Position yourself as the ideal candidate with this Steve Jobs marketing tip about features vs benefits

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So let’s jump in here. What we’re gonna cover today, why we need to be focusing on. Things other than your responsibilities.

’cause responsibilities come off as very boring when that is. Written in your resume portfolio, et cetera, we’re gonna see what to do instead of just writing out all your responsibilities, we will also be talking about how you can communicate your benefits. ’cause that is what recruiters and hiring managers want to see.

That is what’s going to make you stand out. And this will also help you stand out. For example, if you are. Preparing something for a performance review, let’s say. Okay. And we’re gonna see why we have to be doing this throughout the entire UX job search process. So in case you’re new to my world and you just heard about me on LinkedIn or wherever, or it’s been a [00:01:00] while, I’m Sarah Doty.

I’m a user researcher and product designer. I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, and more recently, around 2017. I kind of pivoted my own career really because the researcher in me noticed this problem that a lot of UX people are not great at UX ing their own careers. So that led me down the path of doing a lot of different things, really centered around UX career coaching.

And I’m the host of Career Strategy Podcast, and like I said. I do career coaching with my company or through my company called Career Strategy Lab, and we’ve really. Everything related to your job search. So whether you’re actively applying or just wanna be proactive, that is what we do inside career strategy labs.

So responsibilities. Why are responsibilities boring? Here’s why. So to understand this, we need to zoom [00:02:00] out a little bit here and. Everything I do is really rooted in the idea that the greatest product you are going to ever, ever, ever work on is you, and I know many of you work on cool products, but the best product you’re gonna work on is literally yourself.

And I wanted to include this visual because it’s really important in order to have a successful product, whether it’s you or anything else. Every product needs three things. Every product needs solid design, right? Solid marketing, and solid, solid sales. Because you can have a product with awesome design, but if it doesn’t have great marketing and sales, no one’s gonna know about it.

No one’s gonna buy it, right? If you have a product that does not have good design, but has good marketing and sales. People [00:03:00] might buy it, but then they’re gonna be disappointed ’cause the product wasn’t good, right? You get the idea. So every successful product needs these three things. Now, when it comes to the product of you, let’s think about that design part.

So that design part really means things like. What you can do, your skills, your knowledge, the experience you have, the software, you know, what kinda makes you different, what makes you valuable, et cetera. And the mistake that many of you make is that you’re communicating the quote design of you through. A very boring feature lens, and I’m gonna show you an example of this in a moment.

And to stand out, you have to switch that so [00:04:00] you’re communicating everything about the design of you through a benefit lens. Alright, so couple of things to think about before we get to those examples. So. Responsibilities, just list of responsibilities really doesn’t do a great job at communicating your value.

Right? And look at these examples here. I created wire frames and Figma responsible for user research and usability tests. I created design systems like, sure, those are. Responsibilities, right? But they’re really just tasks and everyone else does them. Every other candidate that applies to a job will likely have very similar style bullet points in their resume on their LinkedIn, in their portfolio, et cetera, right?

These just generic, boring, kind. Responsibility focused bullets and and content. And what we wanna do is we want to not do this, [00:05:00] and instead we want to go and focus on benefits. So let’s run through kind of one by one feature focused candidate. At the left might say, expert at Figma. Great. Totally boring, but a benefit focused candidate would rephrase that.

Reframe that as prototypes helped reduce, or Figma prototypes, helped reduce dev time by 30%. Great. There’s many other ways you could communicate how you are an expert at Figma. Maybe you talk about other things, but imagine this says, Figma prototypes helps reduce dev time by 30%. Let’s look at another one.

Instead of just saying, skilled at user research, which is boring, it’s just a boring responsibility, we could put that through a benefit lens of research led to 5% drop in support tickets. Great. Now we [00:06:00] know the benefit of the research you did. And that tells a much stronger story than just hearing about, I’m skilled at user research.

It’s like, and you know, okay, same thing with design system expert, right? Instead of just saying on your resume, I’m a design system expert, let’s look at that through a benefit lens. So scaled design system that cut UI bugs in half. Much more powerful, right? Because we’re talking about our expertise in design systems.

Through this benefit lens, and this is very, very important. Because when we think of the users, the people involved in the journey of you getting hired, we have to remember and truly understand, like what are they doing? And so when a recruiter is quite frankly, shopping for a candidate, you know, [00:07:00] they’ve got hundreds of applicants at the top right?

And somehow you have to make it through that, that funnel. Of, uh, being an applicant to getting hired. And so they’re thinking about a lot of things and doing a, a lot of things. They’re vetting people, they’re going to interviews, they’re doing a lot of stuff. And what we wanna do is remember that feature focused candidates get stuck.

If you’re applying to jobs and not getting interviews, you are likely a feature focused candidate. And the candidates that get hired and make it further in that job search funnel over here at the right, those people are the benefit focused candidates. Because benefit focused candidates are more likely to attract the attention and interest of recruiters and hiring managers because their resume does not lead, does not read like a list of [00:08:00] responsibilities.

And by having a resume or LinkedIn that talks about your benefits or in your portfolio too, that is going to catch the attention and interest, which will pull you down that funnel. So you’re an applicant and because you caught their attention, you get invited to the screener call, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So we wanna focus on being benefit. Benefit focused candidates instead of feature focused candidates. Now. Let’s think a little more about how do we become a benefit focused candidate. So we have to be like Apple. And Apple was brilliant at being benefit focused. And let’s look at this old homepage from probably, I don’t know, like 2005.

I’m not sure when the original iPod came out. I know the, the phone came out in 2007, but the iPod [00:09:00] right. So the original Apple homepage had the photo of the iPod and it said iPod, and then 1000 songs in your pocket, and then below it had some more details like how much storage and battery life and all this stuff.

What I really, really want you to pay attention to is that sentence right there, 1000 songs in your pocket. That is a benefit statement, right? The benefit of the iPod, one of them was that you had 1000 songs in your pocket. You know, you didn’t have to walk around with like tons of CDs, right? That only held however many songs, but you could have a thousand songs in your pocket with the iPod.

When they announced the iPod, they didn’t say like, it has this much gigabyte of storage and it’s this many dimensions and everything. And sure, on the website it told you that information, but the hook was the benefit of a thousand songs in your pocket. So [00:10:00] this is kind of the the benefit focused version at the Right, right.

A thousand songs in your pocket. Versus the feature focused version, which is like storage for one gigabyte of MP threes. That’s boring, right? So we want to sound like the version at the right. A thousand songs in your pocket. Same thing with the iPhone, right? When they launched the iPhone, my guess is that messaging about the iPod worked so well.

That they just carried it over when they launched the iPhone and when Steve Jobs was at the announcement at the, I forget the event, apple Developer Conference. I think he didn’t get on the stage and say like, the new iPhone is this many dimensions and this deep and you know, is made of this material and blah, blah, blah.

Like just a boring announcement with like. Product [00:11:00] details. He got on the stage and he said. Your life in your pocket. And he also said the internet in your pocket. And that was the benefit of the iPhone, right? We couldn’t do that until the iPhone. And so we want to be like Apple. We want to be this benefit.

Focused style of communicating about what we do and the benefit of what we have done. So back to our whole philosophy of treating ourselves as a product and thinking about our Venn diagram where we have design, marketing, and sales. We need to know that to market and sell ourselves as a candidate.

It’s really about the benefits, right? And you can’t communicate your benefits until you identify your benefits, until you really [00:12:00] believe your benefits. ’cause maybe some of you are struggling with imposter syndrome or doubt, or you know, having a toxic boss or team from your previous company or maybe even your current company.

And even though. You know, you do good work. You don’t believe it because everyone else around you is like talking down to you or saying negative stuff, right? So we need to identify our benefits, believe our benefits, and then we can communicate those benefits. So. How are we gonna do this? One thing to really be mindful of is that this is not just about your resume or your portfolio or your LinkedIn, this is about all of it, right?

The story that you tell about yourself must be communicated at all what’s called touch points in. Your kind of career marketing [00:13:00] materials, meaning your resume, cover letters, LinkedIn profile, UX portfolio, even emails you are sending to people. I would consider that a touchpoint. Also, conversations you have, you know, for a screener call or interviews, et cetera.

These are all touch points and we have to be very mindful at weaving in the benefits. Throughout all of these touchpoint. So we’ll review some of these feature versus benefit focused sentences. Jonathan’s, for example, Jonathan had agile ninja and then it became articulated user needs, business requirements and technical constraints into design objectives, including as a co-moderator of our design sprint fueled digital outcomes lab.

Much, much clearer. okay, you use ai. Okay. [00:14:00] But I wonder, you know, can we think about the benefit, right? And maybe for some of you, like maybe it’s not a one bullet point, becomes one bullet point, maybe one bullet point or one sentence really becomes three. So maybe Jonathan like. You realize, you know, there were multiple benefits of my agile ninja ness, and I’m going to communicate those three benefits in three different sentences or bullets.

So something to think about also. But even just what you did there obviously is a lot clearer. So good job on that. Let’s see. Shiv said, LED in-depth interviews, ideation, and rapid testing to inform a critical web flow redesign. Okay, good. It’s kind of feature focused. Right? And we don’t know the benefit.

So now we have driving a 36% uptake in task completion [00:15:00] that met service effectiveness goals within eight weeks. Launch. Great. Again, we did this very quickly, but you get the idea that’s more of a benefit lens. And I think to that sentence, we just wanna add like the, the part about the research, right? The in-depth interviews, ideation, rapid testing, et cetera.

And one thing I wanna point out too, when you write in a benefit focused manner, it means that some of these bullet points might be longer. Now, if it’s like seven sentences in one bullet point, that’s obviously too, too long. But don’t worry about the length of them when you just initially start writing these.

You can go back and edit them down later, but we want to get the benefit written down. So that we’re clear about it and then we can worry about the length of, you know, this sentences or, or whatever. But great job. [00:16:00] Okay, let’s do one more. I’m looking for one that has a before and after, just as an example.

Okay, here we go. Erica, we’ll do Erica and Amy. So Erica said. The old version was established research operations and resources to help staff learn from, and involve customers to better understand and meet their needs. Okay, so that tells us like kind of what you did. Right? The new one says established research operations program that empowered 20 staff across three offices to lead five.

Customer research projects. Great. And what I liked too about that one is like we added in numbers, and this is a great example for, you know, projects where you can’t say this made the company a million dollars. Right? Which I think is a, what a lot of you assume metrics means. Metrics is also helping us understand the scale and scope and size of what you did.

And in that case, now we know because Erica told us. It empowered 20 [00:17:00] staff across three offices and led to five customer research projects. Okay. Last one, Amy. Amy said the old version was conducted concept testing for a proposed early paycheck feature. Okay, great. We know Amy does concept testing and then now we have de-risked business plan to offer

early paycheck to customers leading to an increase in direct deposits. Great. And I think in that we’d wanna work in like that. You did that through concept testing, but Excellent. Okay. So hopefully all of you have ideas of how to do this and again, getting inspired by everyone else’s. We gotta keep going though,

so when you’re writing your benefits, I want you to think about. These kind of questions that benefits could answer. So it’s kind of like, well, so what? Like you’re an expert at design systems, you’re an expert at Figma. Well, so what? [00:18:00] Right? Why should I care? Why did that matter? What happened or changed?

So those are just some kind of prompts to help you think about optimizing kind of a feature bullet so it becomes a benefit bullet. Alright, so to recap here. Responsibilities are not results. Responsibilities are boring. Responsibilities just sound like a job description, and recruiters and hiring managers want to see benefits ’cause that is going to attract their attention and interest.

So I assure you also so many people communicate in a feature lens. A responsibility lens that if you take the time to communicate your skills and experience through a benefit lens, you will stand out. Okay? So we have to infuse the benefits though into all touch points, not just [00:19:00] resume right, or portfolio, et cetera.

It has to be at every opportunity, every touch point, and. You can see how easy this is, right? We just did it. So imagine if you had 30 minutes to do this, you do a much better job. But even the, the bad first drafts we saw today are great. And in order to do this though, we have to take the time to identify our benefits.

Really, really believe them and internalize them, and then we can truly, truly write them out and include them across all of the touch points. remember our Venn diagram with design market and selling the product of you.

That selling part. A lot of people just, it gives them like gross feeling when they hear sales and they think like, ugh. It’s like manipulation and just like bragging and slimy and like tricking people. That’s not sales. Sales is owning your story and communicating it powerfully. [00:20:00] It also has to do with relationships.

But we don’t have time to get into that today. I will say a couple years ago I did hiring for companies where, you know, they hired me too. Write job descriptions and hire people for them. And I saw hundreds of UX resumes, hundreds of portfolios, and it was just so, so painful to see how boring these resumes were because they literally sounded like job descriptions, like I was responsible for this, responsible for that, et cetera.

And it’s like after five, it’s boring. Let alone 200. Okay. That is all the time we have.

Have a great rest of your day and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye everyone. Thanks for coming.