This article on ideas to market yourself as a job seeker is part of the Content Collective series, featuring tips and expertise from Flatiron School Career Coaches. Every Flatiron School graduate is eligible to receive up to 180 days of 1:1 career coaching with one of our professional coaches. This series is a glimpse of the expertise you can access during career coaching at Flatiron School.
As a job seeker, marketing yourself is one of the most crucial steps to finding your dream job. It is essential to showcase your skills, knowledge, and personality in a way that is both authentic and attractive to potential employers.
To help you cut through the noise of the job market, stand out, and catch employers’ attention, here are 5 ideas to market yourself as a job seeker.
Create Videos For Social Media
Videos allow you to showcase your personality, skills, and experience in an engaging way, while tapping a massive audience. With platforms like TikTok and Instagram, it’s possible to reach millions of people with a viral video, potentially providing life-changing opportunities if the right people see it.
When creating videos for social media, consider the following:
- Introduce yourself, share your skills, your passions, and tell your story. Emphasize and make connections for the viewer on how they all come together to make a perfect fit and add value to your dream job.
- Highlight your technical skills, including any recent tools, techniques, or programming languages you have learned, and share your knowledge. This shows that you are up to date with the latest trends and can adapt to new technologies quickly.
- Showcase any projects you have completed and explain how you used the tools you have acquired. This demonstrates your practical skills and how you apply them in real-world situations.
- Share your contact information at the end of your video, including your email and LinkedIn profile.
- Post your videos on social media, in groups, share them with your network, and send direct messages to your target audience.
- Include an ask – the action that you want the viewer to take.
Make a couple of well-done, engaging videos, and see what sort of feedback you get.
Write Blogs
Blogging showcases your writing and communication skills and can demonstrate your expertise in the field or topic you write about. And with major platforms like Medium that remove the barrier to entry for creating your own articles – all you have to do is sign up and start writing!
When getting started, keep these tips in mind:
- Choose a topic relevant to your industry. Write about industry trends, recent projects, or your personal experiences.
- Know your target market and create high-quality content that is engaging, informative, and well-researched that provides value to the reader.
- You can host your pieces on websites like Medium are share them across relevant social media channels and/or groups.
- Share a link to your published pieces in direct messages and include a link on your resume.
- Add your published pieces to your LinkedIn profile.
With content, more is more, so don’t give up if the first piece comes out a bit rusty. Keep practicing your writing skills – you’ll thank yourself later when it’s become easier!
Create an Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing isn’t just for companies – individuals can do it too! Here’s how to use this tool to streamline your job search:
- Build a target email list by identifying management contacts (the more senior the better) at companies in the industry that you are most interested in, and that you believe would be most interested in your skill and experience.
- Create a personalized email showcasing your skills, experience, and passion for the industry. Keep the email short and to the point, highlighting your value add and why you are a perfect fit for the company.
- Perform A/B testing: After sending your message review performance analytics and refine your strategy based on the data.
Go To Meetups
Attending meetups is a great way to expand your network. Find and attend industry meetups in your target market, areas of expertise, and interest. This will allow you to meet like-minded individuals, learn about industry trends, and meet potential employers.
Be sure to print out business cards before you go with your contact information and LinkedIn profile on them.
Participate in Industry Discussions
Join industry-specific groups on social media, Slack, and Discord. Share your insights and knowledge, answer questions, and provide helpful tips. This will demonstrate your expertise and could lead to networking opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Marketing yourself as a job seeker is essential in today’s competitive job market. But, by trying out a few different strategies to effectively showcase your skills and experience to potential employers, you can draw attention to yourself as a stay candidate.
Remember to stay authentic, be yourself, and always highlight your value add.
About Noreen Walczak
Noreen is an Executive Recruiter and Career Coach with 25 years of combined experience in Business Management, Recruitment, Financial Services, and Coaching. She is passionate about sourcing quality candidates for her clients and loves to assist companies in finding those hard-to-find individuals with a unique combination of skills “Unicorns”. With extensive experience building organizations, teams, and small businesses, she works with decision-makers to build out organizations and identify key employees.
