Quintessential Careers:
Is "The Breakfast of Champions" in Your Resume?
by Joe Turner
Call it a slogan, a branding image, a tagline. When you hear or see an effective one, you know exactly what the
product is and what it might do for you. Walk down the aisle of any food store and you'll encounter hundreds
of slogans like “Breakfast of Champions” that reach into your subconscious and press your "buy me"
buttons. Don't like breakfast cereal? Try cars. Think "Ultimate Driving Machine" instead. See what I mean?
The best branding images help to sell billions of dollars of product every year. Why? Because they work
by promising you a benefit for using their product.
So, what does this marketing lesson have to do with your resume?
Everything. Too often, candidates think job search is all about selling their specific skills. Skills are
only commodities. They get you in the door, but they don't win you the job. HR managers now receive
100 or more resumes per job posting. It's easy to get lost in the resume shuffle with dozens of other candidates.
They're all competing for that same job, and they all have the same or better skills as you.
How can you stand out and get selected?
A great way to do that is to take a lesson from Madison Avenue, the masters of marketing, and develop
a "slogan" of your own. Employers don't buy skills. They want to know how you can be an asset to their
bottom line, which boils down to only two areas in which you can provide a benefit:
When you answer this question, you set yourself apart from most of your competitors. The best way to
accomplish this is to develop your own "slogan." Called a "Unique Selling Proposition,” this slogan is a short
sentence that describes a major, unique benefit that you can offer your next employer. For example, if
you're a project manager you have a number of skills, such as software, hardware, and management expertise.
Trouble is, most other project managers competing with you have the same skills. If you think further, though,
you find your particular strength might be your ability to identify and solve problems early in your projects.
So your USP goes something like this:
Now add one more item, and that's the benefit to the employer. Since employers buy "making money"
or "saving money,” try to find a way to attach dollars to it. This process is called monetizing your
benefit, and it's what will separate you from every other project manager you compete with. It may take
some research or calculations, but it's well worth the effort. Try to arrive at a conservative figure for how
much money you helped your employer make or save on a given project, sale, or time period. In this case,
our project manager calculated that he helped save his employer more than $3 million in a three-year period
while he completed more than $12 million in projects. His USP thus becomes:
By placing this one sentence front and center at the top of his resume, the job-seeker can make magic start
to happen. No longer is this candidate a commodity. The employer can clearly see the benefit of having an
employee who can bring his special talent to help save $3 million. [Editor’s note: Read more about
Unique Value Propositions.]
Final Thoughts
Put this all-important sentence on your resume and watch how your job search can change for the
better. Your USP becomes your "Breakfast of Champions" slogan, instantly creating value and
pushing the buy buttons of your next employer.
Questions about some of the terminology used in this article? Get more information (definitions and links) on key college, career, and job-search
terms by going to our Job-Seeker's Glossary of Job-Hunting Terms.
Have you taken advantage of all of our job-seeker resume
resources? Find articles, tutorials, and more -- all written to help job-seekers learn how to perfect
your resumes.
And check out all our Personal
Branding & Career Self-Marketing Tools.
Search Quintessential Careers:
"Seasoned project manager who excels at identifying and solving problems"
"Seasoned project manager who excels at identifying and solving problems and has saved
my employer more than $3 million while completing in excess of $12 million worth of projects
during the past 3 years."
When you think of job search as marketing, see the employer as the purchaser looking through
endless ads of candidates that all look alike. You can separate yourself as a special product with your
own short "slogan," or "Unique Selling Proposition" on your resume. This short sentence should identify:
As a recruiter, Joe Turner has spent the past 15 years finding and placing
top candidates in some of the best jobs of their career. He makes it easy for
anyone to find and land the job they really want all on their own in the shortest
time possible. Discover
more insider job-search secrets.
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