Career Tip: Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
While you’re on prowl for job-hunting, treat yourself like an enterprise. Your skills are your products and services. And you’re CEO of “You, Inc.” A CEO’s job is mainly to sell: selling change, selling his ideas, selling his vision and image. CEO in other words refers to the Chief Selling Officer. You need to bring out your entrepreneurial skills to push yourself forward on the course of life
Starting a job hunting process is similar to launching a product or service. The only difference is: here you’re a product; you’re a brand; you’re a product manager; you’re a brand manager; you’re a sales manager. You’ve to position yourself. You’ve to bring out your Unique Selling Propositions. You’ve to craft your own marketing strategy. You’ve to open your own channels of distribution to make yourself ‘on-the-shelf’. You’ll press the launch buttons of your marketing campaign. For more elaboration, let me draw the comparison between job hunting and product launch.
Job Hunting Tips from Ashraf Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Number 1 Sales Trainer and Author of “The Craft of Selling Yourself”
Job Hunting?
“Treat a job hunt like a personal development project and be the project manager.” –PENELOPE TRUNK
The Majority of fresh graduates, treading the beaten trail, trust writing their CV and sending it out to potential employers is all that’s required to land a job. I’ve screened thousands of CVs and Cover Letters in my one and a half decade career and I have to say that minimal efforts are usually invested by job seekers to customize their CVs and Cover Letters. An employer could easily get frustrated with vague imprecise words such as ‘Metric, Martial, and Carrier etc’ in CVs and sentences in Cover Letters like ‘ I’ve come to know through reliable sources that you have a vacant position and I assure you that if given the chance, I’ll leave no stone un-turned to satisfy you’. All such CVs and Cover Letters end up in piles of unsuccessful candidate files. Successful people don’t sit on haunches, waiting for miracles to happen. They make miracles happen!
Bayt Jobs on Twitter
You’d have to try hard not to hear Twitter mentioned by Larry King, or CNN, or Ashton Kutcher, or Gulf News, and so on. The buzz around Twitter is huge and people are micro-blogging their interests 140 characters at a time from across the globe.
So what’s the big deal? Well, Twitter’s appeal to many is the ease of publishing snippets of information, links, thoughts, new events comments - among other things. twitter appeals to the blogging crowd who never had the time or attention span to compose blog posts, or to the individuals and business looking for information in real-time. Do a Google search and you get a list of indexed web pages - after Google has crawled them. Do a Twitter search and you get real-time citizen-powered journalism. Twitter is part of the real-time web.
We’re running our own little experiment here with Twitter. We’re tweeting some of our media, marketing and tech jobs on a Twitter account. We have job alerts which let the tech do the work for the job seeker - pushing matching jobs out to job seekers at their request. With this Twitter account, people can “follow” us and get updates in their Twitter feed.
It’s purely opt-in and we are sticking to this niche of jobs since this reflects the early-adopters who are on Twitter. If people find this valuable then we have plans to expand this service for people.
If you’re on Twitter you can follow us here @BaytJobs
I’m on Twitter too, so feel free to follow @danstuart
Let us know what you think through a DM on Twitter or in the comments here.
Qatar Leads the Way For Broadband Penetration
Recently, Qatar’s position as a regional broadband leader was confirmed by “one of the most comprehensive studies of broadband communications ever conducted in the region.” Qatar currently offers the lowest broadband prices in the GCC - “between 10% and 23% lower than that of the average of other GCC nations.” Business Intelligence ME
The study, by international management consulting firm Arthur D Little, provides one of the clearest indications yet of the progress of the ‘Broadband Qatar’ strategy, which aims to provide affordable, high speed internet connectivity to as many people as possible in Qatar.Recently, STC in Saudi Arabia announced that they would cut broadband tariffs by 70% so it will be interesting to see how this affects penetration rates in the Kingdom.
How to Beat (or at least survive) the Credit Crunch
I won’t overdo it with the clichés, but it seems there is hardly a corner of the world remaining that isn’t affected adversely by the global economic crisis. In fact, I find that the vast majority of my meetings with clients these days begin with assessing their marketing needs, but gradually evolve into much more complex conversations touching on aspects from cost-cutting and pricing policies in a credit starved economic environment all the way through to how to gain market share and retain customers and increase loyalty.
I don’t think anyone is either enlightened enough or has the foresight to be able to predict anything to any major degree of accuracy right now, but I have been sitting back over recent months and watching happenings with great interest, both globally as well as in our little pocket of the world. Now that we are approaching the tail end of Q1 2009, I’d like to throw a few theories into the ether and see what comes back my way – hopefully it wont all be abuse!
Appeal to Your Consumer in the “Here and Now”
Tough times mean consumers shy away from luxury and veer towards familiarity, safety and above all value for money. A year ago you may have focused on the great new technologies of your product, or some innovative new design… today you must focus on the value of the purchase, and the safety of the investment for your customer.Focus on flexible payment plans or pricing incentives to encourage consumption of your product, and make sure that your message is focused around comfortable, familiar themes, and easy and risk-free adoption.
