Editors Note: In a competitive global economy and job market it sometimes may feel as if you have become a competitor in the soccer "World Cup". Job searching is not a spectators sport. As a result you need to have your best game on.
If you have been struggling to find a new job then perhaps you have not yet developed the skills (or execution) to articulate a personal "Two-minute job Pitch". This could be a game changer during your next employer interview. Like a world cup soccer player it takes job seekers hundreds of hours of practice, focus and energy that when utilized at the right critical moments may determine those who go home with "The Cup" and those who go just go home:(. Success or Failure in just a blink of the eye. A "Two-Minute Job Pitch" can help you achieve this type of success. So what are you waiting for?
"White Collar Reset: The two-minute pitch
So it's come to this. Eight months into my job search, eight months of clinging to my old magazine journalism career like an alcoholic clutching his last Scotch, I arrive at the weekly Penn Station Meeting of The Five Club seeking absolution and a new life. The Club, one of the country's largest executive and professional job coaching firms (in addition to three physical branches in New York City, it holds eight teleconference branches in the Eastern and Central time zones each week), reports that of the 17,000 people it's helped over the past decade, 58 percent change careers. Given the woeful state of my former industry, the statistic provides a kind of anxious hope on the same week the stock market has shrugged off news that continuing jobless claims have now reached the highest level since the statistic was first recorded, in 1967.
The meeting is held every Wednesday evening in a large fifth-floor conference room directly across Seventh Avenue from the station. The crowd of fifty includes a handful of men in their twenties, a smattering of African-American, Asian and Hispanic women, and a lot of white, middle-aged males, the 21st century's answer to he Man In the Grey Flannel Suit Looking around the room, I count 13 (sorry, make that 14) bald or balding heads. The smell of Old Spice and stale coffee fills the air.
. At the front of the room, a counselor named Kim is lecturing us about the "two-minute" pitch. The two-minute pitch is the summary of who we are, what we've accomplished and what we bring to a prospective employer that we are supposed to have down cold for use in interviews, informational meetings and random networking encounters. The key, as Kim explains, is to use "action" words and to focus on how what you did benefited your previous company. "It's one thing to say 'I organized a sales training program.' It's another to say 'I organized a sales training program that boosted profits by 50 percent.'"
Ok, let's see . . . I survived the firing of five editor-in-chiefs in five years in a tyrannically-run vanity publication that never once failed to finish in the red . . .
Or, no, wait, I got it . . . I turned around my company's most successful division, leading it to $400,000 in annual losses before the company filed for bankruptcy, owing 350 creditors some $4 million
A short while later, Kim announces that we have a special guest tonight, a Five Club "graduate" who has returned to share her success with us. Everyone claps and a smiling, middle-aged designer of distance-learning systems walks to the front and describes a months-long struggle that recently culminated in a job with a non-profit agency and would've been really inspiring if it didn't remind how much better off I would have been if had gone into distance learning. "
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This article isn't helpful in its current form. Amusing, if you read the entire piece, but not helpful. Monica might have supplemented it with some useful suggestions or examples of well-done elevator speeches.
ReplyDeleteThis article was a total waste of time. The Editorial note says that the Two-Minute pitch could be a "game changer" during your next interview, but the actual article content provides nothing of substance beyond the author's pity party.
ReplyDelete