You’re the Product: Build a Go-to-Market Plan for Your Job Search

If you’re on the hunt for your next role — permanent, interim, or fractional — you already know how noisy the market is. The reality? Being great at what you do isn’t enough. You need to show it, shape it, and get it in front of the right people.

What if you approached your job search like a marketer launching a product? It’s not about being loud or salesy. It’s about being intentional. You don’t need a marketing degree — but you do need a plan. This is how to build one.

1. Define Your Ideal Employer Profile (IEP)

Before any good campaign launches, marketers know their audience inside out. You need the same clarity.

Prep work:

• Reflect on the types of businesses where you’ve had the most impact
• Note the industries, cultures, or causes you care about
• Identify whether you’re best suited to build, fix, or scale
• Create a shortlist of 20–50 companies, founders, or investors you’d genuinely like to work with

If you’re pursuing interim work, think about who actually hires interim talent. Often, it’s not HR — it’s the CEO, CFO, or investors behind the scenes. Professional bodies like the IIM (Institute of Interim Management) publish annual reports that can help you understand trends in interim demand and hiring behaviours.

Explore how to sharpen your Interim Proposition or define a compelling Fractional Proposition for this market.

2. Get Clear on What You’re Offering

In marketing, this is your value proposition. For you, it’s the clear articulation of why someone should hire you — not just what you’ve done.

Prep work:

• Boil your impact down into three headline outcomes
• Connect what you offer to real business problems
• Use recent, relevant examples that bring your value to life

Hint: your CV probably doesn’t do this justice. You might want to start with a CV Rescue to set the foundation right.

3. Build Your Campaign Assets

A product launch needs a landing page. You need your equivalents — a digital footprint that tells the right story in the right way. Your LinkedIn profile is often the first port of call. Treat it like a personal microsite, not just a CV pasted online.

Prep work:

• ✅ Customise your LinkedIn URL — make it clean and professional
• ✅ Use the LinkedIn banner space wisely — this is valuable real estate for showing what you stand for or specialise in
• ✅ Ensure all roles — past and present — are clearly defined, with concise impact-led summaries
• ✅ Cross-check your online presence — do dates, titles and responsibilities match up across LinkedIn, your CV, and other platforms?
• ✅ Write a strong ‘About’ section that captures your pitch — not just a list of skills
• ✅ Pull together a one-page CV or even a punchy two-page CV that gives the reader a clear sense of what you bring, fast
• ✅ Be thoughtful in how you’re naming your CV or resume — it can impact whether or not it gets opened in the first place
• ✅ Create templated outreach messages and responses for different audiences (e.g. hiring managers, recruiters, founders)
• ✅ Build your LinkedIn network thoughtfully — add a personal note to every connection request, and offer something of value (an article, an observation, a relevant intro) to make it meaningful
• ✅ Use a tracker to stay on top of who you’ve contacted and where you’ve had traction

Here’s a tip: get a free account with HubSpot CRM. It gives you a clean space to:

• Add your contact list (including hiring managers and old colleagues)
• Store the companies you want to work with (including recruitment agencies and consultancies)
• Track each job opportunity as a ‘deal’, with notes, email history, and next steps

You’re not running a business — but you are running a campaign. A tool like this helps you manage it like a pro, without dropping the ball. When your presence is consistent, your network is growing, and your follow-up is structured, your job search becomes a strategic asset — not just something you’re enduring.

4. Launch and Activate

Marketing doesn’t work without distribution — and neither does a job search. You need to get visible in the right places and conversations.

Prep work:

• Make a list of who to reconnect with (former colleagues, clients, mentors)
• Set a rhythm: 5 DMs a day, 3 comments a week, 1 post every fortnight
• Start adding value — not pitching. Join conversations where your audience already is
• Don’t rely on luck — good networking is proactive, not reactive

When your outreach is grounded in relevance and rhythm, opportunities start to find you.

5. Track What Matters

It’s tempting to obsess over the end goal (a signed offer), but successful campaigns measure leading indicators — the signs that momentum is building.

Prep work:

• Decide what success looks like week-to-week: conversations booked, referrals gained, signals of interest
• Use a spreadsheet or CRM to track what’s working
• Be honest with yourself about what needs tweaking

Think in terms of conversion, not just response. Is your message landing? Are people leaning in?

6. Review, Optimise, Repeat

No marketer gets it perfect on day one. Feedback loops are your friend.

Prep work:

• Revisit what’s resonating and what isn’t — are you getting warm intros or silence?
• Tweak your messaging or audience targeting accordingly
• Don’t be afraid to reposition or refine your offer mid-search

There’s a real confidence boost that comes from seeing your own campaign take shape and build traction — and you don’t need to do it manually every time.

Jerrys’ Final Words

When you treat your career move as a product launch, everything sharpens. The message. The method. The mindset. You might just find that the tools built for marketing teams — including CRMs — are perfectly suited for building your next chapter.

P.S. Notice anything odd above the picture above? MidJourney’s still not quite nailed the anatomy brief — six-fingered humans are alive and well in v6. Great for alien concept art, less so for anything involving hands.