Cultivating Earning Power (Part Two)
You're Not Just An Employee, Anymore
In a world where your product, brand, and service are the same as everyone else’s, it’s only your sales process that differentiates you.
The Challenger Sales Model
Just Give Me The Main Points:
Applying for jobs and waiting for a response ISN’T ENOUGH in 2023.
Therefore, to conduct an effective job hunt, you need to learn how to access the hidden job opportunities that NEVER get posted online.
Therefore, shift your focus from just finding a job to building your Earning Power, which is your ability to generate income over time.
Jobs can disappear due to macro-economic reasons, so it's important to build your network of people in a position to hire you.
Did you miss Part One - Cultivating Earning Power?
Applications Aren’t Enough
Today, you’ll hear stories about people sending in 100s of job applications and not getting any interviews. Clearly, applying for jobs and hoping that Human Resources will take mercy on you isn’t going to be sufficient to executive an effective, timely job search.
The purpose of this series is to teach you how to access the jobs that never get advertised, the jobs that are filled before they ever get posted.
Now…You Aren’t Just Looking For A Job
On any given day, I might be recruiting nurses, teaching music, or building apps. Every day I wake up, I am faced with the question, “How might I package what I’m capable of doing in order to generate Earning Power?”
After two decades of recruiting technical support analysts, developers, and executives, I’ve realized that job-seekers aren’t looking for a job…
…they’re looking to build their Earning Power. Your Earning Power is the amount that you can charge for your products and services. As you develop your set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, your goal is to increase your Earning Power over time.
When you take a job, you exchange your products and services for a paycheque. When you start a startup, you exchange your products and services for a different, potentially riskier type of paycheque. At the end of the day, no matter what you do, you’re endeavouring to generate Earning Power.
If you’re job hunting, I would recommend altering your gaze slightly.
Instead of asking how you might get a job, I would suggest the following questions:
How might I package my products and/or services in a way that’s attractive to hiring managers in small, medium, and or large businesses?
How might I package my products and/or services into a startup?
How might I package my products and services into a sole proprietorship?
I suggest this change of objective for a simple reason: on any given day, given the volatility of global markets, even healthy companies can face tough economic times. These tough economic times have led Big Tech companies like Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft and Google to lay of tens of thousands of people…and nobody’s sure if those jobs ARE EVER COMING BACK.
So, as your Recruiter, as your Headhunter, my job isn’t to get you a job…because that job could disappear at a moment’s notice for any number of macro-economic reasons. My job isn’t to get you a job…my job is to help you generate EARNING POWER, which is your ability to generate an increasing amount of income over time.
Earning Power is your ability to generate an income
I call it Earning Power because with every job you take…your earning power is either going up or going down. I’ve seen folks go from making $200/hour to being left without a career when their company’s software was replaced by a competitor. Can you imagine going from making $200/hour for ten years to having that source of income dry up overnight? It’s a scary thought.
What was in demand yesterday is not necessarily in demand today, so as individuals responsible for our own futures, we have to be savvy about how we invest our time.
And make no mistake…you are INVESTING YOUR TIME. Time is your most valuable resources because you cannot get it back. Windows of opportunity don’t wait for you to make up your mind. They come and they go, regardless of whether we are ready or not. If luck is when opportunity meets preparedness, you can’t get lucky if you aren’t prepared.
So, how do you go about generating Earning Power?
Simple: by bringing your ability to create and deliver products and services based on your unique set of knowledge, skills, and attitude to the market.
This could include:
Putting your resume on Linkedin
Putting your resume on Fiverr
Interacting with Hiring Managers on Twitter
Starting an Indeed Account
etc.
Touch the heart before you touch the hand. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Play the person, not the cards.
In order to set yourself apart from everyone else, you have to build your network of people in a position to hire you. You have to take yourself from stranger to acquaintance to candidate to employee, and since most jobs are filled before they’re ever posted, it’s up to you to connect with the right people so that your name comes up the next time they think about hiring someone.
In the next post, we’ll reformat your resume to fit what employers are expecting. Then, you’ll develop your minimum viable social media presence so you can get noticed by employers. After that, we’ll take things to the next level by showing you how to meet and talk to the right Hiring Managers through the power of TwitterSpaces. After all, Twitter is more effective than Linkedin at uncovering the hidden jobs that never get posted…but we’ll get into all of that soon enough.
