Career Prospecting: Using Product Knowledge to Identify Your Career Target Audience

Once you have self awareness as the foundation of your career seeking and have built a resume that highlights your true skill set, abilities and financial accomplishments, then you can move to best identifying your target audience. This step, in the sales world is often called prospecting. This step is critical to succeed in a healthy resume submittal / contact ratio. I believe the majority of the frustration for a career seeker is based on the lack of knowledge around understanding target audience. Once you have identified your ideal career employer based on the foundation and exploration of self awareness it is much more realistic to identify your target audience. I would encourage a short list of 10 employers / jobs within an employer that would be the ideal for your career. To come up with this short list, you must really dig into factors of your past experience that have brought joy or frustration. Such factors to consider are: amount of supervision received, level of autonomy, advancement ability, level of decision making capability (Product Knowledge – see our previous blog post) , dynamics of team work in the particular job ect…

Once you have analyzed these factors, you can rank job opportunity based on your preferences and identifying this short list should be more realistic. Once you have this short list complete, you can strategically contact your ideal employers. Here is an interesting caveat: these 10 employers do not necessarily have to have ads that they are hiring. Most GREAT companies want employees who are passionate to work at their companies. Most GREAT employers will be excited to hear directly from a great prospect that have diligently researched their company and communicate that their skill set and ideal job would be a perfect match at that company. I know this sounds idealistic, but give it a shot. If you want to find a GREAT CAREER you have to have a GREAT CAREER finding process. We are working on our next blog that will contain best practices to contact your ideal employers. In the meantime, please contact us if you need help strategically prospecting!