How To Land Your Dream Job

Simeon, a highly paid marketing director for one of Murdoch’s media publications, recently asked us for some help after missing out on a dream role at a rival publication.

During our 2 hour meeting it became clear that he was brilliant at his job – in only 18 months he had turned around a publication destined for the scrap heap into one of the country’s best sellers.

He was fantastic with distributors, had a varied and in-depth skill set and was top of his game.

Yet, despite being able to sell his product extremely well, he wasn’t great at selling himself and had missed out on his dream job.

So to find out why, we conducted a mock interview and I threw some difficult questions at him.

As it turned out, he had a lot of big achievements, but he laboured on each point for 5 minutes or more, probably out of a mixture of nerves and not being fully prepared.

This meant that the interviewer found it hard to stay focused, and then had to sift through all the detail to get to the heart of why Simeon deserved the job.

In fact, more than once during our Q&A role-play, Simeon got to the end of his “answers” and realised that he hadn’t even answered the question!

Yet when asked to sum up the Unique Selling Points (USPs) about his publication, he was able to do so effortlessly and with maximum clarity.

The answer was clear: he simply needed to apply some of his own marketing rules to himself.

So, we worked on his own USPs – the things that made him a valuable asset to a potential new employer.

Here’s how we went about it:

We went over some of the toughest questions we could think of, and Simeon jotted down a great example that he could use to satisfy each question.

Examples are great in job interviews, because it is one of the best ways to help the interviewer understand. Concepts and theory are more difficult for them to grasp in a short time.

When he was ready, he read out each example. They were still too wordy, so he cut down each to a maximum of three lines.

He worked on the right words and delivered the tighter answer, with examples, that fully answered the question – in about 90 seconds.

By the time our two hours were over, Simeon was answering any question thrown at him, in any order, with brilliantly worded examples.

The examples also tended to follow a good formula:  problem, then solution, then result.

So, when you are gearing up for your dream job role, try this process out:  it will absolutely give you the best chance of landing your dream job.

Or give me a call if you would like some help!