Leibson's Law

In my continuing quest to return to gainful employment, I’ve been learning about the latest methods for marketing yourself. This week, I attended two sessions on networking (the human kind, not the 802.xx kind) and today I attended a half-day session on using Craigslist as a consultant’s marketing tool. In this blog, I’ll focus on today’s session, which was put on by the local IEEE section’s Consultant’s Network Silicon Valley (CNSV). The instructor was Carl Angotti, a design engineer and longtime consultant who specializes in medical products, project management, and product development. Carl’s been consulting for 30 years, so he knows a thing or three about consulting and how to stay in business, even in tough times. Since 2003, he’s been using Craigslist to market his services effectively and he shared the secrets of his success with us today.

There were more than 20 people in the audience this Saturday morning and we met at Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, literally a stone’s throw from my current marketing consulting gig. The name of the college reminds me of Cogswell Cogs from the 1960’s animated TV show The Jetsons. Had there been anyone from the college present this morning, I probably would have heard “Yeah, we get that a lot,” but it was just us consultants plus a videographer this morning.

I was the only marketing consultant swimming in a sea of engineers. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the attendees had been laid off since the beginning of this year. The range of specialties was pretty interesting so I jotted them down in order from the introductions:

• Microwave antenna design
• IC and ASIC design
• Software QA automation
• Database programming
• Printed-circuit board design
• FPGA design and optimization
• Medical device development
• Expert witness
• Systems engineering
• Semiconductor manufacturing automation
• High-performance computing
• Renewable energy
• Analog IC design
• Management consulting
• Firmware engineering
• Electromechanical design

Quite a variety. All can benefit from Angotti’s self-marketing techniques. Even me.

The first thing to understand is that Craigslist now fills the niche formerly occupied by the local newspaper classifieds. Craigslist listings are faster, cheaper (free), and do not require the reader to buy a subscription or a copy of the newspaper. In essence, Craigslist classified ads have far less market “friction” than newspaper ads and that’s why Craigslist has sucked almost all of the advertising out of the local newspapers’ classified advertising here in the US.

Angotti’s technique is based on using Craigslist’s “resume” section. Many of the people in this morning’s class didn’t know that Craigslist had a resume section. In truth, I didn’t know it either until I was laid off some weeks ago. I missed noticing the resume section before that because I used Craigslist mostly to buy stuff like old, historic HP desktop computing gear and used Ikea furniture. However, there is such a section and you can post a resume in it for free once every 72 hours.

Part of the battle is just posting something. “Envisioning” the act isn’t sufficient. You need to actually do it, of course.

What you post is at least as important. You want to stand out from the crowd. You do that in two ways. First, you need to firmly conform to the “WIIFM” principle, which means “What’s in it for me?” Resume readers want to know what you will do for them and not what you know or what jobs you’ve previously held. You have precious little time and relatively little screen space to make that point so you cannot waste the screen space on the conventional paper-resume formats. You also can’t exploit the Web’s ability to absorb as many characters as you care to type. Posting a 5000-word resume defies readers to figure out what you can do for them because no one has the time or the patience to wade through that much verbiage any more. We live in an instant-gratification world.

Second, you need to optimize your listing for Craigslist’s search engine. Here, Angotti has a neat trick. He skims the job boards—he favors Dice.com—for related job listings and he mines long lists of relevant keywords by copying entire job descriptions from these job boards and sluicing them through text analyzers that perform frequency analysis on the words in the descriptions. Delete common words such as a, an, and, the, etc. and you’ve got a got start at a relevant set of keywords. Carl shoots for 500 or so keywords, which he then deposits at the bottom of his resume simply as a search-engine magnet. Now realize that these filtered keywords ought to relate to your resume. Otherwise, you’re just fooling the searcher. Worse, you’re fooling yourself if you think that you can get a job using a blatantly obvious trick.

Today’s training cost me $47 and I’m tracking those dollars pretty darn carefully these days because there aren’t that many coming in. Nevertheless, I consider the money well spent. Today’s session was videotaped and will end up on the CNSV site for members only. If you’re interested, check out the site. They sponsor many such programs during the course of a month and I plan to pay more attention to them myself.