Strategy #23: Solve Their Problems With Your Solutions

My work-search strategy features three core stages, the first of which identifies lucrative openings with high-quality employers before anyone else has got to them. This is simpler to do than most job hunters might imagine and if you can answer two basic questions you’ll go a long way towards achieving this. Once you understand the importance of these questions and their corresponding answers, you’ll be in prime position to move on to the second and third stages of the process.

In this article I want to talk about the reasons that this pair of questions is crucial to finding work opportunities, how you should go about asking them, and why the answers form the foundation of everything that subsequently happens in your job-search project.

Finding raw work opportunities that perfectly fit your criteria is a key job-search objective. If you’ve been with me from the start of these strategies you’ll already have an idea of what’s involved, but you have to follow the guidelines that I set out to be sure of succeeding. I’ve presented a few of the preliminaries in the two preceding articles and I’m going to think about the mechanics of the process shortly. I’ll do this by introducing you to a straight forward method of narrowing and refining a huge number of potential employment options.

But before we get to that, there’s an important concept that you need to get your head around, which is what I’ll cover today. If you can button down this idea, the rest of the process of locating fantastic work opportunities will easily slot into place. This applies to virtually any job that almost every employer needs to have done. It doesn’t matter how low or how high you are on a company hierarchy. You could be an entry-level worker or a board director and you could be looking for any kind of private-sector employed position.

Incidentally, you might be wondering why I make this specification about the private sector. Simply because most organisations within the public sector hire new employees in a way that’s resistant to the strategies that are essential components of my system. The public sector tends to be extremely bureaucratic by its very nature. It almost always require you to wait for a vacancy to be advertised, you have no choice but to submit a CV, resume or application form, then take your chances amongst multiple candidates at interview.

This isn’t how I do things. If you want to join a public sector employer, you’ll certainly benefit from some of the things I teach you, but you’ll have to forget about others. I don’t want you to waste your time or money on a training system that isn’t particularly designed for this employment sector. Nor do I aim my job-search system at self-employed people, for a variety of reasons. But if you’re still with me, because you’re going after a strictly private-sector position, let’s continue with ways of finding a great job opportunity.      

Almost without exception, the only reason that an employer takes on a new member of staff is because they’ve got a problem that has to be solved. It could be a major challenge that threatens the very existence of the business, right through to a seemingly inconsequential issue that’s no more than an irritation, but it will exist in some shape or form. Your task is to identify this problem and to then come up with a viable solution.

In the introduction to this strategy I said that you must ask two questions, and those questions are these;

1. What is the most pressing business problem that an employer has, in relation to your particular area of knowledge and expertise?
2. How can you go some way towards solving it?

Asking the two questions is the easy bit. Discovering the answers is where the difficulty lies, but until you’ve done so you can’t proceed any further with finding work opportunities.  

You shouldn’t be dismayed about this challenge. Hardly any average job applicants do what I’m going to tell you about later in this series of strategy articles, mainly because they don’t think it’s worth the effort or because they don’t realise how important it is. However, you’ll do things differently if you’re serious about finding great work with a fantastic employer. 

My thirty-plus years of experience in recruiting, interviewing and associated training tells me that the overwhelming majority of job hunters pay scant attention to this stage of their work search. They skim over the problems that target employers face, happy to settle for the most generic type of business issues that could easily be predicted without too much difficulty. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

If they’re in a sales role of some sort, they may decide that the biggest problem is not shifting enough commodity. If they’re in logistics they might believe that the major challenge is getting products to customers on time. They arrive at these hugely generalised conclusions on the basis that every company wants to sell more, deliver faster and so on. These sorts of judgements might be true at a macro level but this superficial analysis simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to a highly targeted job search. This isn’t identifying a problem. It’s a lazy description of a common characteristic within a particular business category.

A common factor amongst ordinary job hunters is a willingness to make sweeping assumptions about business problems, not to put in the work that’s required to complete this activity properly. Instead of digging deep into what’s going on inside an employer they like the look of, they think they can wing it when it comes to sweet-talking an interviewer into hiring them. You mustn’t fall into this trap.

And so, let's think about what's involved with mastering this problem and solution concept in practical terms.

The first part of the activity is quite simple. All you have to do is keep the first question at the front of your mind as you investigate possible work opportunities. As a reminder of that question: what is the single most pressing business problem that looms over any potential new employer, so long as it’s one that sits squarely within your sphere of work activity. How you successfully answer this question, which happens when you’ve found this problem, is something I’ll introduce in the upcoming strategy article, that's #24 in this series, and others that follow later on. Naturally, I give complete guidance about business problem discovery in my Job Search Masterclass if you want comprehensive instructions.

The second part of this activity is asking yourself how you can best solve the problem you’ve identified. The answer to this will be centred upon your skills, expertise and experience. You might remember that I spoke about the primacy of skills over passions in #12 of this series. This is where a thorough assessment of your rarest and most unique work skills bears fruit, so review that piece if you need a refresher on this topic. I’ll return to it in upcoming ones, too.   

OK, let me bring this very concise introduction to a conclusion. The reason that you must be clear about the most pressing problem that a business faces is that knowing this will point to their strongest motivation to hire you, provided that you can offer them a plausible solution. This will become your north star, your guiding light as you conduct your research into potential new employers.

You do this by asking yourself two questions: what is their problem and what is your solution? The appropriate answers will lead you ever onwards, eventually to your principal employment target.

If you prefer to watch training materials rather than read or listen to them, follow this link to my YouTube channel where you can access the video version of this article;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD07EI1S-pQ

And finally, if you have any questions about the issues I raise here, or if you'd like to contact me personally, please get in touch via LinkedIn;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vocationmaster/