Pitch your Talent
The Art of Pitching can be applied in versatile ways.
A startup founder might use the techniques to convince customers or investors. A project manager might benefit from the sales-oriented nature of the pitch when presenting project results to the board of directors. The clear structure pitches have can be helpful for the academic preparing a conference presentation. The pitching method can also be what a jobseeker needs to land that next opportunity.
To help in developing a jobseeker’s pitch, I outlined some key steps below and prepared a worksheet for you to download for free below.
The outcome of the exercise is a five-sentence pitch you can use in job application documents, on your LinkedIn-profile, or when introducing yourself in an interview.
Identify your skills
Let’s start with mapping your skills. List what you have learned in your studies, hobbies, previous jobs and other activities you’ve engaged in.
Quantify what you can by using numbers. How many people were in that team that you coordinated? How big was the budget? Use numbers where relevant when talking about what you’ve achieved.
Remember to include soft skills, too. Have you received positive feedback on your listening skills? For inspiration on what other skills you might have that you haven’t included, see what skills the world needs in the future according to World Economic Forum (2020). While interpersonal skills are not emphasized in this list, do include them, too. In a further digitized world, the ability to communicate clearly and work in diverse teams will surely be appreciated by any employer.
2. Find patterns
Analyse everything you listed. What does your background tell about you? Write down keywords about the image that arises. Search for patterns. What is the red thread in your interests?
For example, one easy pattern to see in my background is people. Working with, for or understanding people. But it wasn’t until I had about a decade of work experience in a variety of fields that I realized that the thing all my jobs had in common was technology. I’ve never been a coder or someone I’d consider “a techie”, but selling, using or innovating with technology had been a part of all my jobs in various ways. What are your patterns and themes?
3. Outline your story
Using the patterns and themes you identified in the last exercise, outline your story with keywords. This is a chance for you to share what you want to highlight in your background, and this can vary based on the opportunity to which you are aiming. You are in charge of your story.
4. Identify your purpose
Where is your story headed? What is your purpose? Don’t worry too much about knowing exactly where you are going (most people don’t). Share what inspires you now. You can discover this by posing questions to yourself such as: “What is the biggest problem in the world right now?” or “What are the societal issues you want to solve?”. Knowing your values will be helpful to know where you want to go.
For inspiration, try to Design your life, listen to Simon Sinek to know your “Why” or identify your Ikigai.
Remember - you can change your story anytime. Nothing’s set in stone, so take this as an exercise you can repeat at any time.
5. Package your pitch
Let’s put it all together now. Create your five-sentence pitch using a structure of:
Your hook - your one-sentence description of who you are. Try to put it in 10 words or less.
Your key skills - describe your key skills in two short sentences.
Your purpose - share what you are passionate about and where you are headed in two short sentences. Challenge yourself to get it down to the length of a tweet (max. 140 characters).
Pay attention to effective language: are there unnecessary words you can remove? Can you say it in a shorter way? Using arbitrary-sounding guidelines like “two sentences” or “10 words” forces you to edit, edit and edit once more. Use active and straight-forward language instead of the passive voice to remove any hesitation.
This is the part where the hesitation or impostor syndrome creeps in. Try your best to fight it off and be a bit bolder than you’d be comfortable with. Talk about yourself as you would of a good friend.
Background
In January 2021 I had the pleasure to contribute to Contact Forum 2021 - Finland’s largest career event for university students and recent graduates - with two webinars on pitching your talent as a jobseeker.
The sessions reached 300+ participants. Those who provided feedback
rated the session enjoyable (5/5) and
useful for jobseeking (4,6/5).
In times like these, we wanted to share openly these tips and the tool to help anyone to pitch their talent.
This blog and the exercise sheet have been prepared for the target audience of Contact Forum but they can be applied in various situations. No matter where you are on your career journey, feel free to test the exercise out!
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