Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A unique selling proposition is a set of attributes that differentiates your products and your brand from your competitors.
What's so special about you?
Great companies design and manufacture products that differentiate their products from others. Familiar brand names such as Apple, Dyson and Tesla come to mind when it comes to the differentiation of products.
Even for commodities like rice, flour, eggs, sugar, bread and butter, you can often see in the supermarket how each brand tries to differentiate itself by telling you how their products have better nutrition, fewer preservatives, and contain more natural and organic ingredients.
The same goes for you as the jobhunter. Do you have a clear USP? Are you sufficiently differentiated from other jobhunters?
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While there is no one direct formula to create your USP, here are a few areas that you can explore.
What's so special about you?
USP lies in the intersection
Let’s say that you have an IT or Computer Science degree and you have worked in a specific field for five years. The world today demands professionals who are not just specialists. If you have strong technical expertise and you understand business well, you will be highly sought after.
If you have an interest in the commercial world, you can take up an MBA. You can choose to study psychology to better understand humans. You can study a foreign language to expand your reach into a culture.
The key is to be willing to differentiate yourself and not settle to be like everyone else.
USP is reserved for experts and specialists
If you are a pilot and you landed your plane in the Hudson River with zero casualty or serious injuries, you have a superb USP. Captain Sully Sullenberger actually did it and he put it in his CV. I highly recommend the movie that featured the dramatic save.
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If you are a specialist doctor and you invented a special procedure to cure a human condition, you have a strong USP.
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In many technical fields, expertise takes time to develop. If you are one of the few rare experts in your field, you have a strong USP.
Therefore, establishing yourself as an expert or a specialist gives you the USP.
One of my clients is in the salvage industry. If you have a ship that is stranded in any part of the world, like the Ever Given container ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal in March 2021, you call my client. They will send salvage specialists that come with the right equipment and expertise to free up your ship.
You can be creative by honing into one area of your field, e.g. you can be a transfer pricing specialist, even though you might know a lot more as a CFO.
Instead of saying that you know 10 different programming languages, why not reach the pinnacle with one or two of them? I know of IT folks who become community leaders in Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or AWS (Amazon Web Services). They are specialists in what they do and they have a passion to help others to grow in the specialist area.
Perhaps you can start a blog or write in a forum of your specialist area. You can start teaching others and conducting workshops. You may even publish a book or establish yourself as a keynote speaker.
USP needs to keep up with the latest development
Apple was the first to develop a smartphone with a large touchscreen. It was revolutionary and it was the iPhone’s USP. But the USP didn’t last very long. Even though Apple keeps innovating, Samsung has overtaken Apple as the largest smartphone company in the world. No doubt that the iPhone and Apple still have many USPs, but Apple cannot stay stagnant.
As a professional, you may have included Microsoft Office as your skill in your CV. This might have been a USP 20 years ago, but today, the ability to use Microsoft Office software is a default requirement. It does not make you special.
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The modern workplace is using many other types of software for work. For example, Slack, Trello, G Suite (from Google), Zoom and Teams. Of course, if you are an advanced user of Microsoft Excel and the job requires it, you may still have an advantage over your competitors.
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In short, you need to keep up-to-date on what can help you to stand out. For the skills that are considered as a baseline, remove them from your CV. You want to use the space in your CV for other interesting items which can showcase your USP.
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You need to evolve to be a better product!