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So I want to talk about something this week that comes up in almost every conversation I have with women in the middle of a job search. It's a little bit of a controversial take, but I think it's true.
The hardest part of a job search isn't the applications. It isn't the networking. It isn't even the interviews themselves. The hardest part is doing the work to figure out what you, and only you, uniquely bring to the table, and then being able to say that out loud with some confidence.
Ultimately, a job search is a sales process. You have to be able to articulate why they should buy you, how you are going to create value for them and how you are going to change their business.
Two Statements, Not One
This is something we spend a lot of time on inside the In Women's Health Career Mastermind. It's the core focus of the first week because it's such an important building block to everything else. Being able to talk about what you uniquely bring to the table consists of two parts. Most people try to collapse it into one and end up doing neither well.
Your Unique Value Add is the combination of your strengths, your skills, and your experience, the stuff you actually deliver, put in language that's familiar to business.
Shows up in: your resume summary, your LinkedIn headline, your cover letter, your 30-second pitch, your About Us, your LinkedIn comment and content strategy, and more.
This answers the question a hiring manager is quietly asking the whole time she's reading your resume: what is this person actually going to do for me? What value do they uniquely bring to the table? It's not your accomplishments. Those sit separately. This is the layer underneath those accomplishments, the why of what allowed you to have them. It's not "I sold $10M of business, or met quota for 20 years," it's what about your personality, your experience, and the way you conduct business that allowed you to do that.
Your Only You statement is different. It's not about what you deliver, it's about what makes you memorable, the intersection of your personal life and your professional life that nobody else walking through that door can claim.
Shows up in: your networking opener, the story you tell in the first few minutes of an interview, your resume summary, your cover letter.
It answers a different question: why will I remember her after this conversation ends? It's what the hiring manager says to the team member when they're talking about your candidacy: "She's the X, Y, Z person."
Maybe an example is useful here.
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Unique Value Add
"I combine data-driven decision-making with deep empathy for the patient experience, which I bring to women's health marketing roles, and it allows me to build campaigns that connect authentically while still driving measurable results." That's what you deliver.
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Only You
"I'm the only marketing lead who has both launched a Series A femtech brand and lived through my own high-risk pregnancy, so I know exactly where the message needs to land and where it can't." That's what makes you memorable.
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Why This Is So Hard
I think the reason this is so hard for people, and honestly it's hard for me too, is that it requires a level of introspection most of us try to avoid. You have to sit with who you actually are, what you're good at, what makes you different. You have to go layers and layers deeper than just the accomplishment itself.
Then you have to figure out how to say all of that in a way business actually understands, which gets even harder if you're coming out of a nonprofit or a hospital system or a government role, where impact doesn't naturally come dressed up in numbers the way it does in the corporate world.
So people skip it. They use generic language. They get lazy and lean on accomplishments only. They go straight to tailoring the resume, rehearsing the same three interview answers, sending out fifty applications a week. And then they're confused about why nothing is landing.
The Reframe
Getting a job is, at the end of the day, a sales process. And sales isn't about volume, it's about story, about being able to talk with real confidence about what you specifically bring to the table and tie that directly to what the company actually needs.
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