Sell Yourself With Samples

Offer specific tips for improvement as a loss-leader.

Offering a sample makes the decision to work with you a lot easier.

In Guerrilla Marketing for Job-Hunters, David Perry tells us of a job hunting retailer who walks through a big department store, writes out a list of potential improvements and sends them to the VP with a request for an interview. He's impressed by her ideas and hires her.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Jill Konrath gives the example of a punk who starts a web design firm and not only sends out sales letters suggesting specific changes to the target's website but gives him a link to a test page with the improvements already implemented. It's almost irresistible.

Jill's advice:

1. Research targets prior to contact.

2. People can't resist easy-to-understand ideas about themselves.

3. Offer your knowledge freely as a loss leader (lagniappe).

How could a third party recruiter use this technique? I'm not sure she could. Because you have to be able to analyze the target's failures. To do that, a recruiter would have to be aware of the failures inside a department, their sources and even the methods that led to hiring the inferior personnel.

Steve Finkel has a presentation that has the prospect do this for you. He asks the hiring manager to think of someone on his staff who is doing a less than stellar job and then offers his stellar candidate as a replacement.

Comments

[David Perry]

Got a love Steve Finkel..His book "Breakthrough" is a classic that i am afraid would make most HR people blush ... so they should dread it as should everyone else in the business. In terms of the today's post: Show & Tell has been with all of us since grade school. it was entertaining back then and a powerful tool for job hunters. don't tell me what you're going to do - do it - or at the very least "show" me you've done it before. It's the very reason artists carry portfolios.