with them and if not seek them out to reconnect. Just like you, they will have moved on in their careers and may be able to point you towards some interesting new opportunities.

Tip 6: Keep It Live & Active - LinkedIn is a powerful shop-window for you and your capabilities; it is a primary reference point for any recruiter and potential employer. So make sure that your profile is refreshed and up to date, consistent with your CV and looking smart. More dynamically, take every opportunity to more actively and regularly use LinkedIn to project your interests, personality and thought leadership. This can be done through the people and groups you follow, the items you like, any topical comments you make on content provided by others and (if you are really brave) articles and posts that you author in your own name. All this adds an important dimension to your personal brand.?

Tip 7: Seek Out Feedback - the recruitment process is always fluid, demanding and often frustrating. Where you can, seek out feedback on how you are coming across and be receptive to this in making changes in your approach; consult with trusted friends and colleagues to get their perspective and feedback to help you highlight your critical value to others and how best to tailor your narrative.

Tip 8: Make It Personal - if you are really serious about securing a new role in the coming year, then acknowledge to yourself that it may take time to secure the right new role, but also it will require you to invest regular personal time to pursue suitable opportunities. This can be a particular problem if your current job is very demanding and you have a busy family and social life. Best practice suggests that dedicating regular, relatively small amounts of time can be the most effective of managing this challenge. Treat you campaign to secure a new job as if you were going to the gym on a weekly basis and schedule private time to dedicate to the task.?Regular time allocated for your career workout will accelerate your progress.

Tip 9: Be Assertive - do not be afraid or reticent to demand things of others in your search for a new role. Be polite and assertive in your approach but do not be afraid to hold recruiters and employers to their stated timescales for responses, progress updates and feedback. In particular search firms and recruiters can sometimes be less than fully attentive to individual candidates. Yes of course they are busy people, but at the end of the day they are dependent upon quality candidates like you to earn them their fees. If you are struggling for response and action, gently remind them that you might be a future client looking to recruit candidates and how they treat you might influence who you choose to deal with in the future.?

Tip 10: Have a Campaign Plan - treat seeking out a new role as a defined campaign with a clear and systematic plan of attack. As mentioned above this requires a discipline to allocate regular personal time but it also requires a robust plan and process for tracking progress, updating contacts, producing documentation and of course allocating time for interview preparation and interviews themselves.?

And finally, in addition to these ten best practice tips for seeking out a new role in 2022, there is one other overriding piece of advice. Given the importance to you of your job search but also the extent of dedicated work required, it may well be really helpful to seek out a coach and partner to both support you in the process and provide practical advice and techniques on applying the above actions.?

At Brosna our sole dedication is to coach talented individuals to seek out and secure exciting new roles. We work entirely on behalf of individuals to help them navigate their career transitions. If you would like more information and/or a confidential discussion about how we might be able to help you in your career journey, then please contact me at [email protected] .

And, of course, in the meantime wishing you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year

Tim Chapman

Managing Director

Brosna Career-Consulting Ltd

www.brosna-consulting.com

[email protected]