Who Knew A PowerPoint Specialist Could Get You Hired?
In today’s competitive marketplace, landing that high profile job is more difficult than ever. It’s not like you can email over a resume, have a couple of face-to-face meeting, and you’re hired. Those who are willing to do simply that might as well join the ranks of the unemployed right now. The way I discovered this phenomena was not through personal experience as a job hunter. On the have been spared the chore of resume re-writing, and Linked In connecting.
Which leads me to the point of this post. One day, I was sitting in my studio when I got an out of the ordinary email request. This was from a senior executive who was applying for a position as Vice President of Sales. She was going up against
five other people and was asked to come up with a detailed plan of what she hoped to accomplish during her first 100 days with the company. And they instructed her to put this together in a PowerPoint. Not an easy task, but she wrote some great content outlining her plan before emailing me. My first recommendation was to pare it down to the key points or “sound bytes”. Since her job interview was with a small group, it was important to focus on the highlights so she could then verbally “fill in the blanks”. I also recommended the use of some playful, icon-like graphics to punctuate each point.
One thing I especially liked, was her idea to begin the presentation with an anecdote about someone else who had a 100 Day Plan. That person was John F. Kennedy. It was a clever way to boost the job candidate’s brand by associating herself with someone who was well known, and well accomplished. I took this opportunity to fill a whole slide with a tightly cropped shot of Kennedy so that we could almost hear the conviction in his words. Again, it’s like power through association.
Well, I got the best news this week when I found out that the presentation went well, and that she was hired for the job! Not only that, she shared that the PowerPoint had a lot to do with it.
