Marketing yourself isn't about 'selling yourself.' It's about being marketable as a potential employee. Any pro marketer will tell you that marketing is about choices. You market your product as the preferred choice.

Think about this for a second. Why choose one brand or product over another? Not exactly a mystic process, is it? You have preferences, you have quality requirements, and you have a price range. One or all of these factors makes the choice for you. Packaging may or may not make a difference, but those are the basic requirements.

You're also working on your own standards when you're an employer looking for an employee to do something for you. The choice of employee is usually delegated, but you set the standards. Remember, for any employer, hiring people is part of business, and those standards will be business standards.

To market yourself to any employer, you have to make it clear you meet or exceed those standards, or you won't even be in the running for a job. Marketing, however, is also about presentation and performance. Some people are much better presenters and performers than others. There's no mystery at all about why they get jobs. Their marketing is excellent. They're a class act, and they get the employer's attention for that reason.

So, how do they do it?

• They concentrate on direct contact with the employer and the interviewers.
• They work on presenting a good image, but they also back it up with proof of good standards.
• They're professionals, and they act like professionals.
• They're excellent in dialog. They're fluent, informative, and interesting.
• They have presence, and they're very good performers in person.
• They prove their credentials with strong, clear examples.

If this suggests they're the sort of people who should get the jobs, that's exactly how they market themselves to employers. Interestingly, these guys aren't necessarily the best candidates, either. They often get jobs against very tough competition, people with better professional qualifications and experience. It's how they present that achieves the result. It's all in their marketing. They compete far more effectively because they do interviews on their own terms. They become the ones to beat.

How to market yourself effectively

• Concentrate on your presentation: Look like the right person for the job. In many cases this just means to be yourself. Don't put on an act; be real.
• Refine your interview content: Make your interview content interesting and effective. Improve your quality of examples and information.
• Improve your dialog skills: Speak directly to interviewers. Hold a conversation and ask questions where required.
• Show your professional side: Don't be an answering machine at an interview. Use information that proves you know your work.
• Show your standards: Give the employer examples of achievements which are clearly top of the range. You become the one to beat.

There's no real trick to competitive marketing. It's actually about giving a better presentation about yourself than the other guy.