12 Tips to beat the recession and sell yourself to any company

By Neil Patrick

Today’s job market is brutal. I don’t need to tell you that I know.

But this terrible recession has created new opportunities if you know what they are and are equipped to exploit them. How can that be if so many companies are cutting back you may ask?

The answer is simple. In a recession, companies need two things more than anything else. And that is more revenue and less cost.  More revenue and/or less costs equals more profit. Simple.

You may be great at what you do, but unless your personal proposition can be presented in a way that is clear about how you will improve the profits of your future employer, you are going to have a hard time getting hired.  Unless you can do this, you risk being seen as a pure cost. And no-one wants more cost right now.

Ah, but I’m not a salesperson or a marketing person, you may say. So I don’t create revenue and profits in my job.  Well, it’s time to think differently. You need to think and act like a salesperson. Whatever function you carry out in a company, you DO affect profits. It may be through revenue, or costs, or both.

If you are in sales or marketing, what you do drives revenue. And more revenue equals more profit. If you are in another area, what you do affects cost.

So think hard about how what you do will increase the revenue or reduce the costs of your next employer. And think about how what you have done in the past can be used to provide the evidence that you know how to do this in the future. And write down the numbers you can use that prove this.

Once you’ve done this, these points must be included in your resume and your online profiles such as Linkedin. Does your resume and Linkedin profile go on and on with lots of prose about all the things you’ve done in the past,  or does it also show the numbers  that prove how what you do improves profit? Your resume and Linkedin profiles must demonstrate how what you’ve done improves profits.

But remember, your resume and online marketing won’t actually do the selling job for you. They are important for one thing only – getting doors open for you so that you have opportunities to get in front of decision makers and sell yourself. So you need to prepare your personal proposition to reflect not what you’ve done in the past, but what you can do for your employer in the future.

One last key point for anyone reading this that isn’t in sales or marketing. I guarantee that if adopt the approach I describe here, you’ll be ahead of just about every other candidate that’s going after the job, because chances are not one of them will have prepared their pitch like this.

These points and more are explained here in this punchy video by Grant Cordone.