Organizations invest a great deal of time and money in creating sophisticated sales teams who craft the right value propositions to engage and entice clients to buy their products and services.
If this is true for business, can designing your own personal value proposition get you in front of the right employers? If you’re a job seeker, you most definitely have a product to sell—and you are it. Consider your resume as the advertisement for what you’re selling.
Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today shares these tips for drafting your personal value proposition from Pongo, a company that provides resume consulting services.
To get started, you first need to understand exactly what a value proposition is and how it can help you get your foot in the door with a potential employer.
Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, defines a business’s value proposition as “a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using [its] products or services.”
So, your personal value proposition should be a statement of the tangible results a company will get from hiring you—the unique benefits you will bring to an employer that others won’t.
In order to define the value you bring to an employer, Pongo recommends asking these critical questions:
1. What are the most important roles you have filled for current and previous employers?
Start with the basics. List the job titles you have held and the duties that came with them.
Example: Let’s say you were an account executive for a widget maker, providing sales and support for 10 of your company’s clients. Your duties might have included selling products to 10 businesses, cultivating relationships with their buyers, engaging in ongoing dialogue to ensure their satisfaction and looking for opportunities to sell them additional products or services.
2. What significant accomplishments did you achieve in these roles, or what did you do better than people in similar roles did?
This is an opportunity to look beyond the titles and duties to see where you provided value to your organization and customers. For example. as an account executive, were your customers satisfied with the value they received from your company’s products or services? Did you consistently win more business from your accounts? How much? Did they communicate their satisfaction to other companies, enabling you to win more business? As you helped deliver better results, were you entrusted with oversight of more important customers?
3. What special projects were you assigned? This shows value tied to a level of responsibility. Ask yourself: Did your supervisors entrust you with key projects that contributed to the company’s growth? Did you complete them on time and within budget? Did you manage the project efficiently? Did you supervise other project team members?
By digging deeper into the details of the value you’ve contributed to customers and to your organization, the personal value proposition that should be reflected on your resume and LinkedIn profile will emerge.
PCT returns tomorrow with more key questions for defining your personal value proposition.
Source: Pongo, a Massachusetts-based company, created the first online Resume Builder and Cover Letter Builder, with over 4.6 million members who have created over six million resumes. Their statistics show that 70 percent of their members surveyed get jobs after using Pongo.
