Standing Out - Post 1

This is the first in a series of posts from the current draft of a book I’m working on, Standing Out: A Short Guide for Proving Your Value to Employers.

This is an experiment. Over the next 3-4 months I’m posting the entirety of a recent draft of my book in progress titled Standing Out: A Short Guide for Proving Your Value to Employers.

With the exception of this post, the book section posts can only be viewed by paid subscribers. This is the first time I’ve put my Substack posts behind a payment wall. It’s also a deviation from this newsletter’s usual format of me writing about something I’ve read, watched, or listened to and I hope some of my readers go along with this fork in the road.

While the book is not in its final form yet, it’s in good shape and as I was working on it I wondered if the content would be useful to my newsletter readers and if having paid subscribers would be a form of paying for the book itself. Again, this is an experiment.

My plan is to post the book sections one after the other over 3-4 months. That way if someone subscribes simply to read this book draft, they can and unsubscribe later if they choose to do so. I plan to number the posts so it’s easier to discern the sequence.

Consider everything in these posts copyrighted by me: Copyright © 2024 Race Bannon. Also, like much nonfiction content, this is entirely my perspective. Other professionals might have different perspective, and I suggest you listen to them all. No one person has the right answers, including me. What this book contains is my opinion about how to stand out among potential and current employers. If you agree or disagree with what you read, I hope it will prompt deeper thinking about the topic. I will never position myself as the ultimate expert on anything, including this topic.

Feel free to share this post with anyone. I’m all about information and perspectives being widely shared.

I’ll be opening these posts for comments which I don’t usually do in case paid subscribers have suggestions for improvement to the content, catch typos, or otherwise have feedback that might improve the final book I plan to publish.

To make accessing the posts easy once they begin to get posted, I’ll create a set of links on this open public page that lists each as they’re posted, a sort of table of contents.

Thanks for reading this. Let’s see how this goes.

Related posts:

Standing Out – Post 2
Standing Out – Post 3
Standing Out – Post 4
Standing Out – Page 5
Standing Out – Page 6

Thanks for reading…

Before you start reading, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to read this book. Whether you bought it or borrowed it, I truly appreciate your readership. I’ve kept the book intentionally short and concise out of respect for your time.

Along with the decision to keep the book short, I’ve made a few others to keep it that way.

Rather the pummel you with lots of personal stories or real-life examples, I’ve chosen to get to the point. Plus, what’s here emanates from my own professional experiences as an employee and manager. It felt a bit too self-aggrandizing to include too many examples from my own life. Any real-life examples I might choose from other people’s professional experiences would be cherry picked and only by chance be relevant to your own situation.

I’ve also chosen to not leverage specific data or statistics either. Given the increasingly changing employment landscape these days, the numbers I might present could be outdated months or years from writing it. At one point while writing this book I did some research only to discover a few months later when I came back to working on the book that another source quoted slightly different data. Sure, I might be able to identify data trends, but it still felt like a moving target.  If here and there I cite a number to emphasize a topic, I do so knowing it’s a shifting job market. Hiring practices are changing too. Technology, especially artificial intelligence, appears poised to drastically shift the job market yet again. As a result, I’ve tried to include information and suggestions likely to be applicable even if the job market or hiring practices change.

The style of this book is casual and intended to deliver its contents to you quickly in easily consumable chunks of text.

Again, thanks for reading. My hope is you find it useful.

The job market

Once upon a time, it felt like it was a lot easier to find a job. Perhaps that’s a romantic memory, but it sure seemed like there weren’t so many hurdles to getting a job when I first entered the employment market decades ago.

These days, I hear from friends and colleagues about the sheer number of jobs to which they apply, the cumbersome and sometimes convoluted hiring processes they encounter, and the overall lack of traction in their job search efforts. As an older person, I recall that it wasn’t as problematic many years ago.

When I initially entered the workforce, an employer would post a “Help Wanted” sign on a business or place a classified ad in a newspaper. The number of applicants tended to be a trickle since applying required physically walking into the business or undertaking the time-consuming process of composing and typing a cover letter, adding it to a photocopy of your resume, addressing and stamping an envelope, and mailing it to the company’s submission address.

Nowadays, all of that can be accomplished with a few keystrokes and clicks. That’s increased the number of job applicants per job considerably. Competition is fierce. Often hundreds of people submit applications for a single open position. To handle the onslaught of candidate applications, some companies have adopted more complex application mechanisms and procedures.

This means you must do something special, something different, something above and beyond what others might do, to be the person selected. You want to stand out from the crowd. You must prove you’re the right person for the job.

You’ve got something to prove

Imagine this situation.

You’re wading through job market openings looking for employment. Maybe you already have some work experience and learned a few things along the way. Perhaps you’ve learned on the job, read books, taken some workshops, or otherwise gained some great experience, knowledge, and skills.

Perhaps you don’t have a college degree or professional certifications and they’re often the litmus test by which employers filter out job applicants.

Perhaps you do have a college degree or certification but you’re brand new to the job market or re-entering the job market after a long hiatus.

Maybe you want to pursue a new career path entirely unrelated to previous jobs or different than what you studied in school.

Or maybe you simply want to do everything within your power to stand out among job applicants for the cool new job you want.

Anytime you’re in a situation where you must prove to a potential employer that you know what you know and can do what you can do to someone charged with determining if you get a job or not, it pays to figure out ahead of time how to best prove your value to an employer, how to stand out.

That’s what this book is about – proving your value to a potential employer and making you stand out from the crowd.

This applies to your current job too

Standing out from other workers isn’t just a good strategy when trying to find a new job. It’s also an important strategy to continue to stand out from coworkers in your existing job.

Today’s job market isn’t just competitive when it comes to getting a new job. It’s also highly competitive for keeping your current job. With all the layoffs and the increasingly rapid shifting of business markets and corporate strategies, standing out in your current job is more important than ever.

While this book focuses on standing out when applying for and interviewing for a job, if you’re in a job you like and simply want to advance and solidify your career within that job, this book’s advice will hopefully help.

To be continued…

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