What Are You a Solution For? - The Art and Science of Finding the Perfect Job
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Craig Triplett
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Do you have a personal career marketing plan?
Have you identified your “unfair competitive advantage”?
Are you currently leveraging your natural talents, skills and interests?
We live in volatile, uncertain times. Many of us have experienced significant change in our careers – some
voluntary, some involuntary. Taking charge of our careers proactively is now an imperative; it is not
optional. However, career management is a topic that most of us know very little about. It’s not typically
taught in school and companies don’t provide training to their employees in this area. No wonder looking
for a job can be such an extremely frustrating and humbling experience! In this brief article, we hope to
summarize a point of view on this topic that you will find very powerful and practical. We hope it will shift
your paradigm about looking for a job and increase your confidence in managing your career.
The great news is that you probably already have the basic skills you will need if you can remember the
introductory marketing or business courses you took in college. That’s right, remember the four P’s of
marketing – product, place, promotion and price. These provide a wonderful metaphor and roadmap for
finding the perfect job. You see, looking for a job and managing your career are essentially marketing
challenges. It’s all about differentiation, positioning and insuring that you are offering the right product to the
right target market. You will probably find it helpful to think of yourself as an entrepreneur or brand manager
responsible for marketing a valuable product or service rather than as a hopeful job applicant. The product
is Brand You. And since all products provide solutions, the fundamental question that one needs to be able
to answer is, What are you a solution for? What is your unique selling proposition?
After determining the product you are selling, you’ve got to define your target market (prospective
employers who need your solution) and develop your distribution, communication and pricing strategies
(see graphic below).
The marketing process, however, all starts with gaining a thorough understanding of your product and the
unique benefits it offers the marketplace. In classic brand marketing, this is the research and development
phase. In career management, it’s called self-assessment. There are many tools for doing this. Some of the
more popular personality assessments include Myers-Briggs and DISC, but there are many others. In our
coaching practice, we prefer a simple self-assessment exercise called "The Perfect Intersection." This
exercise asks five basic questions that we believe strike at the heart of who you are as a product and what
most of us want out of our careers. They are:
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What do you do well?
What comes easily to you?
What do you enjoy?
What would you do if money were not an issue?
What is your unfair competitive advantage?
The first three questions should be answered as one exercise in three side-by-side columns. Answer each
question separately. The goal is to understand why some skills fall in only one or two columns and identify
those that fall in all three. It is often useful to get third-party input on these questions from people who know
you very well and who will give you honest feedback. These people may include current or former bosses,
subordinates or coworkers. Sometimes relatives, close friends or significant others also can provide
valuable input. The fourth question seeks to uncover your true passions because people tend to enjoy and
perform better in endeavors they are passionate about. The last question on unfair competitive advantage
seeks to identify your strongest natural talents and skills. If you are at a loss for how to answer this
question, go back to the first three questions to identify the skills that intersect across all three. Don’t you
want a job that you do well, that comes easily and that you enjoy? Many people will benefit from working
with an objective third party, like a coach or career strategist, to sort through the results because people
are often too close to a situation to have maximum insight.
The remaining three P’s of marketing – place (conducting your industry/company research and developing
your targeting strategy), promotion (writing a powerful résumé, creating an elevator pitch and fine-tuning
your networking and interviewing skills) and price (negotiating and developing realistic salary expectations)
are topics that we don’t have sufficient time to cover here. Hopefully, this brief summary has given you an
overview of a powerful and effective lens through which to view the career management and job search
process.