Actively sell yourself after painful job loss

The air is pungent with job losses. Two million as at November, reported the Business Daily. If you are a victim, choose to “get busy living or get busy dying”; sell yourself or wallow in pity. After all: “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell; and the funny thing is that you are a salesman and you don’t even know it.”

There are those that hold up placards pleading for a job. I commend them; they are getting busy living; they are solution-oriented. I admire them for it takes courage to do this. And right there is the problem most persons that lose jobs struggle with - the courage to own up to their predicament.

It’s as if it’s depraved or illegal to admit you’ve lost your job. “What will people think?”; “I used to be in a multinational and even had a branded car. How can I tell people, it’s all over?” And it is this thinking that gets them busy ‘dying’, sinking them deeper into the joblessness hole. They have a product to sell (themselves) but are ashamed of it, and therefore, of selling it.

So should you hold up a placard in the sun? That’s one active option. The other passive one is to ‘quote and hope’: inform your networks and recruiters of your predicament and await a response.

Yet another active one is to take advantage of the free creature comforts of the twenty-first century; specifically, social media. If you were in marketing, administration, sales, accounting, management, whichever department really, you have competence. And the truth is, even in a shrunk economy, employers are always looking for people with solutions to workplace problems. So, get busy on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Being workplace-related though, LinkedIn plus one other may be a better bet.

Start sharing posts. What about? Your predicament to start with. Not in a pitiful manner (no-one wants a cry baby) but in matter-of-fact fashion. You see, you will be demonstrating initiative and giving voice to the thousands of others in the same boat. And these can become your connections, or followers, but more importantly points of distribution for what you share.

In addition, you can post about flaws you noticed and plugged where you used to work and how similar companies can avoid them. How to effectively work social media can be learnt from the thousands of YouTube videos that cover the topic. You just have to put in the work; this is your new job.

What if I can’t write? Sell yourself via videos shot from your phone, or images professionally and easily designed from canva.com. Just get busy living, not dying. Focus your messaging on improving the workplace and around your competence; invite discussions while targeting potential employers, and let’s exchange notes after consistently doing this for sixteen weeks.

The writer is the lead facilitator, Lend Me Your Ears (sales training).