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Your Personal Positioning Statement

Guest post by: Scott Van Wagner

Article Overview: This article also ran in the Torontojobs.ca magazine and covers how to go about positioning yourself when job hunting. A strong personal positioning statement is a multi purpose tool that can aid in your job hunt.

Your Personal Positioning Statement

In marketing we are concerned with creating positioning statements. For marketers positioning statements are all about building a distinctive and desirable image of our brand in the minds of potential customers. Positioning statements help to identify what the brand stands for, how it is different from other brands, and why we should prefer it to the competition. It is not so different when you stop and think about it when it comes to job hunting. As job seekers we need to be able to develop our own personal positioning statement about our own personal brand.

In crafting your personal positioning statement there are some things to keep in mind:

The Audience:

You need to identify whose attention you are trying to get. What industry, company, or individual, are your job search efforts focused on. You should have an understanding about your audience's traits and needs.

The Connection:

If you have now identified your audience you now need to explain how you connect with them. What is it that makes you relevant to your audience? Is it industry experience, specific expertise, job title? You must somehow identify to your audience why you should be of interest to them.

The Benefit:

What makes you unique and valuable to potential employers? How do you stand apart from the competition? This is essentially your main selling point about yourself. It should be based upon your knowledge of the target market and what their needs are.

The Proof:

What proof can you provide that you are indeed what you say you are? How can you support the benefit that you have just identified about yourself? Potential employers need to know that you can deliver on what you say you can do.

Putting this altogether we can come up with a simple template to use in developing you personal positioning statement as follows:

For (The Audience), (Your Name) is the (The Connection) that delivers (The Benefit) because only (Your Name) is able to (The Proof).

Now allowing for alterations to the above template to suit the situation you can now use your personal positioning statement in a number of job search activities, including:

¨ Your introductory statement or elevator speech

• ¨ Resume Headers
• ¨ Online profiles
• ¨ Cover letters

For yourself there is also value to be had from creating your personal positioning statement in that moving forward all the claims you will make concerning your personal brand can be weighed against how well they support your personal positioning statement. This provides you with a simple way to check such claims for their validity.

Simple, yet powerful, personal positioning statements should be a key ingredient of any job search.

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Article Tags: Job Search, Jobs, Positioning
Referred by: http://www.connectuscanada.com



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