So you’ve landed yourself an interview for an exciting job at a great company. Congratulations!
Unfortunately for you, great jobs are in high demand. And if your potential employer has a strong employment brand or has partnered with good marketing talent acquisition services, you’ll face tough competition for the spot. How can you stand out from a group of qualified individuals?
There are many answers to that question. As a marketer, the responsibility lies on your shoulders to come up with creative ways to differentiate your personal brand and professional skillset. Your best strategy will depend on your background, strengths and the nature of the job and company you’re applying to. But there’s one tactic any marketer in any discipline can use to reliably stand out at any point in their career: a 30/60/90 day plan.
30/60/90
Sometimes called a three-month plan or 100-day plan, this is a system that helps you develop a blueprint for fast success. In short, you create a strategy that will transform you from a new initiate who has never stepped foot in the business to a productive, contributing and fully integrated team member in just a few months. That’s music to the ears of any hiring manager who is eager to get someone in that seat.
Many businesses view a new hire as a risky investment–it takes a surprising amount of resources to find, hire, onboard and train a new marketing team member. If the hire fails, it’s an expensive loss. The 30/60/90 day plan is your way of reassuring your potential employer that there’s minimal risk to choosing you, with plenty of potential gain.
In a field of growing accountability where everyone is interested in results, marketers who have a clear and obvious plan to get there will always stand out. Here’s what MarketPro’s President Bob Van Rossum has to say about the 30/60/90 plan and why he recommends it to marketers of all kinds (even to CMO hopefuls):
As hectic as the modern marketing landscape is, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to know exactly what you are doing in the distant future. Even a year ahead can be uncertain. On the other hand, going into a job interview with no idea how you’ll join with the company is a recipe for a disaster. A 30/60/90 day plan hits the sweet spot in between, proving that you’ve done your research and are dedicated to being a productive employee while leaving your room to shift gears to respond to an evolving marketing environment.
This kind of plan is useful at every point in your career. Even professionals who are new to the marketing industry can leverage it to win their first jobs. The more senior and high-stakes you go in your career, the more having some sort of plan or presentation ready will become an expectation. If you’ve been picked up in a marketing executive search and have your eyes on a senior leadership seat, then it pays to be prepared with something along these lines; you can assume your competition will be!
Resources
It’s valuable to have some benchmarks to work with when determining what progress you expect to make during your first months at the job. There are plenty of resources out there that you can use to help design your 30/60/90. Use the tools, examples, and advice available online and elsewhere to enhance your plan and make it as thorough as possible.
- Follow The ’30-60-90′ Plan When Starting A New Job
- Sample 100 Day Plan Templates Download for PDF Format
- A 90-Day Plan: The Key To Getting An Offer
Check out this sample 90 day leadership plan from Michael Weening
Marketing Talent Acquisition Resources Video Transcript:
Creating Your Plan
Candidates ask a lot–the most prepared candidates and the candidates who are most excited about the opportunity–will ask us “What can I do to set myself apart? What can I do to make the biggest difference and biggest impact on the interview process?” And one of the things that we talk to them about is can you do a 30-60-90 day plan or a 100 day plan depending on what you’re more comfortable with.
And there’s tons of research and it’s easy to find information on the internet on how to do a 30-60-90 day plan and what should be in there so we don’t need to go into the details here.
What’s important about that 30-60-90 plan is that you have enough information about the organization and the role to make it meaningful. And if you walk into that first interview and say here’s my 30-60-90 day plan your probably going to miss what they really need.
If you’ve already had a phone interview and were able to ask really good questions around what does success look like? And after 12 months what is it you want this person to have accomplish? Those are now the kind of things that you can use those answers and turn them into a 30-60-90 day plan.
So, we highly encourage that, it’s a really smart thing to do to separate yourself from other candidates who won’t take the time to do that but make sure you’re doing it based on having enough data first. It’s a combination of things, right, so in order to get enough information to prepare your 30-60-90 day plan part of it’s going to be talking to us, the marketing executive search firm and making sure that you know what we know about the role.
The next is going to be usually in that first interview, be it a phone interview or in-person interview with the client, specifically the hiring manager and your able to talk to the hiring manager about what their expectations are.
The way you get the real job description for any position at any level is to say tell me after 12 months where you want the organization to be based on this person and this role. What’s the difference you want me to make in the first 12 months? And that right there is your job description, what does success look like after 12 months. So now once you’re armed with that information you can come in and say I realize what success looks like for you, here’s the first 30 days, here’s the first 60 days, here’s the first 90 days and that’s how we are going to start down that path.