Great Positioning Discussion
Today, I had an email exchange with a recent post-secondary graduate. When I introduced him to WhyHire.Me, the following Q and A ensued. It was fascinating. I had internalized so much, I finally got the change to jot down some differentiating points about WhyHire.me.
His questions in BOLD, my answers in italics.
What is the biggest difference between WhyHire.Me and having an open and searchable profile on facebook?
We have presented WhyHire.Me as a place for upcoming graduates to share their professional brand that should be developed and shaped through post-secondary education. Our students have been given the opportunity to present their profiles, experiences and engagement in social media around their course of study and professional interests. Mixing social with professional posts can be a risky endeavor…since personal posts, photos or comments can be out of context…and on occasion, not something you would share with a prospective employer. My Facebook updates contain inside jokes…or items of a personal nature that I would only share with friends.
Our V1 product is a push model – students can post, publish and email their PURL as they start looking for work or getting feedback and comments from peers, clients and summer job bosses. That being said, one of our students, Ashley Ferguson got found by a Toronto firm via a google search and was hired. Check out the kudos from her at this link.
Your online digital assets are impressive, but spread out across several sites and links. Imagine being able to shape it through one unified interface…that speaks to WHY someone should hire you? By packaging this up in WhyHire.Me, you would be in a better position to ask your senior level contacts to comment and offer testimonials on various blog entries that speak to your accomplishments. Can you count on these people having Facebook accounts…or an interest in setting one up just to make a comment or offer a living, in context reference?
What is the incentive for students to create a profile? (vs facebook which is already established)
We have a highly declarative URL – whyhire.me/andy_church is pretty much to the point. Think of whyhire.me as the paring knife for job search outreach…Facebook, Linkedin have great uses for a wide range of applications. The free-agent model of employment has arrived. WhyHire.Me is an open rhetorical question that speaks very specifically to future employers or clients.
Educators have the opportnunity to help guide and mentor students by weaving WhyHire.Me into their course of study – professional branding requires thought, strategy and sustained execution. Much like how athletes have coaches, we believe WhyHire.Me needs mentoring through post-secondary education. FYI – one’s profile can be private until the student is good and ready to start promoting their PURL through social media outreach.
We also get great search results because we leverage SEVERAL other sites (Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, any site with RSS feeds). Check out Jennifer Spruit at this link!
What is the incentive for prospective employers to browse this site? or is the hope that they will use a search engine and whyhire.me will be one of the top results?
Right now, if a student embeds their purl into a cover letter, or blog post that get’s searched, it creates an inbound click into the student profile. At some point, we expect to have a critical mass of students and make WhyHire.Me a destination end-point for employers.
What is the next step for whyhire.me?
Keep following me at Twitter goandychurch or bookmark my purl – whyhire.me/andy_church
