Even if you don’t think of yourself as an introvert, you may think of yourself as being shy in social or professional situations.
As a result, you may believe that doing the self-promotion is not something you are good at.
After all, you’ve never written a press release to call attention to a success you’ve had . . . and rightly so.
But some of you should be sending out press releases or encouraging your company to promote things that you and your group are doing because they are significant.
However, even if what you are doing is not changing the world or would be considered worthy of a feature article in a national publication, you can still be doing things to promote yourself.
An old friend of mine would mail a note to all of her friends to bring them up-to-date on the things that were going on in her life including her professional successes, accomplishments and, occasionally, the frustrations. It allowed her to stay in contact with lot of people who would offer her advice, suggestions and jobs.
Today, with e-mail, it is much easier than before.
Every six months, send an e-mail to all of your friends, acquaintances and former colleagues to bring them up-to-date. Skip the complaints about your boss. Former colleagues may be in contact with them and you don’t want to generate problems.
It’s easy to add people to Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn and other products like them.
You can also write a blog posts on LinkedIn regularly sharing your ideas on subjects related to your expertise. Then share the link on Facebook, twitter, medium and others.
This doesn’t require that you actually speak to someone; you are actually speaking to the wind and knowing that your words will be carried somewhere.
In addition, writing comments to people lauding what they have written or done can also bring notice to your knowledge and expertise.
If you run into people and they ask about what you are doing, forget about delivering an elevator pitch; after all, for you, in particular, talking in that way feel so phony. Instead, as I tell everyone, just speak as one human being to another. That’s something you excel at.
Share the occasional meaningful quote or article.
All of this involves very little one-on-one personal interaction that might make you feel uncomfortable. You are communicating in ways that show that you are thoughtful and perceptive.
Any way you look at it, since only 22% of positions are filled by recruiters and fewer than 6% via job boards, your connections, friends and acquaintances and their ability to think of you will go a long way to helping jobs land in your lap, instead of having to aggressively pursue opportunities.
© The Big Game Hunter, Inc. Asheville, NC 2016
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
