Get Hired By Differentiating With Your Skills

As the Director of Digital Strategy at Search Engines MD, which is vague enough that most job inquiries don’t come through me. The benefit of any potential employee is that they won’t get asked, “well, what have you done and how did you do it?” I’m not looking for a “we increased sales by XX%.” I’m looking for a demonstration that you actually have some technical skills, and you weren’t just attached to a team that did the work for you.

Why would I care? Well, everyone at Search Engines MD needs to have technical skills. Everyone on our team has to utilize JavaScript, Boolean programmatic language, and html in some capacity, which is why we put people through tests to see their capacity to learn and understand these components before we consider hiring them.

Now, who freaking cares about what we want, right?

Get Hired By Actually Showing Your Skills

Resumes are how you get hired, right? Well, that very much be the case for most people. We put more stock in capacity to learn and first hand experience than what a resume says, but that isn’t the same for all businesses.

What is the same for all businesses, though, is combining a demonstration of your skill set in combination with your resume. How do you do that? By building your own website! The platform 100% does not matter. You can use WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, or anything else. Unless you are applying for a web design position, you can absolutely utilize a template website design. Very few people are going to be familiar with all of the templates, and your personalization will push it out of the sandbox and into the unique.

But a website alone isn’t enough.

What you will want to do is fill out enough applications and resumes sent out to generate over 100 users to your website. The more users you get to your website the better, of course, but what you are looking to do is prime your audiences. 100 people is the absolutely smallest audience you can get to consistently work with Facebook and Google Display retargeting. You will want to extend these cookies out for several months to make sure you cover the spread you need to fill that audience.

For RLSA, retargeting list search ads, you will need 1000 members. This isn’t realistic for your timeline of getting hired, so don’t worry about it.

The next step is to generate the display campaigns that you are going to run to get the people looking at applications to take a second look at your resume. We utilize additional events to segment the audiences when we run ads, but you don’t have to get that extreme here. The goal is to get someone to engage with that ad, and land on a page demonstrating all of your experience and skills in a more engaging setting. Video is the Queen of this strategy, and you will want to heavily utilize it in retargeting and this landing page.

Why video? Because there is no other way to build authenticity and personality into your sales pitch. Show that you are dynamic, fun, or witty. Show that you would be a valuable asset to the future team because of your out of the box thinking.

Yes, this will still be out of the box with the following our blog gets.

Here is how you setup this audience:

1. Build Your Website

– Buy a domain, preferably your name, and build a basic website with three pages: home, contact, and why hire me. Make it easy to click to call you on the mobile site or find your number on desktop.

2. Create a Facebook ad account and Facebook pixel

– You don’t need to start running any ads right away, you just need to get the pixel and account set up.

3. Create a Google ads account and retargeting cookie

– Same thing goes here, you are just setting up the Google Ads account for when you start running ads

4. Add your retargeting pixels / cookies to your website

– This will depend on your website how they get installed, but if you google “website platform add Facebook pixel” you will find the information you need very quickly.

5. Build the rules for your retargeting audiences in Facebook and Google

– There are plenty of guides out there on how to do this, so just do some searching. I would build screenshots, but that would cause this guide to go out of date within 45 days. Set your audiences for 90 days so you can be sure to follow people around long enough to build up the audience.

6. Update your resume and email to include your personal website

– Add the website to your signature on email, add it in the body of your email, and make it prominent on your resume. You need people to visit this website to get them added to your audience.

7. Create a video and images to test and vary ads

– You won’t know the best combination for this strategy right away, so be sure to create multiple variations to test

8. Create conversion events on your website to track true success

– With Wix, Weebly and SquareSpace this will be easiest because some of the tracking components are being built in now. WordPress will require some skill to track those conversions, so best only used if that is unique to your job.

9. Create your ads and optimize for the right metrics

– Your campaigns won’t run until you have enough views, 100 users, so you won’t see immediate results from this, but you will want them to be ready to start following people as soon as possible.

10. Add Google Analytics to website

– Being able to track and measure this traffic is important in case it doesn’t start to send out impressions. You will be able to see your audiences with Google Analytics, and determine if something is off.

11. Mass resume output

– Send your resume out to the masses, and make sure you get to your retargeting user thresholds. Once you have the thresholds met you can be more selective with your resumes, but you will want to make sure you have things primed for when you send out the most important resumes.

12. Be ready to explain yourself

– The goal of this strategy is to show that you are innovative, and ready to take on the unusual with businesses. Digital is changing constantly, and being able to adapt is important. Showing that you can do something unique with a little research is important.

What to Do If Your Ads Don’t Work

If you fail to build up the right number of people in the audience you will have problems. Make sure you are properly prepared to send out enough resumes to get people to view your website frequently enough to build up those numbers. Have your friends, past jobs, and anyone else review your website to help build up the audience.

If your ads still won’t run, then Facebook and Google hate you. Not really, but you will have to diagnose that problem right away. Don’t accept the failure without challenging everything.