To sell a product you need to believe in it, package it, and promote it.
You’re ‘the product’ here - and recently Geoffrey was talking about marketing and promoting yourself. He made some really good suggestions, but the fact is that you need to believe in ‘the product’ - and go on believing in it – to make the best of those suggestions and promote and sell your ‘product’ really well.
It’s the ‘go on believing in it’ part that can get difficult. Being made redundant can knock your belief in the quality of ‘the product’ all by itself, so a few rejections from prospective employers – and everybody is bound to get some of those – can make you begin to wonder whether perhaps you’ve passed your sell-by date.
I did. I’d pretty well walked from one job to another for more than 20 years when I was last made redundant. I had very good skills and an excellent CV – and I’d stayed in jobs and had good references - so it came as a nasty shock when I found I couldn’t give myself away, least of all sell what I had to offer.
I’d just gotten over thinking that my redundancy was MY FAULT – but I immediately began to believe that not being able to get a job was MY FAULT, and that there was something wrong with me that was preventing me from getting a job.
Well, there was something wrong - and it was MY FAULT. I was scatter-gunning CV’s and applications all over the place rather than targeting them properly – and I had desperation written all over me. I was certainly presenting and packaging myself well – but I was doing it far too well for most of the jobs I was chasing. And I had a really bad attitude to what I was doing.
I finally worked that out when somebody told me that he’d love to employ me but he thought I’d be bored within the week. The unspoken comment was “and gone in three months”. There was nothing I could say, because he was right. I likely would have been gone in three months, because at that point I was just looking to get employed by somebody – anybody – who would give me a job – any job - so that I could look around for a ‘real’ job and have the security of being employed in the meantime. And he knew it.
Quite apart from the fact that my approach was expensive in time and money, it was depressing, and bound to fail. I was inviting rejection – and I got it. That didn't make me feel too good. I was intending to use people – and actually to treat them very shabbily, because employing someone is very expensive – and I got found out. That didn’t make me feel too good, either. In fact, in retrospect, I still don't feel very good about that.
Scatter-gunning’ isn’t a route you want to go down. It can make you stop believing in ‘the product’. And it can make you feel pretty bad about yourself in some other ways as well.
You’re ‘the product’ here - and recently Geoffrey was talking about marketing and promoting yourself. He made some really good suggestions, but the fact is that you need to believe in ‘the product’ - and go on believing in it – to make the best of those suggestions and promote and sell your ‘product’ really well.
It’s the ‘go on believing in it’ part that can get difficult. Being made redundant can knock your belief in the quality of ‘the product’ all by itself, so a few rejections from prospective employers – and everybody is bound to get some of those – can make you begin to wonder whether perhaps you’ve passed your sell-by date.
I did. I’d pretty well walked from one job to another for more than 20 years when I was last made redundant. I had very good skills and an excellent CV – and I’d stayed in jobs and had good references - so it came as a nasty shock when I found I couldn’t give myself away, least of all sell what I had to offer.
I’d just gotten over thinking that my redundancy was MY FAULT – but I immediately began to believe that not being able to get a job was MY FAULT, and that there was something wrong with me that was preventing me from getting a job.
Well, there was something wrong - and it was MY FAULT. I was scatter-gunning CV’s and applications all over the place rather than targeting them properly – and I had desperation written all over me. I was certainly presenting and packaging myself well – but I was doing it far too well for most of the jobs I was chasing. And I had a really bad attitude to what I was doing.
I finally worked that out when somebody told me that he’d love to employ me but he thought I’d be bored within the week. The unspoken comment was “and gone in three months”. There was nothing I could say, because he was right. I likely would have been gone in three months, because at that point I was just looking to get employed by somebody – anybody – who would give me a job – any job - so that I could look around for a ‘real’ job and have the security of being employed in the meantime. And he knew it.
Quite apart from the fact that my approach was expensive in time and money, it was depressing, and bound to fail. I was inviting rejection – and I got it. That didn't make me feel too good. I was intending to use people – and actually to treat them very shabbily, because employing someone is very expensive – and I got found out. That didn’t make me feel too good, either. In fact, in retrospect, I still don't feel very good about that.
Scatter-gunning’ isn’t a route you want to go down. It can make you stop believing in ‘the product’. And it can make you feel pretty bad about yourself in some other ways as well.
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