St.Louis Business Journal
EMPLOYER'S WANT TO KNOW "WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ME?"

By Anna Navarro

April 2005  

Author's note: Case studies in this column are essentially true stories fictionalized to protect privacy and told with the individual's permission.

The central question in most employers' minds as they meet with a candidate is: "What can you do for ME?" If you can't answer that question, chances are your job hunt is going to stall out. Tom's story is a good case in point.

He was a cardiac surgeon who was burned out on patient care, and stressed out by declining patient volumes resulting from drug alluding stents. He needed to do something different, but he wasn't sure exactly what kind of a job he wanted.

So he wrote a resume that pointed to his accomplishments in a number of different areas from management to research to marketing. He networked with many people in a variety of fields, including insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care management.

When he was asked what kind of a job he was looking for he indicated he was flexible, believing that would improve his chances. Everyone promised to call Tom if they heard of a job. He also replied to want ads and Internet job postings. But after a year of intense effort, he'd made zero progress.

He came to see me in utter frustration. He couldn't understand why he wasn't making any headway. In his experience, all his meetings went well and people seemed to like him. What was going wrong?

Tom's problem was that he hadn't addressed the foremost question in every employer's mind: "What can you do for me?" He was bright and personable, but he didn't convey strength, commitment or passion about anything in particular.

To be successful, he needed to get clear about two things. First, what kind of a job he wanted. Second, what employers want from the people they hire for the type of position he was seeking. I explained that those two things were essential to positioning himself to appeal to employers. After some discussion, he agreed that made sense, and we embarked on the work.

Our initial step was to determine the job characteristics he needed for his work to be satisfying. We examined his natural and acquired skills, preferred working conditions, passions, life priorities and a variety of additional variables. From this we distilled a very short list of the 15 things that were most important to him.

Armed with this "shopping list" of what he wanted, we brainstormed 11 different careers that might potentially fit, and he began systematically to explore them. After investigating four of these ideas in depth, he landed on the target: he decided he wanted to become a deal maker for a real estate development company specializing in physician owned surgery centers.

The research he did to determine that this field was a good fit served another very important purpose as well. By talking to people in the field to discover whether the work would make him happy, he also learned a lot about what employers want and how to position himself so he would be appealing to them.

Having this information made it easier to write an effective resume. He was able to highlight those aspects of his background that were most relevant to employers in the field.

Taking this targeted approach helped him in many other ways as well. He understood who could be helpful to him and focused his networking on them. In interviews, he knew what he could truthfully say about himself that would make employers take notice. He coached his references so they could mention aspects of his experience that played well. He knew the buzzwords in the field and dropped them skillfully into his conversations. He also took a couple of graduate level business courses on real estate and finance, so he could talk intelligently on these issues.

The result? He landed a great job with one of the country's largest surgical center developers.

One important caveat to this approach: While packaging yourself this way is very effective, it's also labor intensive. It took Tom ten months to prepare and conduct his successful campaign. So it's usually not practical to do for more than one kind of job at a time.

Bottom line: Being focussed about the position you are seeking is critical to success. You can always stay open to a different kind of job opportunity if it lands in your lap, but focus enables you to organize an effective job hunt, and to answer the employer's central question: "What can you do for me?"

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.