The Vocation Cast

No matter who you are or what the specifics of your job might be, your work inevitably features ups and downs, good days and bad days, elements of fulfilment and frustration – with more of the former than the latter if you’re lucky. So, the obvious question to ask is this. Is there a way of making sure that you get more positives than negatives in the long run, despite the inevitable hassles that come everyone’s way? Can you incorporate a success strategy into everything that comes with your job that is effective over an entire working life? This is the challenge of winning the workplace game. So long as you understand the rules of play, I think there is, and I want to use this Vocation Cast to offer you some ideas on how to do it.    

There’s a work-search technique that hardly anyone uses, but one that’s guaranteed to propel you into the top league of job hunters if you put it to good effect. There’s nothing complicated about doing it and it’s a simple concept to get your head around. Would you like to know the secret to perfecting any kind of interpersonal encounter during a job search, from informal research meeting all the way through to full-blown hiring meeting and salary negotiation? I’m guessing that you would.Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes, and perfect practice massively contributes to an ideal job-search outcome. In today’s Vocation Cast I’m going to tell you about a sure-fire strategy to implement a perfect practice routine that will leave you brimming with confidence and ideally prepared for whatever your next job hunt throws at you, and that’s sandbox practice.

There’s lots to think about when you launch yourself into a fresh job-search project. What sort of work do you want to do next? How will you find job opportunities that match all of your needs? What’s the best way to get in front of recruiters and to then convince them to hire you? That’s just a few of the questions to answer but there are a hundred and one others. You can easily become overwhelmed so to give yourself the best chance of success, you need to concentrate your efforts where they’re most likely to pay off.How do you cover all of the core job-hunting bases whilst keeping your plan as sleek and organised as possible? What are your priorities, the most essential parts of the job search that you should focus on? Is there a way of maximising your job-search return on investment? Yes, I think there is and in today’s episode I’ll explain what my strategy would be if I were in your shoes.  

Imagine that we’re sitting in your favourite café. You’ve asked me to give you an hour of my time in which to offer you the best advice I can about how to find a great job with an ideal employer. You’ve listened to each of the previous Vocation Cast episodes so you understand the outline of the job-hunting process that I recommend. Therefore, you know what to do. You now want a few tips on how to do it as well as possible.So, the questions you have for me are these. What are the specific job-search strategies I’d use if I was in your shoes right now? What would my game plan be? Are there any between-the-lines suggestions I’d offer you, things that go beyond the basic techniques you’ve already learnt about? Our drinks arrive, you take a notepad and pen from your case and we begin. This is what I’d tell you in that time.

I’ve been presenting most of the previous Vocation Casts from a best-case position. I do this because I want to encourage you to expect success in your upcoming work search and to give you every reason to be optimistic about getting hired by a great employer and fulfilling your career potential. However, for a training programme to be truly inclusive, I need to tell you about some of the problem areas that can sometimes derail you, and these challenges often crop up during a hiring meeting. Knowing what these issues are likely to be will help you anticipate the inevitable glitches that may come your way, and prepare you for any difficulties if they cross your path. In my experience, there are half a dozen situations that can interfere with a hiring pitch and they are poor preparation on your part, insufficient time available to you, mismatched expectations, disagreement on the problem, refusal to accept the solution and a not-hiring-now position.

If you want to take your job pitch to the next level, you need to think about the clarity of your voice and the message you want to convey. This isn’t a simple matter of speaking clearly, using tone and intonation, pauses and stress and so forth. Nor is it about the particular words you use in your pitch content alone. Voice and message, in the way I’m thinking about them here, transcend these things and hold the potential to inject your pitch with vim and vigour. These are the keys to creating a transformational connection with a hiring manager who holds your immediate future in their hands.     

When you make any kind of presentation, and this includes an important job pitch of course, you have a variety of core delivery tools at your disposal. These comprise many of the things I spoke about in the previous Vocation Cast, including the tempo of your voice, word emphasis, use of pauses, volume and so on. If you can master them, you’ll soon become a competent pitcher. These are some of the essential ingredients of a great pitch but deploying them well isn’t an end in itself. They’re all subservient to a higher-level objective and that’s to influence your audience as comprehensively as possible. To elevate the quality of your pitch, these micro elements must feed a triumvirate of delivery skills which are impact, confidence and boldness. In today’s episode, I’ll introduce you to these ideas.   Books I refer to in this episode:Nate Zinsser – The Confident MindSteve Peters – A Path Through The Jungle

There are two components of a highly-effective job pitch. The first is strong content that conveys a compelling message. The second is powerful delivery that creates a dynamic impact. By combining great content with superb delivery you place yourself in prime position to influence the outcome of any kind of presentation, including the pitch stage of a crunch hiring meeting of course. I’ve covered the topic of content development already. In today’s Vocation Cast, I’m going to introduce you to some core elements of delivering that content. If you can get to grips with the ideas I’ll present here, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance of impressing any demanding hiring manager and getting the job you really want.