The One Thing Your Résumé Is Missing

When I started seeing myself as a marketer instead of a job applicant, the calls came pouring in

Robert Gibb
Forge

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Credit: Westend61/Getty Images

AA while ago, I was going through a process that many will find familiar: Sending job applications out into the void, then waiting for responses that, for the most part, never came.

Eventually, I realized where I was going wrong. While my background is in marketing, I wasn’t doing everything I could to market myself. So I shifted my thinking: Instead of approaching the process as a potential employee, I decided to see myself as a seller, and the hiring managers as potential buyers. I then went on a mission to find low-effort, high-reward ways to increase conversions on my sales collateral — in this case, my job application. What could I do to make it stand out?

While brainstorming, I came across an interesting statistic that said nine out of 10 people trust what a customer says about a business more than what that business says about itself. In marketing, this is called social proof — humans naturally tend to imitate the actions of others, especially those they respect. I decided that the way I could boost my own social proof was to tap into a resource that many of us overlook: the vast pool of people I’d worked with before. My previous managers and colleagues were…

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