This Is How Yoodoo It

My good friend Mike Southon has just published This Is How Yoodoo It, a collection of sixty articles he wrote for the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph. Mike’s articles feature experts who give practical advice on a wide variety of business and work-related topics. His experts are always interesting and Mike is always generous in his praise of them. And although Mike’s columns are about entrepreneurship, I think that job seekers can learn a lot from him.

Mike is a natural networker. Of course the ability to network fluently and freely is a gift; nearly every job seeker I work with appreciates the value of networking but the vast majority find it uncomfortable and shy away from it. Although I am sure that Mike can work a room agilely and entertainingly that is not how I came across him, and it’s almost certainly not how most of his contacts did.

Mike’s great skill is the ability to publicise his talents in an engaging and inviting way, through a wide range of media. He is not an in-your-face self publicist and he is not one of those blokes whose emails you delete the minute you receive them because you know they are spam. On the contrary, whether you come across Mike through his Beermat books, on Ecademy, in the Financial Times, as a business speaker or through a contact, you will want to hear what he has to say, because you know it will be of value.

And that’s the lesson for all job seekers to take to heart. Getting a job is the ultimate self-marketing exercise; selling yourself in a highly competitive market place where every candidate appears to be of similar calibre. Read Mike’s book. It won’t tell you directly how to get a job. But just by getting an understanding of his style I bet you will be a far more accomplished job seeker when you finish.

This Is How Yoodoo It is published by Ecademy Press. You can get your copy from http://amzn.to/thisishowyoodooit. All proceeds go the Prince’s Trust.

 Oh, and if you want to read a chapter, just click here.