The Job Search is About

Effective Selling

Conducting a successful job search requires that people develop skills they may not have used before such as resume building, networking, coming up with success stories you can share with prospective employers, and so on. In a sense, you must become an adept sales professional. The “product” is you and the “features and benefits” you must convey are your skills, competencies and experiences.

Many job seekers do get skilled over time at communicating these areas, but mistakenly dominate their interviews with story after story instead of doing the single most important part of sales, which is asking the right questions. Selling on the basis of features works OK with tangible goods such as consumer products, but doesn’t work when selling an intangible, such as professional skills. Asking questions achieves important objectives – it helps the candidate form specific parts of their qualifications to the needs of the company, and perhaps as important, let’s the interviewer be an equal part of the conversation.

A classic sales approach called the “The Sandler Sales Method” has a step early in the meeting about finding the prospect’s “pain.” This is where the salesperson uncovers the prospects “pain points” and how their product or service can best help the company they are calling on. Here are example scenarios of using this approach in a job interview setting:

What not to do

• Interviewer: Why should we hire you?
• Job seeker: launches into a 5 minute spiel on experience gained in their many years of working.
• Likely Outcome: Interviewer might wish to be answering emails while this goes on, not engaged.

What to do

• Interviewer: Why should we hire you?
• Job seeker: Before I answer that question, can I ask you what the 2-3 most important areas you need help with in the first 3-6 months?
• Interviewer: sure, thanks for asking, they are…
• Job seeker: interesting, in my last position, we successfully addressed these areas by [brief one minute or so on-point SAR - situation, actions, results]. Or: interesting, here is what worked for us to [solve/address] that [issue/objective].
• Likely Outcome: A better chance than the first scenario that the Interviewer is engaged and interested in going further with you - this person can add value!

The latter scenario isn’t a hard sell, it is relating and helping. Simply stated, asking questions is a way of getting the interviewer interested in you as a viable candidate, connecting what you offer to what the company needs, helping you to stand out from other job seekers who may have similar qualifications and experience. If a solid connection is made, your likelihood of getting to the next step in the process should improve.

Click here or here or more information about selling yourself and engaging the interviewer effectively.

Written by Don Nemerov, CRC Advisor