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Today’s guest post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

So how do you interview and land the job you want,

at the salary you desire,

with the benefits you need?

It’s as simple as J.O.B. training, says career expert Mark Schnurman.  Mark’s piece in the Star Ledger this past week was phenomenal.  You can read the online link here.  In sum, Mark breaks down the process of selling yourself into three categories.

First, it’s important to convince your interviewer that you have JOB SPECIFIC SKILLS.  If you are interviewing for a job in car sales, it’s important to stress your ability to close the deal, maintain relationships well after the sale is made, etc.  The interviewer needs to hear that you can handle the 3-4 key skills that are absolutely necessary for the job.

Next, Mark suggests that you support your job specific skills with OVERALL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE.  If you have a lot of experience, stress this.  If your character is amazingly solid, emphasize that.  If you’ve never been sick in the last ten years, mention this.  These are the “soft” qualities that people too often stress first in an interview. It’s not that they’re not important- they are.  The key is to wrap them around your job specific skills.

Finally, Mark recommends that you emphasize how much you would BE A GOOD FIT for the organization.  This is a culture question- would you be a good match for the general vibe of the culture in which you’re hoping to work?  Don’t fake it, just be yourself.  I would recommend that you interview within a culture that you accept and see the good in.  If youre only interest is in making an organization different from what it currently is (I think we would put that in the “hatchet man” category), there might be some room for deeper reflection.

GTD APPLICATION

From a GTD perspective, interviewing and finding the job you want is just another outflow of your project list.  As Stephen has often posted here at Productivity in Context, a running list of all of your projects is essential to productivity.  Here’s how the landing of your new job could play out in a project list:

1. List “New Job” as a project
2. List “Next Actions” such as: identify 3 online job banks, call 4 contacts for advice, edit resume

Then go to it!  When you have a trajectory playing out in your mind and in your projects list, your job hunt will go smoother.  You won’t feel like to you have to be job searching at every hour of the day (thank God!) and the job you want will eventually come your way.  If it sounds too simplistic, it’s not.  I’ve used this process many times and it always pays off.  Good luck!