One of the things that a resume is used for is getting a quick idea of what all your assets are and what you can contribute to the position you are applying for. This is good; you want your resume to be an introduction that leads to a longer relationship. But resumes should not show your age, because it is far too easy to assume certain ages have certain characteristics. This is one reason that “age discrimination” is one of the unlawful practices in the job market.
Even though age discrimination is unlawful, it still happens. People naturally do make assumptions about others based on initial information. But the resume that is professional, appealing, and updated gets past attitudes and showcases what you can do. That’s a good argument for making sure your resume does not show your age.
Avoid These Signals Of Age & Resumes
It’s true that age discrimination can be against the “too young” as well as the “too old”, and I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t happen. But, most of the time, the older job searcher is using a resume from years ago, or has updated their resume according to what they needed the last time they went job hunting. Age and your resume can be as obvious as listing your birth date or as subtle as putting a double space behind the period like they taught when typewriters were the latest technology. It’s hard to stop doing something like the double space because it’s habitual and you may not realize it’s not used in this setting. Some college professors insist on a double space, so younger resume writers actually get caught here, too, but if the double space is accompanied by other signals, it’s a count against you.
Those other signals can be things like listing your jobs from the earliest on with dates included instead of the last ten years with all your skills. Skill-wise, it’s a good idea to keep it contemporary unless you are applying for a job that needs that particular ability. Being able to cut galley pages apart and do paste-up on a page spread isn’t needed any more in printing, but being able to lay out a page with a computer program is.
If you aren’t sure that your resume is age-neutral, get a critique from someone who looks at resumes all the time. You could try asking why the last company you applied to turned your application down, but it’s hard to get someone to admit they discriminated against you because of your age. By this time in your life, you have so much to offer that it’s worth taking the time to make sure your resume reflects that fact.
New Survey Shows Executives Need Social Media Skills
There are many CEOs who are not interested in social media because they are incredibly busy. Let’s face it though, we are all busy. However, BRANDfog’s 2014 survey on The Global, Social CEO indicates that C-level executives who ignore social media are losing the ability to influence brand reputation and company leadership. The global conversations are happening on social media, and not being part of the conversation means others are controlling the topics.
How The Survey Was Conducted
A diverse selection of companies, ranging from small startups to Fortune 1000 companies in several industries, was represented. BRANDfog surveyed 1000 UK and US employees in these companies asking 15 basic questions about social media for executive and C-Suite communication. This is an annual survey and shows a definite shift in perception regarding social media and industry leaders.
Highlights and Conclusions
There were three observations of recent trends made in this year’s survey results. These are:
Social CEOs make better leaders.
Social CEO engagement leads to brand trust.
Social media is modern PR.
It’s clear that anyone interested in being an effective upper level executive is going to need to come to terms with social media. To quote from this survey:
“C-suite executives who embrace social media gain a competitive edge. They use social channels to provide context for business decisions, address brand issues, showcase company culture and most importantly, demonstrate thought leadership.”
What This Means For You
Anyone interested in moving into the upper executive levels of a company should be working right now to be a competent, professional social media expert. Careful monitoring of your social media use now, in areas like LinkedIn profile development, is going to pay off in the future. Developing social media competency keeps your personal brand clean, your professional brand impressive, and becomes a habitual discipline.
As you move higher in the corporate world, a habitual discipline is going to make adding new responsibilities much easier because you already do the basics. It’s also going to make you more attractive to those looking to fill leadership positions. A social media-savvy candidate will be preferred in tomorrow’s business world.
The Top Reason Professional Resume Distribution Works
Is anybody in your family interested in your family history? My mom is our family historian. She has our family tree going back to the 1600’s! It’s pretty amazing what she’s found out and who she has met along the way. One thing most genealogists will tell you is that researching a family tree is a lot like networking. Many families will have one person in the generation who is willing to keep all the photos and letters and information, and finding that person is like finding a treasure trove. Instead of laboriously working on finding one branch, suddenly you discover that they’ve got the connections to a whole bunch of branches and they know the people who are the keepers of the photos and letters and information for all of them.
If you are interested in finding the connections in your ancestry, you need to find the people who are already doing the research. They have already made connections you have no access to until you contact them. For example, if you never meet Great Aunt Irma, then you won’t get to see all the letters your grandma sent to her dad with the pictures of your dad as a baby.
Networking
Companies use recruiters to fill executive positions and many other types of openings. A professional resume distribution service has carefully maintained connections with many professional recruiters so that a resume goes to the right recruiters for that job seeker. The connections have already been made: These are professionals who rely on networking for their career and carefully maintain the connections between them. Instead of Great Aunt Irma keeping your dad’s baby pictures, they’ve got first knowledge of job openings, and you won’t find out about it unless you connect to the right one.
This networking is the reason professional resume distribution works so much better than a blind email blast to every company in the phone book or a hopeful query out of nowhere. If your resume is presented by a reputable distribution service, that reputation enhances your resume by association. Recruiters get untold numbers of resumes all the time. It makes sense to filter them for efficiency. The fact you recognized quality and respected professional standards weights your submission with authority.
If Nobody Knows You Are An Expert, You Are Invisible
One of the assumptions about executives and those higher on the career ladder is that they have expertise in their field. The problem is, people have to realize you have that expertise. Your plan for your business, career, or any kind of future acknowledgement really needs to include ways to show the world you know what you are talking about. Fortunately, it is easier today than it’s ever been to establish yourself as an authority: an expert in your field.
Ways To Establish Your Authority As An Expert
Write a book. This is so easy with e-books because you can self-publish right away and update as needed. And the benefits are huge: you “must be an expert” because you wrote a book or two. It’s also a good way to let potential employers know what your expertise is, and it looks impressive on an executive resume.
Be a great blogger. Writing consistent and useful content builds up an audience of readers who welcome your next post because it helps them somehow. If you are sharing your insights and making a difference in your reader’s lives, you are building a reputation for expertise. You are proving your expert status with every post.
Utilize online networks. Whether it’s LinkedIn profile development and posting regularly, guest blogging, Google+, or taking thoughtful part in online discussions, there’s an impression being made about who you are. Make it a positive and authoritative impression and there will be lots of good reasons to see you as an expert in your field.
Curate content carefully. Link to authoritative sites or articles and share your expert opinion on the information. Create a reputable source for research in your industry.
When you think about it, this is marketing. You are in the business of selling yourself as a well-deserved expert in your field by getting the message out to the people who need what you offer. Anyone who aspires to become an executive or any type of professional needs to be seen as an expert, or nobody sees them at all.
Did you know that anybody can enhance their life, and thus their career, by improving some simple, basic skills? Once you have a handle on these skills, there’s no telling what can happen but you have to apply them consistently: everybody needs to learn how to learn and learn how to teach.
Learn How To Learn
Learning is essentially acknowledging that you don’t know everything and being open to expanding your horizons.
If you are always reading a novel, try reading some non-fiction regularly.
If you never do fiction, start with some short stories and work up.
Take a class in something that appeals and intimidates you.
Play games on your phone or computer that are not in your comfort zone, like words for a math whiz and numbers for the linguist.
Learn how to use your hands or your body a different way, like dancing or knitting or soccer or anything fun.
I bet you thought I’d be telling you to work on a career skill, and that certainly is a good idea. But for many of us, we need to start developing the ability to learn first. When you start with what you like and stretch your mind a little bit, you are learning how to learn.
Learn How To Teach
Teaching is not being a windbag standing in front of suffering students and talking to hear themselves. Good teachers listen to their students and try to understand how they perceive things so the facts being communicated get through to the brain. A teacher needs to have a good grasp of the subject in order to explain it effectively.
Offer to explain something you are good at to a friend who wants to know how.
Show a newbie some tips about a skill you have.
Write instructions just to see if they make sense when you follow them.
Improve your writing skills so you can communicate better.
Rewrite things that are confusing to make the meaning clearer.
Research the styles of learning and figure out how to explain to each style.
The truth is that we all teach, whether we realize it or not. The goal is to be a teacher of good, helpful things who passes on all you have learned. When a person continually is learning, and is also continually sharing their knowledge, it completes the circle of intelligent growth. It also keeps you in a positive stance for whatever your career is doing and enhances any job.
Well, it’s happened again. The relentless wheel of history has rolled into another season, and that’s actually a pretty positive thing because every new season is a great reason to look at what you are doing, decide what needs to change, and set some strategic goals that will get you where you want to be.
Look At What You Are Doing
It doesn’t matter if we are talking about your job search, your workplace, or the balance between your home and career. Everyone needs to look at what they are currently doing and see the good points along with the bad. Write it down and celebrate what is working for you, even if there are some scary situations you need to deal with soon.
Decide What Needs To Change
Even a small change can make a big difference in how your workday goes, and doing some updates in your LinkedIn profile or resume will be good investments that give profitable returns. Perhaps deciding that each child does one activity at a time will give everyone some margin in their lives. You don’t need to change everything (particularly if it’s working well) but changing something around is like a breath of fresh air.
Set Some Strategic Goals
Where do you want to be ten years from now? How about next year? Are there steps that can begin to get you there? Many times a career coach can help you figure out which steps will get you there, and what will be a sidetrack you regret. If you are not sure what you need to be doing now in order to reach your goals, get some advice from people who have made it to where you’d like to be. Even if you decide not to take their advice, it gives you a better idea of what is involved.
A change in the season is always fun because it’s an excuse to mix it up a little bit, but it also is an excellent reason to revamp your strategies for success.
Many times, someone will look at the price of having a professional resume writer develop their resume and wonder if it is worth the cost. There’s a way to put the cost of a professional resume service into perspective: How much will it cost you to stay unemployed and searching for a job?
Say you are hoping to find a job that pays $52,000 a year to make this exercise easy. That means your pay before taxes is $1,000 because there are 52 weeks in a year. If you have been looking for a job and nobody is calling you back, your resume usually has a lot to do with that, so your current resume and job search methods have already cost you however many weeks you’ve been using them.
Now take a look at the prices of the various a la carte services or packages. Look at those prices in terms of the salary you are hoping to earn and the time you have been searching for a job — and think how improving your resume or distribution will improve your chances of finding that job. It may cost you less than one day’s worth of future salary to have your current resume critiqued and know how to improve it. It could be less than a week of your future salary to have a professional resume written.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll get hired with a professionally written resume, but you almost certainly will get called in for an interview, and the rest is up to you. It’s costing you quite a bit in lost wages to use an inferior resume that is not getting results.
Criticism is kind of painful, because nobody likes to be wrong. But without constructive criticism we’d all be in a fantasy world assuming everything is fine and wondering why things aren’t happening the way we imagined they would. Particularly when it comes to your career, criticism is a valuable tool. But that tool has to be in the hands of somebody who knows how to use it for your benefit.
A Professional Critique of Your Resume/Cover Letter Does 3 Things
Professional Perspective — A Professional Resume/Cover Letter Critique should be just that: professional. You want someone who is going to look at your cover letter and resume with the same perspective that potential employers, recruiters, and HR people will be looking at them. After all, these are the people who you are hoping to impress with that cover letter and resume, so it makes sense to write them with that goal in mind.
Experienced Advice — It isn’t that helpful to find out what’s wrong with your cover letter or resume if you don’t know how to fix it. A resume critique from Professional Resume Services includes concrete steps you can take to make improvements and provides insights on why these steps are suggested.
Immediate Return on Investment — As soon as you get your critique back, it includes a plan of action that you can immediately implement to get your career search back on track. The 3-4 page report catalogs every detail that needs to be improved and how to go about that improvement.
It doesn’t cost as much as you’d spend on a big date night, but it is worth every penny. A resume/cover letter critique from Professional Resume Services will give you an understanding of the problems and a way to fix those problems, making this criticism something you’ll appreciate getting.
