Sell Yourself for Success

What do I mean by selling yourself for success? Simply put, it’s the way you communicate your skills, abilities, and motivations to a potential employer. There are many ways to sell yourself outside of communication. It can start with what you’re wearing, your posture, maintaining eye contact, the CV you send, and your overall tone of voice, to name a few. For the purpose of this blog (and in the interest of not taking too much of your time), I’m going to be focusing on WHAT you are communicating to the employer—what you should do, what you shouldn’t do—with the aim of providing some assistance to help you succeed and to give you something to think about in your next interview preparation.

Find the Balance in Cyber Security Recruitment Jobs

Selling yourself usually goes one of two ways in an interview. You either oversell or undersell. The success comes in the middle. When you oversell yourself, you create doubt in the interviewer. Did they really do all that? Can this genius cyber security engineer really recite the ENTIRETY of ISO27001?! I may be dramatising, but the point remains. You can't do it all, and everyone knows that.

Usually, when you oversell these elaborate stories, they end up being about a project that an entire team delivered that, at the end of the day, doesn’t mean a thing to the person interviewing you. They don’t care what the team did; they want to know what YOU did. They want to know how you encountered a problem and the steps YOU took to overcome it.

Otherwise, it goes the other way. The CCIE network architect comes across to the interviewer as someone who may or may not have set up a home lab at some time in the past year—or seven. The IRAP assessor who has produced thousands of reports seems like they don’t even know what the Essential 8 is….

If you approach selling yourself in either of these two ways, chances are you aren’t getting a call with an offer, whether you’re applying for a chief information security officer role or a cyber security contract job.

How to Sell Yourself in Cyber Security Recruitment

So, how do you sell yourself? There’s a fine line between confidence and capability. You have to know that any skill, tech, or project you mention, you have a real example of how you implemented, utilised, or contributed. Otherwise, you risk seeming less capable and overconfident.

Always back what you say with examples of what you, yourself, did in projects—how you implemented a certain tool or how your skills meant that you configured the firewall faster than expected.

Use the STAR method. Seems obvious, but it's proven.

The STAR method is broken into four steps:

• SITUATION – What was the context? What did you need to achieve? What was the outcome you were working towards?
• TASK – How were you going to achieve this outcome?
• ACTION – Outline the steps you took to get to the outcome. Highlight the issues you faced and how you overcame them.
• RESULT – What did you achieve? How did this compare to the initial situation? Did you save the business money? Did you reduce timeframes? How did you do this?

Using this method ensures that you convey to whoever you are interviewing with that you understood what you needed to do, how to do it, and what the final result was. This is how you sell yourself for success in any cyber security jobs in Australia, whether it’s in cyber security architecture, GRC, or offensive security. Read more about the STAR method and other resources on our interview preparation page.

Know Your Strengths & Showcase Your Career

Now, there are a heap of ways for you to sell yourself. The key to doing this correctly is knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and what you are looking for in your next role. This allows you to speak (using STAR) to these strengths. Bringing relevant examples of where you showcased your skills—and, in some cases, where your weaknesses were highlighted and the steps you took to overcome them.

Don’t be the person who oversells and claims to know it all. Similarly, don’t be the person who has been in the industry forever and seemingly doesn’t know anything. Be the person in the middle—use the STAR method and showcase your skills in a way that demonstrates you knew what you were achieving and how you got there.

Remember, more than likely, you aren’t the unicorn that knows it all—and that’s okay! There’s a reason cyber security specialists exist across so many specialist fields. But if you are the unicorn that knows it all, send me your CV.

Ready to secure the skills to protect and defend your business? Or looking for your next exciting cyber role? Whether it's for long or short-term contracts or a permanent role, we are Australia's top Cyber Security recruitment agency, committed to providing the best talent and expertise to meet your needs.