Being Different Makes all the Difference

Being Different Makes all the Difference

Last night I spoke to an in-transition group in NJ about the ways to set yourself apart from the competition. In any job market, being different is the name of the game…

How can you stand out from the crowd? It’s not impossible, but it does take both effort and courage to step out of your comfort zone.

1. Realize that any time you spend with others you have potential for networking. Attending in-transition groups is certainly a good first step, but there are so many other ways for you to meet people including at the gym, at a workshop or industry seminar, at church, at the supermarket, on a plane, at a party, on the bleachers at your kid’s soccer event, at a volunteer event,…this list could go on for days. Get out of your house and start talking to people. We are all human and deep down inside we all want to help each other succeed

2. Spend time trying to figure out what you were put on this earth to do. Do you really want to be lawyer or did you just go to law school to please your parents? Perhaps your true passion is to teach or to speak about overcoming your life’s challenges or to help your local politician win the next election. If you search for a job that you are passionate about, you will find it so easy to market yourself on cover letters and to sell yourself on interviews because you will no longer have to fake your excitement.

3. Start a blog to help the world understand a little bit more about you. Blog about challenges in your industry and give your opinions about how you might fix them. Blog about your personal hobbies (assuming that they are appropriate for potential hiring managers). Consider partnering up with someone who can proofread your posts for both grammar and tone and also to help you brainstorm new ideas. Visit StartingABlog.com for additional tips.

4. Sign up for all the job search related Yahoo Groups you can find. Just go to groups.yahoo.com and search using the keywords job, jobs, and leads. To narrow your search to your industry, use “job pharmaceutical” for example. To narrow the search to your city, use “leads Las Vegas”. While you’re there, join my Yahoo group “AbsolutelyJobLeads”. Now here’s where you can be different. Don’t just join the groups. Instead, contribute any leads that you aren’t planning to follow through with to your group. Without everyone’s contributions, the leads groups cannot sustain themselves.

5. Start using Twitter. This is the one thing that I just cannot understand. Twitter is a free resource. There are recruiters tweeting about open jobs every day. There are hiring managers looking for candidates who know how to demonstrate their expertise in 140 character snippets. Yet when I ask people who I meet at in-transition groups whether they are tweeting yet, only 5% say yes. Join me in the Twitterverse! Click here to get started.

---

Absolutely Abby’s Advice:

Consider the role of a movie producer like Steven Spielberg. When planning for a new movie, he auditions thousands of actors in the hope that one actor can play the part exactly the way he envisions it. When all of his choices are in front of him, he doesn’t necessary choose the candidate with the most experience nor does he choose the candidate just because of his or her similar roles. He chooses the actor who perfectly matches the part. If you are the candidate who is the perfect one for the job, it is you who will get the part and play the role for a very long time.