How to recapture confidence to win in your job search

When your confidence is slipping, you don't project the image that you should to build new customers or win a new job. It is very hard to feel confident when you are facing loss of job or have lost your job. You wonder how you are going to pay the bills or if you will ever find a new job. Some days it is hard to even get out of bed in the morning.

How do you recapture your confidence?

You need to learn how to market yourself.  As foreign as that may sound, job search is always about marketing. You define yourself as a product and then you execute a plan. Most people have the wrong concept of a resume. They see it as a job history instead of a marketing tool. Professional resume writers help the job seeker explore how their value can be positioned (marketed) to win the next role. Instead of a boring list of duties, their contributions in their earlier roles are defined with quantifiable success points. It means thinking deeper about yourself than the surface who, what, and when types of questions. The real confidence booster is not only the why of what you did but the results that you delivered. Telling that story in your resume will help the hiring manager understand your value.

To the right reader, this bullet from the banking industry will illustrate value:

• Collaborated with operations and sales leadership to create POS workflow integration into an operational Service Level Agreement (SLA). Drastically improved process time and reduced lock extension costs absorbed by the bank by 80% in the first three months.

For a hiring manager seeking expertise in fundraising for the non-profit sector, this bullet resounds with value:

• Capital Campaign ­– Spearheaded $2.2 million capital campaign in collaboration with Fundraising Chair for ABC Foundation and garnered commitments from high net worth prospects, securing gifts from $5,000 to $100,000.

Illustrate your resume and LinkedIn profile with value stories

When you fill your resume with stories that help the hiring manager understand how you can change the game for them, you recapture your confidence because you know your message will be heard. Don't omit LinkedIn when you are sharing your stories. Your LinkedIn profile is much more likely to be seen by people who are looking for people with your talent. But 80% or more of the LinkedIn users fail to tell any stories in their profile. They fill out who (Your title, what (bare bones of your job, where (the company), and when (employment dates) but leave out the value. Value bolsters your confidence.

Read this bullet that could be used in a resume for a product development engineer or in the LinkedIn profile:

• Product Development – Identified need for in-house standardized testing for electromechanical component of the spectrophotometer and built fixture to discover root cause of component failure and perform final test of repaired product, which improved company reputation for reliability and quality control.

Does it capture the value? If you are a hiring manager in manufacturing with a need for an analytical engineer who can see a bigger picture, it certainly does.

When you are developing your job search plan, you will be more confident if you think about the details and how you can capture your value. As you develop these stories, you are also going to be more confident when you are called for an interview. The same stories help you explain your value in the interview.