Pitch 🙋 Day 22 - Networking Advent Calendar
The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this? Missed Day 1? Read more here.
Day 22: Write your elevator pitch
On Day 5, we talked about (re)writing your bio, which is a specific form of introducing yourself for social media. While we get ready for January, the hottest hiring/networking month of the entire year, let’s sit down and create a more detailed elevator pitch. Here’s a 3-step process on how to do that.
Start with a laundry list
Before you try to write a pitch that’s perfect in one go, start by just listing out everything you’ve done. Don’t worry about writing full sentences either, try to cover as much ground as you can with keywords. An example from my own experiences:
Event organizer. Team of 6. Design, social media, planning, project management, public speaking. 50-300 guests. Student of the Year Award.
Management consultant trainee. PwC Academy, data analysis, business planning, conflict mediation & team leadership. Best Fellow Award.
Startup recruiter. Hired for 5 companies. Sales, marketing, engineering, data, finance, people, machine learning. Average 2 hires per month, 24.5% conversion rate to final stage. 5 ATS. Processes, training, employer branding.
I avoided using the exact job titles I held because they weren’t very intuitive to outsiders, and I used the easier to understand versions instead. This advice is echoed by big tech recruiters that you should adapt your past job titles to the companies you’re applying to.
Find a story
One issue with most self-introductions or pitches I hear is that they are basically a verbal version of the CV. So where’s the pitch part?
Based on the laundry list from before, add another section on what you’re motivated by and what you’d like to do in the future. Our past doesn’t have to define us, and someone who is constantly seeking to grow and evolve themselves is a candidate that hiring companies want to speak to.
Same tip applies here: don’t use hyper-specific job titles to define what you want to do. You can even use mission statements like “I want to help more women gain financial knowledge and make informed decisions by creating accessible software” rather than “I want to be a junior UX designer in fintech”.
Revise, rehearse, repeat
Finally, it’s not a pitch unless you can say it. Stitch the first two parts together through your story, make some revisions as you see fit, and start rehearsing. Record yourself saying it until you’re comfortable with how these words flow out of your mouth. If words don’t sound right, keep tweaking them and changing them.
Rehearse this in front of your family and friends, and ask for their advice. This could be a great exercise to do during holiday times, and is even better when your family and friends don’t work in the same industry as you do; they will force you to take out all the jargon and make it make sense.
January is when companies finalize their hiring budget for the new year and when they’ll be on the hunt for great future employees. Prepare yourself for January and have fun pitching!
Are these networking exercises helpful? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!