Marcus Sheridan posted recently about how little effort job seekers exert in standing out from the crowd. His example was cringeworthy on the part of the job seeker: he posted an opening for a social/video professional and not a single job seeker shot a single frame of video in their application.
Marcus isn’t alone. I’m hiring right now, and job seekers seem to be taking a spray and pray approach. They’ll fling their resume at anything that moves – and that’s it. They carpet bomb their prospect list and hope someone calls them back with an interview.
Sound familiar to us marketers? It should. This is how we used to do marketing in the bad old days. We’d spam the world and hope someone bought something. Aside from legal restrictions, what else did this do? We ended up with some terrible customers. The best and the brightest saw through our terrible marketing and marked us as spam.
Job seekers are still stuck in the bad old days of marketing. What should they do differently? Adopt account-based marketing.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is the practice of marketing to the companies we want as a customer. ABM focuses on getting a foot in the door at qualified companies; why prospect broadly, spend thousands or millions of dollars on media and ads, and burn out our sales and marketing staff to reach everyone? We only need to reach people and companies who are capable of buying what we have to sell.
ABM can be applied to job search. Instead of applying everywhere and hoping someone calls us back, we decide where we want to work first. Then instead of making the minimum amount of effort over a large number of companies, we make a concerted effort over a handful of companies to build a relationship, get to know the hiring managers, and improve or tailor our own offering to match what our target companies need.
Over the course of this series, we’ll tackle how to apply ABM to your job search. We’ll look at you, the candidate, through the lens of ABM and give you some practical tools to land the job you want, not the first opportunity that comes your way.
Stay tuned!
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