Employers don’t buy just skills. They want to know how you can be an asset to their bottom line. This boils down to only two areas where you can provide a benefit:

How will you help an employer make money?, or
How will you help an employer save money?
When you answer this question, you set yourself apart from most of your competitors. The best way to accomplish this is to develop your own slogan. Called a “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP), this is a short sentence that describes a major, unique benefit that you can offer your next employer.

Add Strength to Skills

For example, if you’re a project manager you have a number of skills, such as software, hardware and management expertise. Trouble is, most other project managers competing with you have the same skills. If you think further, though, you find your particular strength might be your ability to identify and solve problems early in your projects.

So your USP goes something like this:

“Seasoned project manager with a strength in identifying and solving problems.”

Find the Money

Now add one more item, and that’s the benefit to the employer. Since employers buy “making money” or “saving money,” try to find a way to attach dollars to it. This is called monetizing your benefit and it’s what will separate you from every other project manager you compete with. It may take some research or calculations but it’s well worth the effort.

Try to arrive at a conservative figure for how much money you helped your employer make or save on a given project, sale or time period. In this case, our project manager calculated that he helped save his employer over $3 million in a three-year period while he completed over $12 million in projects. His USP becomes this:

“Seasoned project manager whose strengths in identifying and solving problems have saved my employer over $3 million while completing over $12 million worth of projects during the past 3 years.”

By placing this one sentence front and center at the top of his resume (as a “summary” statement), magic can start to happen. No longer is this candidate a commodity. The employer can clearly see the benefit of having an employee who can bring their special talent to help save $3 million.

As a recruiter, Joe Turner has spent the past 15 years finding and placing top candidates in some of the best jobs of their career. He makes it easy for anyone to find and land the job they really want all on their own in the shortest time possible. Discover more insider job search secrets by visiting jobchangesecrets.com.

We were drawn from the weeds
We were brave like soldiers
Falling down under the pale moonlight
You were holding me
Like someone broken
And I couldn’t tell you, but I’m telling you now

Just let me hold you while you’re falling apart
Just let me hold you and we’ll both fall down

Fall on me
Tell me everything you want me to be
Forever with you, forever in me
Ever the same

We would stand in the wind
We were free like water
Flowing down
Under the warmth of the sun
Now it’s cold and we’re scared
And we’ve both been shaken
Look at us man,
this doesn’t need to be the end

Just let me hold you while you’re falling apart
Just let me hold you and we’ll both fall down

Fall on me tell me everything you want me to be
Forever with you
Forever in me
Ever the same