The Briefcase Technique

This is a bad time to be unemployed. Stable, wealth producing jobs are disappearing from our country at a frightening rate. Since it has been 27 years since I last did the job search thing, I feel quite inadequate to address the dilemmas faced by today’s job seekers. From time to time I have found suggestions that seem to have merit that I could pass along to readers of this blog. The following method taught by Ramit Sethi of the “I Will Teach You to be Rich” blog seems to be most appropriate for freelancers, but the presenter also has collected data showing it works when looking for a job or getting a raise.

The foundation of this technique, indeed the foundation of all such efforts in today’s economic climate must be what the author terms, “amazing preparation.” Before approaching a potential client or employer, understand their business, their problems and challenges. Networking, research on the web, or preliminary informal conversations with low level employees who are tasked with keeping people like you away from the decision makers are all ways of collecting valuable intelligence data.

When you have finally earned an interview with a responsible manager with real decision making power bring your briefcase along with you into the room. At some appropriate point, perhaps when the subject of price or salary comes up, or when potential client or employer asks the question, “What’s in it for me?” Pull a one to five page proposal out of your briefcase and hand it to the interviewer.

Announce you have prepared this paper to detail the things you can do for the company. It should be a menu, allowing the reader the potential of selecting one from column A and two from column B.

Sethi contends the technique works because it takes the focus off you and your needs and squarely addresses the customer and their needs. He contends that one of the main reasons people are not employed is the very real fear that a new hire will require a lot of the manager’s time to train or coach them into a productive employee. Sethi also notes that managers don’t want to create anything like a five page proposal but they love to tweak and edit such proposals. In my experience this is absolutely true. Providing a manager with something they love to do anyway, seems pretty smart to me.

When applying this technique to more responsibility and a concurrent raise, at the end of the proposal include comparable salary data from a third party website or some similarly authoritative source.

Ramit Sethi The Briefcase Technique Video