Win your dream job with a blue ocean strategy

Credit to Author: Murali Murthy| Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:05:26 +0000

As you start another day sending out resumes or preparing for an upcoming job interview, you may wonder about the competition and what you could do if you rise above them and even make them irrelevant. A blue ocean strategy may save the day for you.

Blue Ocean Strategy, a very popular book by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, spells out the strategy to make your candidacy unique and valuable.  The same strategy is taught in many business schools and used by many executive teams today.

According to the authors, two types of oceans exist. Red oceans are viewed as a bloody, shark-infested waterscape full of completion. In the red ocean, job seekers compete with each other intensely, for limited resources in an overcrowded space.

In a blue ocean however, you create an altogether new way of looking at things and a new value offering that’s different from the rest, making your competition irrelevant.

THE RED OCEAN

A red ocean job search involves a frenzied where you jump at publicly posted roles. Once you see the job posting, you take out your resume, prep it with keywords, send it in and wait.

This means, you are one of many similar candidates vying for the same, limited roles. Naturally, it’s a more reactive than a proactive approach applying to open jobs that already exist in the job market.

Your background and experience are used in a red ocean job search to convince the hiring team that this job could be a natural extension of your past.

In a typical red ocean job search:

– You’re often responding to posted roles and often not getting past the round one of the interview. If more than 20 have applied for the job you want, you’re definitely a red ocean resident.

– Your resume speaks to the problems you solved months and years ago that may not be relevant to this current economic environment.

– Your response to the interviewer mostly centers on you’ve done in the past, how skilled you are at one part of the job description and such.

– You find it difficult to articulate how your background and skills differentiate you from other similar candidates. By contrast in a blue ocean interview, that question wouldn’t even come up for you.

– You focus on industry/domain expertise, company fit and prior experience in your interview. Although these factors are important in both Red Ocean and Blue Ocean job searches, they don’t actually differentiate candidates that much from one to the next.

– You come away from the job interview after a strong conversation on your past and negligible information sharing about the future of your industry and how you are planning to help shape it.

THE BLUE OCEAN

By contrast, a blue ocean job search centers on future possibility. You make the competition irrelevant “by creating a leap in value in the mind of your audience – the hiring manager.

To demonstrate your value as the ideal candidate, you need to showcase how the company will get a strong return on investment on the cost of supporting you. Thus a blue ocean job search revolves around the concept of value which you can deliver for the company.

In this job search, you don’t compete on experience with other candidates, but ride on the strength of your innovative ideas and future thinking. For instance, you could share how you think about – and intend to solve the business problem they’re facing, whether it’s a new product or service introduction, changing the trajectory of the organization, or doing more with less.

Instead of widening your search, you approach with a laser focus and pitch yourself in emerging areas and claim that space through thought leadership.

IN A SUCESSFUL BLUE OCEAN JOB SEARCH:

– The interview feels like a two-way communication about the future needs of a company.

– The majority of your conversations focuses on collaborating and sharing ideas about the company.

– You bring new ideas to the conversation and even re-shape the conversation about how you can add value to the role and to the organization.

– You have a clear differentiating value statement – not a tagline, not an elevator pitch, but a vision of “here’s how I could create value for you.”

– You know in your heart that the interviewer left the conversation inspired and made him think differently about the organization and the role.

– Your interview storytelling relies on innovation – what new value you’ve created for your prior employers.

Go ahead, put your thinking hat on and devise a blue ocean strategy to get your career on the fast track to success.

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