Slacker Manager

Full frontal personal marketing assault

by Bren on June 30th, 2005

So you might remember a post from a few days ago where I mentioned the 100 day strategic agenda that I used in a recent internal interview. Surprise, surprise, I got the job!

I really was surprised to get The Call. The honest truth is that I was probably the ultimate underdog in that race. I’m a relative newcomer to the industry (3 years in Higher Ed) and have zero experience in that particular facet of the business (Admissions). Yet now I’m the Director of Admissions for Graduate and Professional Studies. How could this happen?

This is my post-mortem, offered up for whatever value it holds for you. I learned some stuff during this process that I don’t want to forget, so it definitely has value for me.

One reason I considered myself the underdog is that I actually applied for the job twice. The first time I applied, I submitted the standard resume and internal application. I was informed that my background wasn’t a fit (and, as I’ve already established, they were right). I sat on that for a few weeks, then decided to apply again. You know, because I can’t get enough punishment. Kidding. The job sounded really enticing to me, and I was certain that I had sufficient transferrable skills. So for the second application, I decided that if the interview committee wouldn’t or couldn’t "read between the lines" of my resume, I’d have to be more explicit. I decided to do the full-frontal personal marketing assault. I mentioned in the previous post what this entailed, but for the record here’s what I submitted and to whom:

• Standard resume to the interview committee and reference letter people (see below)
• Standard internal application to the interview committee
• 2-column spreadsheet analyzing the job requirements and wishlist against my KSA’s (knowledge, skills, abilities) to the hiring manager. Each cell in the leftmost column included one of the job requirements, copy/pasted directly from the job posting. The rightmost column included my corresponding experiences, etc. I color coded the rightmost column–yellow meant that I met less than 100% of the requirements. Green meant that I met 100% or more of the requirements. This was also a great personal exercise–if I’d had more than a couple of yellow cells, I probably wouldn’t have continued the application process.
• "Can I get a witness" (aka reference) letters from several senior internal folks. VP’s, Exec. Directors, etc. Including my boss. These went to the hiring manager. I think you’d have to be careful with this one. You can’t really ask people to pipe up for you if you haven’t built some kind of (good) track record.
• I have pretty much zero external marketing experience, but a fair bit of internal marketing experience. I whipped up an informal document that outlined marketing projects I’ve done, past and present, and how they’d translate well. This went only to the reference letter people, just for their info.
• The 100 Day Strategic Agenda (.doc) went to every person I met in all the interviews (a full day of interviews with roughly 20 people).
• Post-interview "thank you" email to everyone I interviewed with. I just did a group email rather than individuals.

My main goal for the full-frontal personal marketing assault was primarily to allow myself to sleep at night. I knew I could do the job and I figured I’d enjoy the work. Even though I’d been turned down once before and figured it’d happen again, I wanted to be sure that I had no regrets when I thought back on my application. As it turns out, I have no regrets, but I do wish I’d done a little more homework.

In one of the group interviews, I was asked a question that (it seemed to me) totally exposed my lack of knowledge about the organizational structure of their business. That was just bad preparation on my part–the information was freely available to me and I didn’t do the research. Bad, bad, bad and after the interview I spent a few minutes beating myself up, then moved on and had lunch. Next time I’ll do better research.

In the original post there were some great comments from readers (thanks, readers!). I pulled out two specific bits that I’d like to incorporate next time. First, I’d like to read The First 90 Days. I nearly bought it when I purchased You’re In Charge, but I knew I’d get the stinkeye back home if I spent fifty bucks on books. So I stuck with the one that looked like it had a template I could use. I’ll definitely be reading The First 90 Days soon (from the library, babe).

Second, Pete did a great job of outlining a nice SWOT analysis for oneself. Here’s what he says:

I’ve done something similar - a 30/60/90 day plan that includes as much detail as I can offer considering the limited knowledge I have about a position. Another thing I do that helped me get my current position is a SWOT Analysis (Stregths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) based on the bullet points in the job description and how they pertain to my particular skills. First, I list all of my strengths and weaknesses and match them to the items in the JD. Matches for S and O result in +1 each, and -1 for W and T. The total score should come out positive. If not, I know I’m not a match for the job, or I’m positioning myself improperly for the position. And yes, it’s tricky to list weaknesses like that. However, I think that it shows that you know yourself and areas you need to work on, and that you’re confident that those things can be overcome.

Excellent advice. It’s similar to my color coded spreadsheet, but with a bit more rigor. I’ll be incorporating this in the future. Thanks Pete.

So that’s it. Like I said, I’m mainly documenting this for myself, but I’m guessing that other folks will find a little value here too. Best of luck to you.

Oh, one more thing. Just noticed that Tom Peters (yeah, THAT Tom Peters) picked up a reference to the original post that Todd wrote over at 800CEOREAD blog. Cool. Brand You, indeed–thanks, Todd and Tom!

Share This

Related Stories

• Fast track yourself
• Hiring and firing, fast and slow
• Book review: Career Intensity
• Five more books to give away GONE!
• The first 100 days

POSTED IN: best of, career