The Elevator Speech: Marketing U.

By Ilya Cantor
URL:  http://getcareer.blogspot.com/

I was recently asked by a job seeker to give a "formula" for constructing the 60-second elevator speech.  If only it was that easy or practical.

The problem with the 60-second shpiel is very much related to the limited time you are allowed.  Having dealt with journalists and marketing folks for much of my of my career, I can tell you why good creative people are so valuable.  It’s incredibly difficult to hone a message to 60-seconds, let alone 30-seconds as is sometimes required.  It is much easier to write a 200 word “summary” than a concise 25 word overview.

Whether you are delivering your message in person or in writing, you should set the tone up front.  By this I mean a concise headline (and read The Ugly Truth About Recruiters.)

By starting out in this way, you give people a context to absorb the information that comes next. Everything hangs off your opening statement.

Like the summary at the top of your resume, it is in the nature of an advertising promise, and you need to deliver on it.  If you are a manufacturing expert, a retailing expert, or a mergers & acquisition expert, setting the tone allows the audience to know what we are listening to and for.

More importantly, and at the risk of sounding too specialized, you need to explain your industry and the work you did in that industry that made you special.

• What made your industry difficult and what did you do to manage within it?
• How did you apply the many skills you have acquired over the years to those unique circumstances?
• What words will convey that difficulty in the most memorable terms?

So many people believe that more is more. “A two page resume is a must” they argue, and “how can you pack 20 years on one page, I’m a professional!”

Those same folks will write dense, no white space blocks in the cover letter, and those same folks, will drone on forever in person in the hope that more is more.

But the truth is that less is more.  Those first few seconds of the interview or an introduction, a discussion, a letter, a resume, or a phone conversation are so incredibly crucial.

Do you think the time-starved recruiter or hiring manager has the patience to read volumes about you when they are scanning dozens of other equally qualified resumes?  No.

Busy people nowadays don’t read, they scan.  They look for clues and key words.  Most of us are now addicted to Google-like search speed, and trust me, I will consider you to be disrespectful if you try to monopolize my time with an epic about yourself, regardless of your literary prowess.

Give your audience a headline, and let them be the judge of whether you’ve said enough.  Because it’s a lot more likely that you’ll be eliminated because of what you said rather than what you didn’t say.

That is, if what little you did say spoke volumes.

Comments

[tod hilton]

Good advice that we should all take to heart when preparing our resumes!