Expanding your target audience

In many of my blogs I have advised you to concentrate your efforts on the 15-25 corporations for which you are likely to be the preferred job seeker. So what if you want to move to another industry or role? What if you have not yet had a job offer in your preferred target group and need to expand your efforts?

Who needs you most?

The process is the same. You need to identify corporations that will value some part of your background – perhaps a different or very narrow aspect of your skills – and concentrate there with a pitch that showcases the relevant skills. And because you may be missing a portion of experience that client was hoping for, it is very important that you include case histories and metrics of success.

Delivering bad news gracefully

Here is an example: I was working with a customer service manager from a hospital who delivered scary or bad news to patients about tests they had recently completed. He was gifted at delivering bad news gracefully but after a while it got to him and he wanted out of critical health care. So we identified other industries that would appreciate his gift of delivering awkward or complicated or bad news. He applied to mortgage companies where he could tell consumers about loan alternatives if they did not qualify for their preferred loan terms (this was before “sub-prime” was a dirty word.) Another obvious industry was student loan providers, where he could coach people on additional loans to apply for.

Cows for warlords

Another of my favorite examples is a woman who worked as a Product Manager for a high end clothing manufacturer in Europe, then went to a humanitarian non-profit in Africa during a political crisis as Marketing Director. Then she was recruited to a security company in France which protected multimillion dollar executives. On the surface those companies and jobs had nothing in common. But I showed her that they had a lot in common:

• The need to access and manipulate international resources.
• Project management in a hostile or highly competitive environment.
• Very short time frames in which success had to be achieved.
• The need to deliver out-of-the-box solutions in ambiguous environments. For instance, for the clothing manufacturer she had models in evening gowns jump out of helicopters into movie debuts instead of running newspaper ads. In Africa she solicited aid from neighboring governments with gifts of cows. In France she could be negotiating with groups who were also friends with the terrorists on some level.

How to apply to Minnesota

So how did she job hunt in Minnesota? We decided the corporations where she would be most valued would:

• Do business in many countries on a very sophisticated level.
• Want her for her ability to run teams that protected executives worth $15-30 million in compensation.
• Or want her for her ability to evaluate business partners in foreign countries. Can this manufacturing rep team in country X deliver a 15% sales increase in sales in the next 12 months? Is that potential manufacturing partner in country Z able to deliver 3 million cases of widgets in 8 weeks?

There are several processes that can be used to identify options like these whether you are intuitive or deductive in your processing of information. But the key is to look for corporations and roles where your past successes will be highly valued by the target audience. Have fun exploring!