If you’re on the hunt for six figure jobs, you know that they don’t usually fall from the sky like snowflakes. They’re hard to come by, and when you do get a lead on one, they can be difficult to land. The competition is stiff.
But if you want to land a job like that, you have to freeze out the competition, so that you’re seen as the clear choice by the employer. If you’re the clear enough choice, employers and recruiters will come to you, knowing that you’re the talent they must have to do the work they need done.
So how do you position yourself so that six figure jobs start falling out of the sky?
It’s not as hard as it sounds.
Six Figure Jobs Are About Doing Something Well
If you’re going to get paid that much, your boss is going to expect you to perform at a high level. There’s no way around the fact in this type of job, you’re hired for your skills. Your boss has a problem and you are the solution to that problem.
The trick to having your pick of six figure jobs is to be able to articulate, in a convincing way, the exact problem you solve for an employer, and then be able to back it up with evidence from your background (skills and experience.) Make sure the problem is a problem that people will pay to solve.
Six Figure Job Listings LIE
Job listings, especially ones for six figure jobs – even more than five figure jobs or lower, because these jobs tend to be more strategic – are big, fat, liars.
They’ll tell you all about the duties that you’ll be performing, the kind of person they’re looking for, the project you’ll work on, that kind of thing. But they’re lying by omission. They leave something out.
What they leave out is huge, and if you can figure it out, it gives you an advantage over your competitors in getting hired.
Here’s what it leaves out: What they’re really hiring you for.
No job listing is going to say:
- Our sales numbers stunk last quarter and we need someone to help us figure out why and turn that around.
- We have a real leadership problem here, and if we don’t fix it we’re in trouble.
- We’ve tried six ways from Sunday to market this product, and it’s not working. Should we scrap it, or give it another go? I wish we had a little more experience in this product area to help us figure it out.
If you know exactly the types of problems you can solve, given what you enjoy and what your skills and experience are, you’ll be the exact solution a company needs – and when you can uncover, through talking to people in your network, what their real problems are, not just what role they’re trying to fill, you can go to them and say “Hey, I’m the person for this role.”
They will want you hired yesterday, because they’ll know that you’re not just coming in to fill the role, but to solve the real problem they’ve got.
Is There Always A Problem?
Yup.
There’s not always a crisis, but there’s always a problem. That’s what business is. Whether it’s increasing sales, retaining customers, marketing more effectively, your role has a purpose. Your company has a purpose. Figuring out what that purpose is and how YOU help fulfill it best is what will get you hired.
Landing Six Figure Jobs Is About Branding
You may have realized that this is all branding. You need to brand yourself, which isn’t to say you need to pull some hokey statement out of the sky and become known as the guy who wears purple ties every day.
It’s about figuring out what problems you like to solve, that you have experience solving, that people will pay you to solve.
When you can figure that out, and you can articulate it well, you’re going to need a snowplow for all of those job offers!