Creating a personal marketing plan will give you more insight into the current job market and put the numbers in your favor. Since job hunting is a matter of having the numbers on your side, your action plan should be targeted to produce 25 to 35 responses, resulting in a phone discussion. The goal is to have several offers maturing at the same time, and you have to be realistic about rejections in the interview process.
To begin with:
1. Surface the right information about yourself and set clear goals. Take all the ciritial information from your career past, making sure you highlight the strongest selling points.
2. Pinpoint what you should be marketing, especially your transferable skills. See what you can do as a professional that can crossover. Just because some of your skills are not sought for a specific job, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be highly valued once discovered by the employer.
3. Identify industry alternatives to target. Read and see what else is out there. Are there new industries where you would fit well? Discover if you have the skill set to completely crossover into a different industry where you will become even more successful.
4. If you have liabilities, you need strategies to neutralize them. Find out if there are liabilities on your resume that are holding you back. Examples are periods of unemployment and lesser degrees of job titles as you’ve moved forward, rather than the other way around.
5. You need a step-by-step game plan — an action agenda —to get your story told to all the right people. You want to lay out a step-by-step plan — a weekly agenda — that will guide your search. This is your complete track, a game plan. This includes a plan for interviewing and negotiating (your approach to these important matters) which should be decided on in advance.
It has been proven people who have an action plan have a much better chance of getting hired to that next big firm because they have all their assets at their fingertips. What’s more, they have found all their strongest selling points and were able to neturalize their liabilities, making them look like a dream candidate. In addition, while putting the plan together, you take a hard look at yourself and realize skills and other attributes you may not have thought of when valuing your abilities in the past. Have a plan of action, a personal marketing plan.