What's the Greatest Barrier to a Successful Job Search?

What’s keeping you from getting the job? It could be the same thing that trips up others: you don’t understand (yet) that the job search is a sales process. It doesn’t matter what career you are involved in: to get the job, you have to sell yourself to the hiring manager. That means that you’re the product. You’re trying to get the hiring manager to pay you a salary to do work (or, to buy the product to get a benefit). Once you understand this, it changes EVERYTHING. If the job search is a sales process, what does that mean for you? How should it change your thinking? 1. Do you understand your product? 2. Is your product ready to go? 3. Do you know your product? 4. Do you know your competition? 5. Do you know who your potential buyer is? 6. Do you know what sets you apart from your competition and makes you unique? 7. Can you describe what sets you apart? (Your elevator pitch.) 8. Have you put yourself in front of enough employers to have a true opportunity at a new job? If you think about the job search as a sales process, it changes the way you think about whether you've been successful or not, whether you've done enough, and where your bottlenecks might be to that success. Just think about that, and maybe it will change some of the things you've been doing in your approach to finding a job. If you’re unsure about how to implement this idea in your own job search, get some marketing help in the form of a career coach. A career coach can help you pinpoint what makes you unique as a product and how you can stand out in the marketplace–so you can stop wasting time and get your dream job.