People have different perspectives on company holiday parties. Some dread going to them every year, while others have waited for this day to come since the last one ended. Regardless of your opinion, company parties are generally seen as a requirement to attend. And since you’re going to attend, you might as well use it as an opportunity to enhance your branding rather than hurt it. Here are the top four company holiday party mistakes employees and executives make that they later regret.
Drinking Too Much
Many holiday parties will have an open bar, which means the possibility of over-drinking is high. Drinking too much can lead to saying things you don’t necessarily mean, acting inappropriately and doing things you’ll later regret. It’s perfectly fine to have a couple of drinks while you’re socializing, but if you continue to drink throughout the night, mix in some water as well–and eat! Not only will you feel better in the morning, you’ll also protect your c-level personal branding reputation. You don’t want to be that person that everyone talks about the following Monday.
Eating Sloppily–or Not Enough
Take advantage of the great food available to you, but don’t go overboard. Be conscious of the people who will come up to greet you and always have a free hand available. And remember your manners, as you don’t want to be the person who spits food out of their mouth while talking to others. As tempting as it is to load up on food, try not to overindulge. Also, you do want to make sure that you eat. You may be the type that maybe in social settings, or out of nervous energy drinks a lot of wine or coffee. Either of those in large quantities aren’t good for your system. Make sure you eat something to soak up the liquids you are consuming.
Complaining & Socializing
You wouldn’t complain during an interview, and the same is true at a holiday party. Whether you’re complaining about work, the food at the party, the environment or anything else, no one wants to hear it. It’s not the time or the place. Turn complaints into compliments and you and the other attendees will have a much better experience. Make a conscious effort to talk to people from different departments, people you know by face, but never had a conversation with them. At a company party I was at (I was in medical sales way back when), I made an effort to talk to the accounting/payroll department and the shipping department. I had heard of the names of these people, but never met them. Yet, the accounting department wrote my checks and the shipping department were the folks who shipped out my supplies and made sure everything got to where it needed to go on time. Meeting them all really solidified the camaraderie you create when you work with a team. It was fantastic. After that, it was much easier to call any of them to inquire about vendor invoices or find out where the product was.
Not Arriving On Time or Staying Long Enough
You can guarantee the top executives, managers and supervisors are taking note of who shows up, when they show up, and how long they stay. The rule of thumb is to arrive within 30 minutes or so of the start time and stay until the party is over, to the extent it’s possible. Showing up an hour late, eating some food, drinking a couple beverages and leaving early isn’t going to look good for you. Make plans ahead of time to block off the appropriate amount of time to stay.
Professional Resume Services is more than just one of the top resume writing services. We enjoy and take great pride in helping people with every aspect of their career, even if it’s giving out the best practices for holiday parties. This is the time of year to appreciate your co-workers, bosses and having a job in general, so make the most of it. And never hesitate to contact us if we can help in any way.
Every executive should know their resume and LinkedIn profile should be treated differently. If not, it’s one of the first things executive resume services will point out. But what about the summary section of each? Many people make the mistake of using the same summary for both their resume and their LinkedIn profile, thinking a hiring manager won’t think twice about it. The truth is hiring managers look at both and want to see different information to learn as much as they can about you before calling you in for an interview. Here’s how to differentiate your summaries.
Your LinkedIn Summary Should Be Longer
Your resume needs to be condensed as much as possible. If you’re like many people, you tend to be a little too wordy on your resume, so executive resume services can help tighten up your sentences for you. On the other hand, a LinkedIn profile writer will tell you the more detail you can provide, the better off you’ll be. You want to be specific with your strengths, what you bring to the table and offer a brief summary of your career up to this point. Think of your LinkedIn summary as a way to pull back the curtain a bit and give a recruiter or hiring manager a glimpse of who you are outside of just a name on a resume.
Formal vs. Informal Tone
Part of your LinkedIn profile development should be writing in an informal tone and showing a bit of your personality. In other words, when a person reads your LinkedIn summary and then hears you speak, they should be able to easily identify you as the same person. Of course, an informal tone can’t be confused with unprofessional, because you still have to present a professional demeanor on your LinkedIn profile. Just tone it down a bit from the formal language used in your resume summary.
Why It’s Important For These Summaries To Be Different
A hiring manager wants to know as much as they can about you upfront before they even invite you for an interview. So if you simply copy and paste the text from your resume summary to your LinkedIn summary, it either indicates you aren’t taking your job search seriously or you may have something to hide. This is why a good LinkedIn profile writer will create their summary separately from their resume summary, while still pointing out all the important facts about them.
Professional Resume Services knows exactly what hiring managers and recruiters look for in high level candidates. Job candidates may not think their resume or LinkedIn summary is important, but the reality is both are looked at closely. If you’re in need of some help with your LinkedIn profile development or anything to do with your resume, feel free to reach out to us at any time for assistance.
Many professionals get caught up in trying to make their hard skills and expertise sound good, and forget to highlight the soft skills they have. When you’re talking about high-level executive positions, every candidate will have similar hard skills on their resumes and cover letters. What can distinguish you more than anything are the soft skills you possess, since those are unique to every individual. Here are some tips for demonstrating these soft skills in an interview, even when you aren’t specifically asked about them.
Important Soft Skills That Translate To Any Job
The most important soft skills an executive resume service suggests highlighting include:
Of course, there are plenty other skills you could have, but these are some of the main ones that translate to any given job. Some of these skills may not fit naturally into your resume, but you can include them in your LinkedIn profile and you definitely need to mention them in your interview.
Demonstrate How Your Soft Skills Have Worked Previously
You’re going to be asked mostly about your knowledge and expertise in an interview. But if you really think about it, you likely used a mix of your soft skills in order to earn the knowledge you have today. Consider a particular aspect of a previous job you were an expert at. You may have become an expert at it because of repetition, but you also likely had to use critical thinking, innovative thinking, problem solving and more to achieve the result. Demonstrating these soft skills allows an interviewer to really see how your mind works, which is extremely beneficial when the outcome of the project you’re describing was successful.
Relate Soft Skills To The Job Description
Every good executive resume service will tell you to tie your soft skills in with the job description when writing a resume. It’s also important to remember the aspects of the job description when talking about your soft skills in the interview as well. You can talk specifically about a project at your previous job, but be clear about how your skills can translate to the job you’re interviewing for. Don’t make the interviewer try to piece this together themselves, since they could miss out on a key point you’re trying to make.
Professional Resume Services does more than simply write resumes and cover letters for executives. From the moment you reach out to us, we will help you throughout your job search, all the way until you land the job you’ve always desired. Whether you need help optimizing your LinkedIn profile, tweaking your resume or knowing how to answer interview questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at any time for guidance.
Most people don’t need an executive resume service to tell them they should proofread their resume, social media profile and anything else during their job search. However, it’s easy to overlook typographical errors when you’re focusing on many aspects of the job search, as well as trying to balance your personal life. Having correct grammar and spelling on everything tied to your name is of critical importance. Careless mistakes reflect negatively on you and can quickly disqualify you from the position, no matter how innocent the error is. Consider these points when it comes to grammar and spelling during your job searching efforts.
Don’t Rely Solely On Spell Check
The spell check feature is good for identifying obvious typographical errors, but there are plenty of misspelled words that can get through the check. Feel free to start your proofreading by running the spell check, and then give the document a diligent proofread from start to finish yourself. The best professional resume writers will read over a resume multiple times before finalizing it, simply because it’s easy to overlook mistakes when you’ve spent hours on any given document.
Incorrect Grammar And Spelling Can Hurt Your Personal Brand
As you’re writing an effective resume, you always have to keep your personal brand in mind and ensure every word is a reflection of it. A grammar issue or a misspelled word can give off a negative perception of your personal brand, since it may appear to some people that you don’t take the time to proofread your work. And if you can’t catch typographical errors in your own resume, what makes a potential employer think you will catch these types of errors on important work documents? You may think this sentiment is a bit over-the-top, but the reality is this is how some hiring managers will see things.
Always Get An Expert Opinion
You can’t underestimate the importance of having an executive resume service look over your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letter or any other document you’ll be using during your job search. These experts are trained to identify even the smallest errors and have a knack for enhancing these documents to put you in a better position for finding the job you desire.
Professional Resume Services is a team of the best professional resume writers ready to help you maximize your job searching efforts. Executives have brought us their resume simply to proofread it before they submit anything, and they’ve also come to us to help write their resume from scratch. No matter where you’re at or what your comfort level is with your job search, feel free to contact us if you’re in need of any advice or tips we can help with.
Asking for advice when you’re struggling with making a decision can be valuable. However, when it comes to getting career advice, you have to be careful who you’re listening to. Most people you ask won’t intentionally give you bad advice, but it also may not be very valuable to you. The best executive resume services will typically offer different bits of information than you would receive from family, friends, co-workers or anyone else. Here’s how to know if you’re listening to bad advice and what to do instead of following it.
Set Realistic Expectations
One of the most vague things anyone can tell you is the ability to be anything you want to be. Better career advice is to take a look at your skills and desires and set a more realistic path for success. It’s never a bad thing to dream about being at a certain level in your profession, but you can’t overlook the work it takes to get to that point. Start by working on your c-level personal branding and achieving realistic expectations before reaching for the pinnacle of your profession.
Don’t Choose A Career Based On Money
You may have also heard to choose a career based on the salary if you aren’t sure exactly what you want to do. This may be great for a couple of years, but it will be short-lived excitement if you don’t like going to your job every day. Instead, focus on long-term happiness by looking at the values a company offers, the culture within the organization, the opportunity for advancement and growth and more. Believe it or not, the people who are motivated solely by money are typically the people who aren’t happy with their jobs and overall lifestyle, with some exceptions, of course.
Choose Your Network Wisely
Take a look at your LinkedIn profile and see how many connections you have. Many experts tell people to get as many LinkedIn connections as they can, because you never know who you will cross paths with. However, the quality of your connections is typically much more valuable than the quantity. Having a dozen or so quality connections on your LinkedIn profile will be more beneficial to you than having hundreds of connections you don’t even know personally.
Patience Usually Won’t Move Your Career Forward
There’s a time and place to be patient in your career. Too many times you see people getting passed up for advancement by people who were more aggressive. There was a time when the duration of your tenure with an organization played a factor in promotion opportunities. However, the times have changed and tenure isn’t quite as important. It’s more important to step up and ask for more responsibilities, demonstrate your leadership qualities and make it known you want to move forward in your career. You’ll likely have much better results compared to being patient and waiting your turn.
Professional Resume Services provides the best executive resume services tailored to your specific needs and desires. We are always willing to offer career advice based on our years of experience, but will never provide advice to people who don’t want to hear it. Our goal is to help you find the job and career you desire, so feel free to contact us at any time when you need us.
As a job candidate, you have to know what works and what doesn’t work with your job search to ensure you make progress every single day. One of the most effective strategies for any job search is networking. With quality c-level personal branding, networking can lead you to many new connections, as well as the possibility of being referred to a company’s hiring manager. This relationship between networking and referrals is underestimated by many professionals, but the truth is companies would much rather pick from referrals than random job candidates.
Why Companies Prefer Referrals
In most cases, the speed of the hiring process is much faster when working with referrals. From an employer’s standpoint, if one of their employees refers a potential candidate, chances are they will be a high quality candidate, a good fit, have a better chance of hiring them quickly and may even lead to other quality candidates. This is especially true if the employee who made the referral understands the importance of c-level personal branding. A hiring manager is more willing to trust one of their own employees rather than a resume they received from other outlets.
Can Networking Make You A Referral?
So now that you know how important being a referral is to a potential employer, how do you become one? Networking is the easy answer. You can start by working with an executive LinkedIn profile writer to ensure your online brand is represented appropriately. You can then use the LinkedIn platform to re-engage with current connections or make new connections based on your interests. One misconception many people have is that networking is all about asking for a job. The reality is networking is about building relationships and seeing where they lead. It never hurts to let your connections know you’re looking for a job and explain your qualifications, though. While companies tend to hire referrals quicker, from a candidate standpoint, becoming a referral may take a little longer since you have to build a strong relationship with your network.
Remember A Referral Only Gets Your Foot In The Door
When you’ve ultimately been referred to a company for a position of interest, it doesn’t mean you have the job wrapped up. You have to remember there are likely other referrals that are candidates as well. Don’t put off visiting the top resume writing services, since it could be the difference in you getting the job or not. Being a referral definitely gives you a better chance of getting the job, but it’s far from a guarantee.
Professional Resume Services is known as one of the top resume writing services, but we also help professionals in many other ways. Building your network and earning referrals can open the door to many opportunities, whether you’re looking for them or not. To learn more about this relationship and how you can use it to enhance your career, feel free to contact us at any time.
We’ve all been a part of a job search before where you put so much effort into writing an effective resume that you want to send it out to as many companies as possible. This is actually one of the worst things you can do, since the resume is most likely generic in nature. Hiring managers can easily identify a generic resume and will toss it out as soon as it’s identified. For the best results, the top resume writing services suggest tailoring each resume you send out to the actual company you’re sending it to. This may seem like a huge time investment, but when you know exactly what to change, it’s not as daunting of a task as you think. Here are some of the main things to consider changing when you apply to multiple jobs.
Locate Appropriate Keywords
The same types of jobs will have different job descriptions. In a world where every resume has to pass through ATS to get into the hands of a human, you have to use the right keywords for each job posting. Read through the entire description and pick out all the soft skills, hard skills and job-specific skills you can find. Then look at your resume and incorporate as many of them as possible without making it sound unnatural.
Add Statistics
Take these keywords to the next level and add an eye-catching statistic whenever possible. Hiring managers like to see percentages or dollar amounts on a resume because it puts your words into perspective and makes you sound much more credible and specific. Simply saying you boosted your company’s bottom line the past three years doesn’t have the same type of impact as saying you increased the bottom line by 10% one year, 13% the next year and 15% the following year. Your executive resume service will ask you to provide them with these statistics so they can incorporate them throughout the resume as appropriate.
Tailor Your Skills To The Company’s Requirements
Do some research on the company’s website before altering your resume. You may be able to identify their areas of need and be able to point them out. Companies and hiring managers don’t necessarily care what you did at your previous jobs. They just want to know what value you will provide their company. The top resume writing services can help you with using your past experience to demonstrate how your skills will transfer to their company and create similar results.
Professional Resume Services helps executives with writing an effective resume every day. Having a unique resume for every job you apply for is extremely valuable and well worth the time and effort. Many times you don’t have to significantly change your resume. A few tweaks and additions here and there can make a big difference. If you ever need assistance with your resume, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for tips or advice.
Every aspect of a job search has to go perfectly in order to land the position you want sometimes. You may have crafted the perfect resumes and cover letters with the help of an executive resume service, but still can’t get a job for some reason. If you’re able to land an interview but can’t get past that point, you could be making a critical mistake many job seekers make: not writing a thank you note. Believe it or not, many employers indicate not receiving a thank you note can sometimes disqualify a candidate, especially if they are on the fence about hiring them. Here’s what to consider about thank you notes so you don’t run the risk of jeopardizing your job search.
When To Write A Thank You Note
The timing of your thank you note must be within 24 hours of the conclusion of the interview. It’s important for the interviewers to have you in mind throughout their interview process, and writing a quality thank you note is one way to do it. The company is likely interviewing many candidates to fill the position you desire, so setting yourself apart is essential. You may be the top of the top at your company, but it’s still a good idea to send a simple thank you.
Should Each Interviewer Get A Thank You Note?
Every executive resume service will suggest sending a thank you note to each person who interviewed you. Ask for their business card or their email address before you leave to ensure you have the right information. And if for some reason you realize you forgot to ask for it, reach out to your main point of contact and request the information. The hiring manager will likely ask each interviewer their opinion of you, so you want to shape their opinion to be as positive as possible.
What To Include
Just like when writing an effective resume, the content you write in your thank you note must be unique. Personalize the note to each recipient, and bring up a point you may have connected with them on during the interview. Whether it’s a school affiliation, an upcoming vacation or any other point you related with them on, be sure to point out the connection in your thank you note.
You can also use your thank you note as an opportunity to clarify any points made in the interview. If there was an objection or if you didn’t seem qualified for a certain aspect of the job, you can reiterate why you think you will be able to overcome it.
Professional Resume Services is more than just an executive resume service. We want to help each of our clients throughout the job search process so they can land the job they desire. The importance of a thank you note is critical today, so contact us at any time for more advice on how to write one and what information you may consider including.
