Creative employment requires you to apply nontraditional approaches to find your next employer(s). A well written resume and strong interviewing skills may never even get the door opened. Minimally, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition. Ideally, you need to find a path where competition doesn’t exist. Let’s look at one creative employment example.
Networking is difficult because you have to sell yourself and many of us become overly modest when attempting to explain the value we’d bring an organization. What if you stopped selling yourself and instead found a product or service that was aligned with your personal passion? Let’s say your passion is prevention of blindness. Uncover companies that are engaged in prevention of blindness or even enabling technology for individuals who have compromised vision. Find one or more companies that might be willing to work with you on a commission-only basis to do business development for them. Now, you need to find companies where you’d like to work and that have a connection to prevention of blindness. Rather than asking that company to meet to discuss your career goals, you can now meet with them on behalf of a company in which you believe.
Several positive outcomes are now possible. Your passion will enliven your networking performance, which will immediately make you more interesting to the target company. The pressure of selling “Brand You” is gone but it is quite likely that you can steer the conversation to a discussion of your background. If that occurs, it should become simple to say that you are looking for opportunities with companies that fire your passion and, in the interim, have agreed to help a colleague with business development. That makes you look engaged, driven…a go-getter. Sooner or later, someone will be intrigued and you may hear the question, “What would it take to bring you onboard with us?” Clearly that gives you the stronger negotiating position.
The benefits don’t stop there as if you are successful with the business development you will earn commissions and have taken the first step to creative employment. Perhaps even more important, you will strengthen your portfolio of business skills and also become a much more practiced networker.
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