How to stand out using the AIDA framework

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the career strategy podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop dreading Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Hey, friend.

Sarah Doody [00:00:39]: Welcome back. Today’s episode is going to introduce you to 4 letters that are a part of a framework that has guided me in my career. And my hope is these four letters become ingrained in your mind and come back to you when you are in situations where you need to communicate more effectively, where you need to connect with people, where you need to market and sell yourself as a candidate in your career or job search. Alright. So let’s just dive right in here. The four letters are a I d a or as I call it, ADA. Now, I learned about this almost 2 decades ago, to be honest. I read this book.

Sarah Doody [00:01:28]: It was in there. It stuck with me then, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my head. It has really guided a lot of things I’ve worked on, whether projects or my own resume, my own job search, my own marketing of my own products and services. So what do the letters a I d a stand for? Attention, interest, desire, and action. Now ADA is something that companies of all sizes, of all stages, of all types, from Apple to Starbucks to Microsoft to Amazon to you name it. ADA is happening in the background with these companies all of the time. And this is at play in many scenarios, but let’s talk about a familiar scenario that maybe you can relate to. So have you ever been on Instagram and something caught your attention? A product that you didn’t know existed caught your attention.

Sarah Doody [00:02:37]: Right? Then what happens? You become interested and you start to pay attention more when you see that product or company other places online, maybe on other social media platforms, or you give them your email or phone number, and they start emailing you or texting you and things like that. And because that company already caught your attention, you are interested when you see that company later, whether, like I said, it’s in your email inbox, another social media post, whatever. And time goes on and you are interested and you keep staying interested, and then you start to experience desire. Right? You start to imagine your life with this product. You imagine if it’s clothing, you know, what it’s gonna look like or where you’re going to wear this thing to. Or if it’s travel, you’re imagining yourself, you know, in that, city or at that hotel or resort, whatever it is. The more you are exposed to it and you are interested that desire builds, and then guess what? Many times you end up taking action. That is the ultimate goal of adaP.

Sarah Doody [00:03:58]: We want to get people’s attention so that they stay interested long enough to create enough desire that they are moved to take action. That is ADA at its core. Now, what does this mean for your career? Let’s think about this scenario of someone who is looking for a job and kind of imagine a horizontal line on a piece of paper, and over the left that’s where you Sarah, and over at the right, that is your next job. Ada is gonna happen in the middle, and this is why most people’s job searches end up taking months, sometimes even years, because they don’t think about Ada happening in their job search. So, let’s imagine a recruiter or a hiring manager because in essence, the process of you getting hired is very similar to the process of you going and buying that new pair of shoes or booking that hotel or something. Right? At the end of the day, you are a customer, and in your job search, the recruiter or hiring manager is a customer, and they are, for sake of our analogy, purchasing you your skills, your experience, etc. So, let’s think about that experience of a recruiter or hiring manager. And let’s imagine first you need to get that recruiter or hiring manager’s attention.

Sarah Doody [00:05:36]: So imagine you applied for a job and that recruiter or hiring manager is going through the applications or going through resumes, etc. The goal is that something about your resume catches their attention, and to do that we need to create a resume that makes you stand out from other candidates. And, that’s a combination of the literal content or words on your resume, as well as the design of that resume, and that’s how we’re going to catch their attention. Great. Now, when we catch their attention, guess what? They are interested in you, in your resume. And because they are interested, they are going to spend more than likely more than 6 seconds on your resume because you have made it easy for them to go through your resume and read the bullet points that are compelling, that use action verbs, that quantify your impact and the outcome, etcetera. And your resume is able to hold their interest which is how they’re going to spend more than 6 seconds on your resume. Great.

Sarah Doody [00:06:57]: The longer they spend on your resume, their desire to learn more about you grows, right? Because they’re able to read more about your skills and experience that you’ve put into place in your previous jobs. And as that desire builds, guess what? They are going to take action. And in this case, hopefully, invite you to an interview, that first interview. And that’s how ADA plays out just in that early stage of your job search of you applying for a job and a recruiter or hiring manager vetting you as a candidate because you caught their attention, they were interested, your resume kept them interested which created desire, which caused them to take action and invite you for an interview. Now this ada experience continues. Imagine you’re at an interview. Great. Ada happens.

Sarah Doody [00:07:59]: You get their attention with maybe your first couple of answers to their questions. Therefore, they are interested and they don’t try and multitask or tune out or cut the interview short. And because they’re interested, their desire is building for you as a candidate, and maybe they invite you to the next round of interviews. And this continues and continues until the ultimate action is taken where you are offered a job. So that is ADA. And the thing is a lot of candidates do not think about this, number 1, because they’ve never heard about it. But number 2 because a lot of times in our job search we are thinking so much about ourselves and rightly so. However, when you flip it and you think about the customer or user, if you wanna call it that, in your job search and you think about what am I doing to capture their attention, to create interest, to create desire that then leads them to take action.

Sarah Doody [00:09:11]: That’s what you need to be thinking about, and this is at play on your resume, on your LinkedIn profile, on your portfolio if you have one, what you say in interviews, even in cold messages you send to people. This is at play. So, I want you to think about this for whatever part of your job search you may be in or maybe you’re in the early stages of still getting your resume and portfolio and things ready to go, but really have this in mind and maybe just write it on a sticky note, put it on your laptop or computer so you don’t forget this. Because as you’re doing these things, just be thinking, what am I doing to capture attention, interest, desire so that they take action? And even, am I making it easy for them to take action? This could be, you know, regarding your portfolio. Let’s say, if your portfolio, you know, requires a password and you don’t tell them the password, or it’s a really complicated password, or, you just forgot to give them the password, that’s making it hard for them to take action, right, to actually view your portfolio. So attention, interest, desire, action. If you wanna see a visual of this, look in the show notes for this episode because I’m going to link you to, an Instagram post I did with a little visual that will help you kinda see this in action if you’re more the visual type. And that is Ada, short and sweet.

Sarah Doody [00:10:55]: I hope this helped you think differently and helps you think more strategically in the future as you consider the experience that people have, you know, on the other side of hiring. Now if you’re not looking for a job right now, you’re probably thinking of how this integrates into maybe your function in sales or in marketing or maybe you’ve heard this before. But if we apply this to our careers and our job Sarah, I promise you are going to be more strategic because your career materials will be designed in a way that creates this ADA experience so people take the desired action more quickly. Alright. So that is all for today. I hope you learned something. Maybe share this with a friend and have them listen and you can discuss it and figure out how you can apply it to your own career. And, this is really kind of the anchor of what we teach in career strategy lab.

Sarah Doody [00:12:05]: Everything that we teach is designed to help create this ADA at all steps of your job search. So if you’re listening to this and you are a part of career strategy lab, you’re probably thinking to yourself, ah, I see this at play in everything that we do in career strategy lab. So that is all for today. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and I will see you later. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to the career strategy podcast. Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it.

Sarah Doody [00:12:47]: Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you later.