Getting Hired
How do you stand out in an ocean of salespeople?
“Never give up searching for the job that you’re passionate about.”
- Warren Buffet
If you are on the job hunt right now, it is still slim pickings. When the lockdowns started and mass layoffs were happening back in March, I reached out to help those in the Enterprise Sales Forum community. I hosted just over 100 1:1 mentoring sessions since just on the topic of job hunting.
In a healthier economic cycle, my advice would be different. When times are good, you can be choosier and dig into all the aspects of the job, compensation, culture, and the upside for you career wise. And quite frankly you do not have to try so hard. It is the standard apply online, send resume, phone screen, interview, offer cycle.
Now we are in a different cycle. Companies can be choosier. Standards are rising because of the glut of talent. It is a buyer’s market and if does not favor you.
If you go in with the standard approach, you will not stand out. Even consistent quota achievers and President’s club recipients are not shoe-ins for roles. The competition just got raised a few notches.
So how do you strategize and adjust your approach when job seeking in down economies? Specifically, how are you going to:
Identify your values, goals, the things you are most passionate about in work?
Find roles and companies that align to your values, interests and goals?
Rise above the crowd to demonstrate and tell your unique value?
Weave your story into the hiring company’s goals and values?
If you do not have a strategy for each of these questions, you will severely impede your ability to land a new job. This post will provide you a framework to help you put a plan in place that allows you to shine when you are competing for a role.
Finding a company and role that fits for you will depend on how well you know yourself. We often do not spend time to reflect on the things we value, what we are passionate about, and what our long term goals are. Nine times out of ten, when coaching salespeople on job seeking, they tell me they have never given these questions any thought.
Write your answers out on a pen and paper or a whiteboard. Have one column for values, one column for things you desire most in your work, and one column about where you want to be in ten years.
For example, in doing this exercise, here are some things I put in each column. For values, what matters to me most is transparency, trust, and creativity. For what I want out of work, I seek fast decision making, collaboration, a culture of experimentation, and working with engineers. For long term goals, I want to be in a position to coach others and build credibility in my work as a community builder.
Next is finding companies that align with who you are. What I realized is that the things I value and care about tend to align with tech companies that are fast moving, have flat hierarchies, and value trying things out. This is what led me to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The other factor to account for is which industries and companies are strong currently or are trending towards growth. If you look at your columns and it appears that travel is an area of interest, you are going to be hard pressed to find jobs. On the other hand, if you find cloud technologies interesting, that is a massively growing space now and in the years to come.
Once you know your values, what you want out of work, and the types of companies that are both growing and align to your values, it is time to do your research. Find companies that spark your interest and follow those companies on platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Look at their reviews, job openings, and what connections you have into those companies.
The next question to answer is how you rise above the masses. The clue is in the next question about stories. In sales, the ability to tell stories is critical to build credibility and influence buyers. The same occurs in the hiring process. You need to tell the story of you and why you are awesome.
This is not about bragging or ego pumping. It is about humbly sharing about what makes you unique. For introverts like myself, this can still be a struggle.
To help you in this effort, add a fourth column to our worksheet from before and write down the skills you excel at when it comes to sales, business, and general work skills. As an example, you might be great at cold calling, being decisive, and learning things quickly. Write all of these down and then come up with concrete examples. The ones that seem the most complete and compelling are your superpowers.
This is where you begin to create your personal narrative. Take your superpowers and write out long form examples of using those superpowers. Use the STAR technique for writing each example. This means stating the situation, the tasks you were directly responsible for, the actions you took to fulfill the tasks, and the results of your actions. Whenever possible, include metrics, either quantitative (I closed out the quarter at 150% of goal) or qualitative (my CRO recognized my efforts during Sales Kickoff).
You might not be a great writer though. It does not have to be perfect though, the point is to get this stuff out of your head in a format that you can refer to in a way that is consistent. Writing a narrative also allows you to collect feedback from colleagues, friends, and mentors. Getting feedback is the best way of ensuring you are explaining yourself with clarity and that highlights what is great about you.
“I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.”
— Jeff Bezos
The last question to address is connecting your narrative to the company you are interview at. You need to understand a company’s values and what makes it tick.
A good example is what I went through in getting hired into AWS. Getting a job anywhere in Amazon is notoriously hard. There are 14 Leadership Principles which act as the cultural glue of the company, and every hire is not only expected to align to those values, but to also raise the bar in elevating the level of talent in Amazon.
Getting back to finding the companies to apply to, this is where having connections in the company is helpful. Before joining AWS, I pinged about a dozen people about their experiences working there, what the culture was like, and how they navigated the hiring process. With this information, I took my narrative and plugged pieces of it into the 14 Leadership Principles. I also created “negative examples”, which are stories that did not turn out well, but still demonstrated how I overcame and learned from the experience.
For places like Amazon that have clearly laid out values, this is an easier exercise. You can still use the same process if values are not as well stated. Use what you learn from current and former employees to get a sense of the culture and values so that you oriented your narrative towards things the company considers important. Once you have your narrative in place, practice telling those stories, commit the narrative to memory, and videotape yourself so you can review and improve your delivery.
A few things to note. I do not mention resumes or LinkedIn profiles at all. There are plenty of resources for getting help there, but realize that these tools do not help differentiate you. They only get you in the door. I also do not talk about recruiters. Unless you are working with an actual executive recruiter, most of them simply do not that the ability or time to help you. Developing your story is something that only you can do.
Last thing to share is that I am speaking on the topic “The New Sales Playbook” next Thursday, Oct 22nd at 3 PM EST. I will talk about things to consider when selling in an environment that is rapidly changing. Come join us for a talk, live Q&A, and networking with your sales peers. Come join us and sign up here to reserve your spot!
Cheers,
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum