Your Personal Marketing Plan

In order to ensure that you show yourself in the most attractive light to prospective employers, and recruitment firms, you need to develop your Personal Marketing Plan.

Don't know where to start? Then here are seven steps to help you get started. Ideally you should try to complete each before you start actively looking for a new role.

Step One – prepare your CV
Step Two – decide what you want to do
Step Three – know your strengths and weaknesses
Step Four – prepare your 30 second commercial
Step Five – organise a networking programme
Step Six – go find the vacancies
Step Seven – review and refine

Step One

If you haven’t got a CV then you need to prepare one. If you have then you need to ensure that it is up to date and is in a usable format.

See - Preparing your CV

Step Two

Take plenty of time to decide what you are looking for; if you do not know then it will be much harder to find it or ask a recruiter to help you find it!

Carefully analyse what you want from your next role and write down the criteria which should cover:

Step Three

Think carefully about your strengths and weaknesses, what you enjoy in a role and what you don’t. Be honest and realistic with yourself. Ask your partner or friends what they think and if they agree with you. If you have done any psychometric tests recently then carefully go through them to find pointers to this. It is likely that you will be asked questions on your ability and experience at interview so this will help you to prepare. It will also help you with Step Four.

Step Four

Prepare your 30 second commercial. Imagine you have 30 seconds to tell a prospective employer what you do and why they should employ you – what would you say? If you are a Manufacturing Manager you might say:

‘I am a manufacturing manager in the plastics sector and have ten years’ experience…’

or you could say:

‘For the last ten years I have helped my company to maximise their manufacturing efficiency and profitability by identifying areas of improvement and developing their processes, helping to take them to number one in the plastics sector’

Which do you think sounds better to a prospective employer and which makes you sound different from everyone else? Knowing yourself well will certainly help you to sell yourself to a company, initially to get an interview and then at the interview itself. Take time to practise your 30 second commercial – use it every time someone asks what you do – refine it and see the difference it makes.

Step Five

Organise a networking programme - both on-line and off-line.

See - Networking

Step Six

Go find those opportunities to apply for!

Step Seven

Brush up your interview skills