“…the whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself.”
- Joseph Campbell
Welcome to Part 3 of the Heroic Journey Series – the Return. This is where you bring together what you learned in Part 1 and Part 2 and finally make your career transition. It’s called the Return because the Hero ‘returns’ with the gift he discovered during the Initiation. As Joseph Campbell says, you really recover the ‘unrealized potential in yourself.’
How does this apply to your career transition? What you are really doing is taking the insight you gained in Part 2 – the realization that you can put your skills and abilities to work in the world of business – and bringing it out for the benefit of the world. This unrealized potential inside yourself is what I call your Holy Grail. And your job as the Hero is to take this divine gift – the value you have – and share it with the business world.
At this time you are probably wondering when do you begin with your resume and cover letter. I want to give you a bigger picture perspective first. Instead of writing I want to introduce to a more important topic – marketing.
Mindset Change – Land Your First Job by Learning About Marketing
The most important mindset change you need to master during the final stage of your military transition is to think like a marketer. You can’t leave the goal of landing that first job to chance. There is a systematic process of understanding the needs of others and communicating your value – it’s called marketing.
There are many definitions of marketing. Here is one of the best ones by a world renowned marketing professor:
“Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.’’
-Phillip Kotler
Let’s take a look at the different elements in this definition:
- Social – communicating and interacting with others
- Process – an organized series of actions that bring a result
- Individuals and groups – think hiring companies
- Needs and wants – specific desires and outcomes these companies want to achieve
- Creating and exchanging products and value – a measure of worth, importance and usefulness
You and your abilities to perform and meet a specific business need is the value you need to communicate to the hiring companies. Marketing is the process to do it.
Marketing to a *Foreign* Audience – International Marketing
Keep in mind that the marketing you will be doing is of a specific kind – marketing to a *foreign* audience. No, I am not saying that you have to leave the US – although I did, using the same principles successfully. But you need to be aware that most likely the companies and individuals you will be meeting, interviewing and networking with will NOT have served in the military. Therefore, all your communication needs to keep in mind that your audience does not speak the language of the military. Leverage the translation skills you read about in Part 2 and speak to them like you would someone who knows very little or no *English*.
Understand the Customer and Their Decision-Making Unit
One of the most fundamental principles of marketing is understanding the needs of your customers first. This is the *buyer* of the product you are selling – You. In the job hiring process the *buyer* is the hiring manager. It is the person who will be your future manager – the person you will be reporting to, as we say in the military. He or She will make the final decision if you are the right fit for the open position.
But they usually don’t make this decision alone. And they are usually helped in the hiring process by several individuals. The most important members of this decision-making unit are 1) the Human Resources manager and 2) a Recruiter. The Human Resources (usually called HR) manager is part of the team that manages the development and design of the organization, recruiting new employees, internal training, compensation and other personnel-oriented policies. This department gets the task of finding a suitable candidate for the hiring manager. HR managers usually work with external recruiters who specialize in finding, screening and selecting candidates. The impact for you is that you need to be aware that there is a decision-making unit (often abbreviated as DMU in marketing speak) that you will need to influence and communicate to.
You as a Brand
“You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description. Starting today you are a brand. You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? “
-Tom Peters
So wrote the legendary management writer and consultant Tom Peters over 10 years ago in a classic business article, The Brand You. I first read this article when I was doing my MBA in 1997. Its message just blew me away and revolutionized how I went about managing my career transition.
Tom’s main message is that You need to take lessons from the big companies and think of yourself as a brand. You need to think about the following questions:
- What value do You provide?
- What makes You different?
- What’s the pitch for You? (more on that below)
- What’s the real power of You?
- What’s the future of You?
Tom Peters just didn’t write a creative article, he helped kick-off an entire new way at looking at careers called personal branding. Think like Nike, Coca-Cola and Starbucks and take a page or two from their branding playbooks.
Segment, Target and Position
Marketers use a specific strategy to identify, select and sell to their markets. It’s called Segment, Target and Position. Let’s see how it applies to Brand You:
- Segment (or Segmentation) is the process of identifying your prospective customers by grouping them together by the same profile and common needs. After I decided to focus on marketing I segmented by market in two types: one in Information Technology (IT) companies, the other in Consumer Goods companies.
- Target means to define your target markets. Here you are defining the resources and needs of the markets you segmented above. Continuing with my personal example, I realized that IT company marketing managers needed some experience with implementation and introduction of technologies; while Consumer Goods marketers needed to understand fast moving consumer brands and markets.
- Position means to identify the attributes, benefits or skills you uniquely have that you can promote in the mind of your customers. For the IT companies I was targeting I positioned previous communication and technology projects I managed in the military. For the Consumer Goods companies I led with a four month internship I completed at Coca-Cola Netherlands.
Managing Your Channels
All brands have different routes to markets that we marketers call channels. Take Coca-Cola as an example. Think of all the places you can buy a Coke. You can go to the supermarket, gas station, fast food joint, movie theater, convenience store, vending machine and the list goes on. Just like Coke your marketing plan will include specific channels where you can sell your brand. Here are the most common ones:
- Networking. Your network is a social structure made up of a group of individuals tied together by a common interest, whether that’s friendship, commercial reasons, personal reasons or a combination of. Personally knowing a hiring manager or someone in the decision-making unit of a hiring process is the fastest way to get your brand in front of a company.
- Recruiter. Here is the Wikipedia definition: a recruiter is someone engaging in recruitment, which is the solicitation of individuals to fill job or positions within any group, such as a corporation. Recruiters may work within an organization (typically in its Human Resources department) or on an outsourced basis. Outsourced recruiters working for multiple clients in a third-party broker relationship, and are variously called headhunters, search firms, agency recruiters, recruitment consultants or agents.
- Job fair. Job fairs (sometime referred to as career fair or career expos) are events which are normally organized by recruiters (but also other organizations such as school alumni associations and other groups) that bring together prospective hiring companies and candidates.
- Job board. A job board is an online location that provides up to date listings of job opening in various industries.
- Advertisement. An advertisement is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience to purchase and take some action. Hiring companies will sometimes make direct advertisements about their open positions to get prospective candidates to respond directly to the company.
You have probably started to come across these concepts during your search for information on your career transition. My own perspective is to not think of these as separate career tactics but as marketing channels you need to proactively manage.
Your Resume – a Sales Letter
Here is the part you’ve probably heard the most about – a resume. A resume is just a summary of your work experience, education and personal contact details. In Europe they use the expression curriculum vitae (CV) which in Latin means: [the course] of [my] life.
This is an important document in the career search process. But unlike most people, I don’t view this as just a work and education summary. I’ve used resumes as sales letters. Why is that? Because most people don’t understand the purpose of a resume. Most people think its purpose is to land you a job. That’s not correct. The real purpose of a resume it to get you a foot in the door and land you an interview for the job. To do that you need to consider the resume a sales letter whose job is not just to inform and summarize your accomplishments, but persuade and sell.
The Interview – Selling Yourself
Continuing with my approach of marketing yourself as a brand, the interview is one of the final hurdles to getting that first job in the business world. As you are starting to figure out, my view is not the conventional approach.
I’ve seen many people, even experienced business people, do this wrong. Most think you just “show-up and throw-up” – show up at the meeting and throw all your experience at the interviewer. In fact, an interview is really a one to one sales meeting with an orchestrated sales process. You need to properly research the company, the person you are meeting, know how to influence their behavior, position the most important elements of your experience, handle objections and ask the most effective questions.
Put It All Together In a Plan and Campaign
Here is the final part of marketing brand You. You need to view all the above elements not as separate tactics or actions but part of a coordinated plan. And this plan needs to be prepared and executed with the same amount of precision and sophistication as a military operation. Here are common elements of your plan:
- Vision – a short summary of your ideal outcome and future
- Goals – specific objectives you want to achieve
- Summary of your Brand strengths and weaknesses
- An honest review of all your opportunities and threats
- Segmentation, Positioning and Targeting (see above) of your market
- Channel management plan
- Marketing tools such as your resume
- Measurement and feedback to track, monitor and adjust performance
We’ve come to an end of another meaty and juicy article. There is a lot of information here to take in and it may require reading it over again several times to let it sink in. The most important take away, which is really a mindset change for all military, is that you are a Brand with unique abilities and benefits. And the management process you need to master to influence and persuade your prospective buyers that you are an ideal fit for their needs is marketing.
We are almost done with the Heroic Journey series. In the next and final article, Heroic Journey Series, Conclusion, I will wrap up the entire series by explaining that a Heroic Journey is not new to you – and that in fact you are very experienced in the entire process!
Begin Your Heroic Journey!
Related Posts:
- Personal Marketing and Branding for Military Veterans
- Heroic Journey Series, Part 2 – Initiation: Discover the World of Business and Align to Your Skills, Strengths and Passions
- Managing Your Marketing Channels for Transition Success
- Why Your Military Transition Resume Is a Marketing Tool
- Heroic Journey Series, Part 1 – Departure: Master the Mindset of the Inner Work of Success