Think of potential employers as your customers. If you listen to what your customers are saying, you will find that they will tell you exactly what they want to “buy.” Understanding what is important to your customer (the employer) helps you understand what that customer wants to buy and what you need to sell.
If you work in sales, marketing, marketing communications, or are in any way close to bringing in revenue for your employer, you will understand the importance of “getting inside your customers’ heads” to find out what is important to them, because this allows you to sell the product or service based on the customers’ needs. Knowing what customers want to buy makes it much easier to customize your message to meet their needs.
All the insights you need to write a good cover letter are already available to you in job postings. All you need to do is learn how to translate it into usable information, which is what we are going to do now.
What follows is a simple exercise called Target Job Deconstruction (TJD). Do not skip this exercise: It can make an enormous difference to this job search and to your entire future career development. It will tell you precisely how to prioritize the information you offer employers, and will give you examples for your letters and a new way of understanding what it is you actually get paid for. The exercise will also tell you the topics you’re most likely to be asked about at interviews, and prepare you with suggestions for answers to those questions.
This exercise is geared toward:
The most difficult part of any letter is knowing what to say and how to say it, but the TJD approach ensures that the topics your letter addresses are going to be of the greatest interest to your customers, and that the words you use will have the greatest likelihood of resonating with the reader.
Collect six job postings for the job you are best qualified to do, and save them in a folder. Try to use jobs located in your target area, but if you don’t have enough local jobs, collect job descriptions from anywhere. For target job deconstruction, the location of the job doesn’t matter: What’s important is understanding how employers define, prioritize, and express their needs.
Open a new Microsoft Word document and title it TJD for Target Job Deconstruction. Add a subhead reading Job Title, then copy and paste in the variations from each of your sample job descriptions. Looking at the result, you can say, “When employers are hiring people like me, they tend to describe the job with these words.”
From these examples, you then come up with a Target Job Title for your resume. You’ll add this line right after your name and contact information. These words help your resume perform well in resume database searches and act as a headline, giving human eyes an immediate focus on who and what the resume is about. This again helps your resume’s performance.
Add a second subhead titled: Skills/Responsibilities/Experience/Deliverables.
Look through the job postings for a single requirement that’s common to all six of your job postings. Take the most complete description of that single requirement and copy and paste it into your TJD document, putting a “6” by your entry to signify that it is common to all of them.
Check the other job postings for different words and phrases used to describe this same job skill, and copy and paste them beneath the entry you created. Repeat this exercise for other requirements common to all six of your sample job postings. The result will be a list of the skills/requirements that all employers feel are of prime importance, and the words they use to describe them.
Repeat this process for requirements common to five of the jobs, and then four, and so on all the way down to those requirements mentioned in only one job posting.
When this is done, you can look at your work and say, “When employers are hiring people like me, they tend to refer to them by these job titles; they prioritize their needs in this way, and use these words to describe their prioritized needs.” At this point you have a template for the story your resume needs to tell.
Generate illustrative examples of your competency with the skills that employers identify as priorities. You should remember that jobs are only ever added to the payroll for two reasons:
1. To make money or save money for the company, or to otherwise increase productivity.
2. To identify, prevent, and solve the problems/challenges that occur in your area of expertise and that interfere with the company’s pursuit of (1).
Working through your list of prioritized employer requirements, identify the problems that typically arise when you are executing your duties in that particular area of the job. Then for each problem identify:
Going back to the prioritized requirements you identified in earlier steps, consider each individual requirement and recall the best person you have ever known doing that that aspect of the job. Next, identify what made that person stand out in your mind as a true professional; think of personality, skills, and behaviors. Perhaps she always had a smile, listened well, and had good critical thinking and time-management skills.
Together with the specific technical skills of the job you have already identified, the traits of the person who stands out in your mind will give you a behavioral profile of the person every employer wants to hire, plus a behavioral blueprint for subsequent professional success.
Looking one last time at the list of prioritized requirements in your TJD, consider each individual requirement and recall the worst person you have ever known doing that aspect of the job. Perhaps he was passive-aggressive, never listened, and was rarely on time with projects or for meetings.
This time you will have a complete behavioral profile of the person no employer wants to hire and a behavioral blueprint for professional failure.
Target Job Deconstruction will give you the insight into your target job to maximize your resume’s productivity both in resume databases and with recruiters and hiring managers. The process also uncovers the areas of the job that will hold specific interest for a hiring manager and therefore likely give rise to interview questions. And because you have thought things through, you will now have answers to those questions and will be able to illustrate them with examples.
Last, but by no means least, you also have a behavioral blueprint for professional success: no small thing to possess.