In today’s increasingly digitized world, the resume is becoming more important than ever before. Your resume is one of the first ways potential employers get to know you, after all, which means it needs to be as polished as possible in order to make a good impression. However, crafting an excellent resume can be tricky, even if (or perhaps especially if) you have a lot of experience under your belt. If this is the case, let us offer you a few tips on how to achieve the best executive resume format and really “wow” your potential and future employers!
Research the Best Keywords
You’ve likely noticed how rapidly keywords are growing in significance in the business world. It turns out keywords are just as important to personal marketing as it is to commercial marketing. But just what are the best keywords to use?
Specific job titles are a great place to start. Use any and every high ranking position you’ve held in the past on your resume to help catch an employer’s eye. This is one of the easiest and best ways to display your credentials. Additionally, anything you frequently performed or used on the average work day, from PC programs to basic duties, are fair game. You’ll also want to give employers a clear image of what your previous positions entailed and what they can expect from you if you’re hired. The idea is to be very detailed since you don’t know what keywords will prompt a prospective employer to look at your resume.
Have a Point
There are very few instances where people like rambling. Don’t lose sight of the point of your resume as you write. While this may sound obvious, it is very easy to get lost in the slew of details you’ll need to include and forget to get to the heart of the matter. The most important goal of your executive bio is to get hired for the job you want. Showcase who you are and what you can do for the company you want to work for by listing your skills and strengths with relevance to the company’s needs. Before you even start on your resume, we recommend scoping out the industry so you can fine-tune your expectations and objectives.
Be Brief
You want to detail your expertise on a point-by-point basis. Being concise will automatically score you points with an employer because this shows you understand and respect that they have one minute—at the most—to review your resume. This will also help them to understand more about you as a professional in that amount of time.
You can accomplish this by writing out a summarizing paragraph on your resume’s first page. If you need help properly paring down your credentials down to a short paragraph, you can turn to a cover letter writing service for help.
If you’ve followed us for a while, or just have ample knowledge of how job searching and the professional world work, then you know the importance of crafting a personal brand. This is how you appeal to other professionals, especially those who may hire you to work for them later on. The main issue for anyone attempting c-level personal branding, however, is figuring out how to go about it efficiently. In this blog, we’ll give you a few tips on how to brand yourself efficiently and catch the eye of recruiters in an instant!
Include Your Accomplishments
While this goes without saying, your accomplishments within your industry will be some of the most important elements of your personal brand and should not be ignored. The key aspect here is how you incorporate them. You don’t want to splay them all out like playing cards strewn on a table. Rather, you can frame them in a way that appeals more readily to employers.
For a few ideas on how to do this, you can always rely on a team of the best executive resume writers in your area or do a bit of independent research. While you should strive to keep your entire resume brief, you can add a bit of color to your stories by describing them in the form of a (very) brief story—three lines maximum, to be precise.
Think About How You’ve Contributed to Your Industry
This part of brand construction may prove a bit challenging, but it is the perfect method of showing any recruiter or hiring agent how you are a valuable employee. By creating your personal brand, you are effectively telling other professionals a story. Make it appealing by getting to the meat of the action! This means displaying your contributions to the past companies you’ve worked for. It may help to follow the C-A-R formula for these contribution stories, ‘C-A-R’ meaning Challenge, Action and Result. Think about what was being asked of you at the time, how you completed the task at hand and what happened afterward.
Research as Much as Possible
Oftentimes catching a glimpse of others’ work and ideas can help inspire you. If you’re stumped as to how to start or flesh out your personal brand, looking at how others have constructed theirs can give you a boost. We don’t mean lifting someone else’s work entirely, however! Writing an effective resume means showcasing your own strengths and individualizing yourself. Copying someone else entirely defeats the purpose.
As you surf through your Google results and check out what other people are doing, be sure to evaluate your own methods and ideas. How can you apply what they’re doing to your own strengths and accomplishments? Think about how you have influenced your previous employers in ways no one else did. This will help you figure out how to brand yourself well.
Additionally, it may help to get in touch with a professional resume writer to learn what you can do to better market yourself. You may come away with a new perspective toward your career and professional potential that you’ve never considered before, one that will wow employers on the spot!
When you’re in the middle of a job hunt, it can be hard to know which resources to focus on most and which are worth your while. While the Internet—and especially social media—has been brushed off in the past as a means of finding work, it now can serve as an extremely valuable tool during your job search efforts. Here’s how you can make the most of it!
1. Communicate
Social media is just that: social! Now is a prime opportunity to try and reach out to other people in your industry. Many of today’s social media platforms feature chat rooms about a myriad of subjects. You can easily find one related to your chosen industry and get to know other professionals in your area of expertise. They can help point you in the right direction as far as who’s hiring and what’s going on in your field.
2. Take Advantage of Popular Social Media Platforms
Thanks to their widespread usage, you may have come to associate the most popular social media sites, like LinkedIn and Facebook, as either purely for socialization and fun, or are simply skeptical as to whether they can really help you during your job search. As it turns out, this is one situation where you should truly believe the hype!
While sites Twitter, Facebook and others like it are most commonly used for social networking, you don’t want to discount the networking aspect. If you play your cards right and focus your efforts on business, you can use your social media accounts to forge worthwhile connections that can lead you to better job opportunities. Now would be a great time to create your LinkedIn profile if you haven’t already.
3. Google Yourself
While this may sound a bit vain, you’ll want to Google yourself before you set up any social media accounts just for the sake of seeing what comes up. Letting this go unchecked means you risk the chance of potential employers running into something unsavory when (and not if!) they look you up. You’re better off playing it safe and checking up on what’s associated with you on the Internet. Otherwise, it could end up costing you valuable job opportunities.
4. Be Direct
You don’t need to be discreet about your job search! Let those close to you know you’re in the midst of a hunt. You’ll need all the help you can get, and you never know where great connections will come from! Even if they don’t know any people who can directly provide you with work, they’ll be able to keep a look out for opportunities for you.
5. Focus on Networking
One of the best and most important aspects of any social media platform is its ability to quickly and easily put you in contact with millions of people, regardless of location. Be sure to use this to advantage! This will a key element to your Facebook and LinkedIn profile development. By researching the higher ups of the companies you’re interested in working for, you’ll know how to frame your social media accounts to better appeal to them. It will also be easier for you to get in touch with them and make a good impression.
We hope these tips will help you utilize social media far more easily as you look for your next career position. Of course, if you find yourself overwhelmed or confused, you can always turn to LinkedIn profile writing services to help you make the most of professional social media usage. Don’t hesitate to turn to your nearest resume writing service for your other job search needs!
While social media is a relatively new development, it has made waves around the world thanks to its exceptionally wide reach. It can now be used to influence the world, whether it’s through helping others form lasting friendships or simply staying in touch with those they love, inspire political change or even communicate consumer needs to businesses across the globe. Anyone in the middle of a job search can benefit from social media to land the perfect new job. Here’s what you can do to boost your success!
Utilize Your Options Well
While social media is an amazing means of connecting with employers and fellow professionals, you can’t try the spaghetti method by throwing options wildly and going with whatever adheres. You have to plan exactly how to use your social media profiles to their fullest and stay diligent with it. Creating a
LinkedIn profile is a good place to start because it will put you in touch with millions of professionals in your industry, as well as businesses looking for someone with your talents. You’ll ultimately want to sign up with more than one service because this will give you the chance to collect a greater number of opportunities and news about jobs available to you out there.
We must highlight the fact maintaining any kind of social media presence takes time and investment. For instance, while writing a tweet may take up only 140 characters, you have to plan how to use those characters as efficiently as possible to market yourself. Before you even think of signing up for that first account, you’ll want to consider how you’ll go about advertising yourself and which channels will serve you best for this goal.
Don’t Discount Social Media Entirely
Quite a few people still dismiss social media as a vapid pastime with no hope of generating serious forms of engagement. As time has repeatedly proven, however, this viewpoint is several shades of wrong. Millions of businesses in this day and age have caught on to the social media wave and are using it to reach out to more consumers than ever before. In fact, many of today’s job board sites also have social media accounts you can follow so you can stay on top of opportunities to apply.
If businesses and job boards can take proper advantage of it, so can you! Proper
LinkedIn profile development will be key to establishing your professional online presence so you’ll want to get on-board with what social media can offer you and reap the benefits of those opportunities.
Take Advantage of the ‘Social’ Aspect of Social Media
There’s no point in using any social media platform for your job search if all you’re planning to do is push out posts and never interact with anyone. Reaching out to other professionals can help you stay in the know as far as what today’s job boards are posting. You’ll soon find a wealth of opportunities pooling toward you from across the web, likely from job boards you’ve never heard of before!
If the idea of social media intimidates you, you aren’t alone. You can depend on a
LinkedIn profile writing service to help you get started. We recommend to
get in touch with your nearest resume writing service and start learning the ropes today!
Career changes are becoming increasingly common in today’s ever-shifting world, especially as people with multiple skills and access to different, better options are leaving less fulfilling careers to move toward new opportunities. No matter who you are and how secure you are in this decision, switching to a new field can be incredibly daunting. This holds especially true if you’ve spent several years within your old field and are just now gaining the chance and confidence to move onto the new. How can you market yourself and get your foot in the door? Will any of your old experiences and skill sets help you gain the job you want?
Luckily, there are a few things you can do to help boost your chances of successfully breaking into a new industry.
1. Don’t Forget Your “Extracurriculars”
Not every experience included on your resumes and cover letters has to be on the job. As long as it applies in some shape or form to the jobs you’re applying for and the industry you’re trying to get a foothold in, it will appeal to potential employers. You can include such things as internships and organizations, among others.
2. Rewrites Are Likely
After spending so much time building up your resume for your current field, it may feel like a waste to scrap it and start anew for a job change. However, it’s worth it for a variety of reasons. Each job you’ll apply to will have different interests and needs, which you will have to analyze in terms of how well you’ll fit. Tailoring your resume to different jobs makes sense because it gives employers a sharp idea of how well you’ll fit in with the company. If this idea seems daunting to you, you can always turn to a professional resume writing service for ways to rewrite your resume effectively!
3. Keep It Brief
You may feel tempted to pad your resume if you don’t have quite enough experience in your new field. Don’t! You have merely a few seconds to catch a potential employer’s attention, and overloading them with information about your experiences, whether true or embellished, is just the right way to turn them off completely. Make the most of your resume by including only the most important experiences and other bits of professional information.
4. Format Your Resume Properly
Not even the most spectacular resume will make the cut if there are noticeable formatting errors. The good news is you have a bit of wiggle room when it comes to acceptable resume formats. There are letter resumes, which amount stylistically to experience-based cover letters; functional resumes, which focus on any skills you have in relation to your chosen field; and chronological resumes, which organize your experiences from newest to oldest. Feel free to pick whichever format is right for you!
No matter what field you’re trying to enter, you can rely on top rated resume writing services to help you craft an appealing resume! Don’t hesitate to get in touch to learn how you can improve your prospects and earn the job you deserve.
For many, interviews can be some of the hardest parts of the job seeking process. This holds especially true for the naturally nervous and the socially clumsy, as well as those who just don’t cope well with pressuring social situations. If any of those last three descriptions fit you, we understand your worries. The good news is you don’t have to wring your hands over interviews! In this article, we’ll go over the three most common ways people bungle their job interviews and how you can avoid these mistakes and ace your own interview!
1. Revealing Too Much Unavailability
Let’s face it: employers will rarely hire someone who lives several hours away from the company office. It is unrealistic to expect or believe someone who lives too far away will be able to consistently make it in to work on time. Furthermore, if other circumstances limit your ability to work on a consistent basis, this will also count against you.
While we’d recommend simply not applying for any jobs you know you’ll have trouble commuting to for any reason, sometimes you have valid reasons for picking that employer. For instance, you could be in the middle of a move, so your being too far away is simply a minor and temporary technicality. In the meantime, you may want to borrow the address of a friend or relative who lives in the area until you’re able to relocate properly.
2. Aggression
Of course, you always want to have and maintain a go-getter attitude when it comes to applying for jobs. If you don’t, you’ll never get a job at all! However, there’s a difference between being motivated and being pushy, and you never want to come off as the latter. This is the easiest way to ruin your chances of being called back.
Once you’ve interviewed, do not try to call the employer with no warning whatsoever. In the meantime, spend that energy elsewhere if you can’t get rid of it, such as by working with a team of professional executive resume writers to tweak your resume and related documents. The most you should do is send out an email to the employer, re-introducing yourself. This will help you stick in their head as a potential candidate.
3. Neglecting Your Pitch
No matter what company you’re seeking to work for, all of them will want to get to know you during the interview process. Ideally, you can use this chance to reveal strengths that your resume will not necessarily show (even if you’re a pro at writing resumes that get you hired)! Having a great pitch will catch your interviewer’s attention and let them know you’re worth giving a chance. If you bungle this, you could risk your entire chance at getting the job. Think about who you are and what your professional strengths are before going to the interview to help hash out how to market yourself to your employer.
Additionally, you may want to rely on an executive resume writing service to help ensure you have a better chance of landing interviews—and jobs! The best thing to do is get in touch with a team of professional executive resume writers to help turn your prospects around.
Close but No Cigar: How to Handle It When Hiring's Not Happening
BlogJob Search
Job searches are hard. We understand. Figuratively, you’re casting your line out in the world’s largest pond, already flanked with fishermen with just as much skill as you, and the fish headed your way are extremely choosy as to whose lure they’ll take. So what happens when you work your hardest, buy the best possible line and lures and camp out for hours chasing fish after fish, but fail to get a single bite?
Discouragement is the most frequent and understandable emotion. If you’ve been putting in applications to job after job but have yet to be hired by anyone, we realize and acknowledge your frustrations. However, you have to keep trying! Here’s what you can do to try and keep yourself afloat while your job search continues.
Check Over Your Resume
While this may sound like an irrelevant suggestion, it could very well ring true that you don’t have enough information included within your resume to push employers to hire you. Sometimes we shortchange ourselves by underestimating our skills. Sometimes we fail to see how certain skills and experiences relate to the industries we’re trying to work in, so we leave them out of our executive resume bio and flesh out the rest of what we have to offer. Go back over your resume and think about all of your qualifications, experiences and skills and whether you could have skipped over anything that could prove useful. Chances are you’ll come across something you shouldn’t have left out, but other times you may just need to tweak the wording to better align with keywords that potential employers search for.
Re-evaluate Your Prospective Jobs
If your resume checks out, you may be using it to approach the wrong positions. Again, this happens more often than you’d think! Look back on all of the applications you’ve submitted recently and make a note of what you find. While you’re doing this, be sure to consider your own skills and where you fit in terms of what the employer is asking for. Sometimes we apply to positions even when we don’t have exactly the right credentials. Other times, we simply may not yet have enough experience in the field to qualify for certain positions in it.
Invest in Some Self-Improvement
If you find a dissonance between the types of jobs you want and the types of jobs you qualify for, now is the best time to start brushing up on your professional skills so your executive LinkedIn profile (and other branding tools) will more adequately reflect your potential. You can potentially improve your professional skills by taking adult courses to learn any necessary software, researching what skills are becoming more relevant in your industry and much more.
It also helps to review the best ways to market yourself to any and all prospective employers. A professional resume company can assist you by critiquing your executive resume cover letter and much more! Be sure to reach out to your nearest and most qualified executive resume company to get back on the right track with your job search today!
So you’ve learned the importance of a personal brand and have made the decision to start working on your own…but what’s next? This is a very common question that has been asked by several senior level professionals just like you. As it turns out, building a personal brand is hard, but it can very much be done! Here’s how.
1. Think About Yourself
Every employee, and especially every senior level professional, has something significant to offer a company. You will have to tap into just what your skills and positive personal traits are before you begin crafting your personal brand. In fact, this is the first step of c-level personal branding. It may help to approach this issue from the perspective of an employer and figure out what traits are most desirable in any employee, then work backwards to hash out what makes you unique from every other applicant out there. Craft a story about yourself for your hiring audience to read.
2. Start Pruning Your Presence Online
While no one will admit to Googling themselves, it will actually help you figure out one of the most important parts of branding yourself—your name. Keep track of how you’re mentioned online and whether it’s in a negative or positive context.
3. Be Mindful of Your Internet Activities
Now that you have an idea of how you’re perceived online, you’ll have to make sure to keep these perceptions under control. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want potential employers to find later on. If you’ve already engaged in online activities that you wouldn’t necessarily want employers to discover, you will generally have the option to delete them—but be careful!
You can never completely erase something from the Internet once it’s there. In the meantime, you can do any necessary damage control by carefully considering what you post and only letting pictures and other forms of media slip through if they contribute to your efforts toward personal branding for senior level managers.
4. Build a Website
Thanks to the advancement of the Internet, building a website is easier than ever! “Why do I need one?” you may ask. For starters, so many business interactions now take place online…from consumers to businesses to potential employees and those in charge of hiring them. A website is a wonderful way of presenting yourself to the world in a quick and aesthetically pleasing manner. Don’t think you have to go big and flashy! Just a paragraph about yourself, contact links and a well written resume will do.
5. Look to Older, More Successful Brands
You can find other people who’ve built personal brands by connecting with those who are in either the same industry or are alumni from your alma mater. Connect with these people as soon as possible for tips on how to better construct your personal brand. If you play your cards right, these new associates should prove valuable!
On our site, you’ll find information about building a personal brand, writing an effective resume and much more! Once you learn a little more about yourself, you may choose to get some additional help to push your executive job search to the next level!
