Hey, folks who are looking for jobs: Be specific.

If you say “I’m a recently laid-off Creative Director…” and you expect that folks will be interested based on your title… you could do better. Your job here is to hook peoples’ interest (and if you’re a Creative Director who’s not doing that in a post like this you’re not showing off your talent like you should).

What is it that people are looking for? What is it that YOU provide that others do not? For me, for instance, I can say, “Co-founder, Creative Director, Team Lead”, and it says something about me, sort of.

But if I specify that I have an established track record of building really effective multi-disciplinary, highly collaborative teams, that shows a kind of specificity. If you’re not building a multi-disciplinary collaborative team, great – I’m not for you. But if you *are*, you’re a lot more likely to ping me than you would if I just said, “team lead”.

But I can get more specific. I also work best in very early-stage teams, because a lot of my process is about building things and learning super-fast, which maximizes potential for success on projects where folks are building something genuinely new. Again, if you’re a huge company working on some iterative thing, great – I’m not the guy for you.

It’s a trade off – telling people your strengths means you aren’t going to be aligned with everyone. And that is a luxury in some cases. Sometimes you need to be everything to everyone, because you need a job – any job. But I’d also suggest that right now, it’s more important to stand out than it is to be “in the running” for a lot of roles.

So be specific. Tell people what your unique strengths are. How your experience and worldview have shaped who you are and what you do better than anyone else. Your job is to capture peoples’ attention and make them NEED to hire you. It’s not enough to say, “I’m a person who’s available.”

This is something most people are really not used to. If you’re struggling with this, I can help. No charge. DM me (with a copy of your resume and a blurb you’ve written for yourself) if you’re looking for a hand with this, and I’ll be happy to spend an hour with you working on it.