Sometimes, all that is keeping you out of a c-level career is your online brand. Other times, it is your resume. Often, it is both!
If it has been years since you tried to find another position, you need to understand that things have really changed. You may be great at the face-to-face networking that is an essential asset, but online social networking might not be high on your list of things to do. This is a mistake, because today, the people who are vetting job candidates are looking online. If you do not have a strong presence, you aren’t on their radar.
Why, some ask, would a c-level executive professional decide to hire someone else to write a resume or develop an online brand? Wouldn’t the fact they are capable of planning the strategic infrastructure of a Fortune 500 company and negotiate multi-million dollar partnerships mean they can do this themselves? Leadership professionals usually will rely on a professional resume writer and other professional services because they are used to outsourcing tasks that require high levels of expertise. There’s a skill to the complexity of assessing career progression and leveraging data to create a personal marketing campaign. Only the highest quality of a complete Executive Resume Package yields results by positioning you to get the job you want.
For many of those who have busy working in their current positions and not paying attention to the new demands in the job market, it’s good to add the discounted Executive Recruiter Distribution or Online Branding Power Package. Whether or not you need them can be determined during the initial consultation — an hour of strategic consultation that includes discussing branding.
Have you noticed that the working world is kind of like a track event?Some races are marathons, and the runners who win are slow and steady folks who keep on moving ahead, where the sprinters, the ones who zip past leaving their co-workers in a cloud of dust, don’t always stay on track. Not that sprinting is bad, it’s just a different race and the techniques that work in a short speed contest don’t do well in endurance challenges. Track events will generally have a variety of contests and different skills will win different events.
Sometimes an athlete will move from one event to another, like the sprinter in the marathon. If the sprinter has developed the endurance to keep a steady pace and still have the strength to run fast at the end, they will likely be the winner. If they have no endurance, they won’t be able to keep up in the long run. An athlete who has learned how to adapt can switch to several events and win them all, but it takes experience and training. It also takes recognition that they are capable of moving from one category to the next.
A worker who has moved up to manager or supervisor and shown 2 – 10 years of quality work is often ready to be promoted from one event to the next, but they have trouble getting the recognition for their abilities. Because they are seen as capable managers or supervisors, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will be seen as executives. It’s like the marathon runner has announced they are entering the sprint.
Our professional resume packages highlight all the accomplishments in your career and showcase the skills that you will bring to a promotion. They are perfect for presenting your abilities as a professional ready to add a different category to your career.
If you have been the race for a long time, maybe it is time to up your game. Go over your resume part by part and make sure it represents who you are today and where you see yourself going. Do your accomplishments shine brightly? Is your experience rich with detail but yet concise enough to not bore your reader to tears? Does your resume have action statement and keywords to pass a keyword scanning machine? To stay competitive, update your resume yearly with highlights of what you did the previous year. Don’t leave it until the last minute when someone is asking for it. Like training, it takes a bit of time and thought, but the results will be worth it.
3 Reasons You Might Need Help With Online Branding
Online branding is hard to avoid if you are going to be involved with society. It’s actually happening whether or not you want it to, because some of your information is probably online already. Don’t believe me? Try doing a search on your name — I’ll wait.
This is why you need to “own” your online brand. Maybe there was a lot of entries with your name, maybe just a few, but when you submit your resume to a company, the name on your resume is what they will search. It’s a very important part of your professional package. But sometimes, you need to get help in order to get your online brand what it needs to be. Here are three possible reasons to ask for that help:
You are overwhelmed with all that is going on in your life right now. Sometimes life throws a real curve ball and you are starting over from square one. It could be a divorce, a death or major illness, coming back into the workforce after a hiatus, a family emergency, or even a natural disaster. If there is too much on your plate, this is one thing you can delegate to a professional.
You don’t really know what you are doing with the whole computer thing. You are learning, but you are afraid of making a mistake. I always tell newbies to the computer age, ‘You can’t break it!’ Getting professional help will give you a confident start and you can take it from there. Or you can learn as you go and try it out. Either way it’s a reality you will need to face –e-commerce, for example– you can’t go to an actual Amazon “store”… you need to order online to get what you want from there. Start small and work your way up to profile creation.
You now realize that you blew it big time. You have been buzzing along posting selfies and crazy party photos, and now you wish you’d listened when your mom told you to be discreet. She was right and now you are sorry, but you have no idea what to do about it. A professional would have experience in this area and could help. We help with reputation management and can help you clean up your digital dirt. Then you can tell all the tweens you know to heed your warning.
Professional Resume Services offers several types of online branding help, from LinkedIn Profile Development to Online Branding/Profile Development Coaching and even an Online Branding Power Package (all on the link; scroll down and see). It’s also part of what is offered in our Coaching Services. If you need help with your online brand, you can find it here!
When it comes to grammar and spelling mistakes, there are usually two kinds of people: those who see it and those who don’t. If you are a member of the latter group, it is kind of like being colorblind. You know there is a difference when it is pointed out to you, but it really doesn’t stick out enough to notice. Unlike being colorblind, though, there are things you can do about improving your grammar and spelling. It really is a skill you need to work on because it will affect you all through your career. The reason you need to work on writing accurately is because the first group of people (yes, I admit, I am one of those anal retentive types), are the ones who see grammar and spelling mistakes– and can’t help seeing them. They know, because they are told, that grammar and spelling don’t matter to many, but it matters to them. Because it matters to them, it affects the way they view a “professional” who makes a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes — they see an “unprofessional” who doesn’t care about details and may not do a good job. All the advice on how to avoid mistakes when writing your resume and cover letters applies to your business writing, too. Even executive resume writers make mistakes, but when writing things that affect their job they carefully do their best to correct mistakes by proofreading and using tools like spellcheck. The tools are limited, so the human has to pay attention or the wrong (correctly spelled) word could be used. All the writing you do for your workplace should be proofread because it becomes a permanent record reflecting your abilities to communicate as well as the actual information in the material. Whenever I hear someone say that spelling doesn’t matter, I think of Dan Quayle and potato. In 1992, Mr. Quayle was the Vice President of the United States, doing the best job he could. He was a guest helper at a spelling bee, using a flash card with “potatoe” on it, and corrected a student’s spelling of “potato” by suggesting it needed the “e” at the end. It would be easy to Google this incident, and you would see what that little mistake did to his political career because it gave his critics an excuse to dismiss his abilities. Now, Mr. Quayle was not in a position to be proofreading right then. But you usually can be careful with the writing you do for business purposes. You can start to work on your grammar and spelling skills, too, by checking things that don’t look right. There are many helpful (and free) online lessons to take advantage of. If you know you are one of those who don’t “see” the mistakes, assume you are making some and do what you can to correct it. One of the most common spelling errors I see is “manger” for “manager”. I probably notice this the most because I used to make it all the time! Manger is an actual word so it was never corrected by spell check. Luckily, Microsoft Word has tools you can use and adjust to catch your most commonly misspelled words. Spelling matters, so make sure to have a second set of eyes on your work!
Communication is all about getting across barriers to connect. How many times have you suddenly realized that you do not understand what someone means when they use a familiar word? Or have you experienced this: you want a solution to a particular problem and the salesman keeps insisting you need a solution to a problem you don’t have?
Employers encounter a variation of this when an applicant submits a resume. In her excellent article, “How To Speak The Language of Hiring“, Lydia Dishman says that hiring managers want to know the quality of experience and how a candidate will approach the job once hired. Resumes, on the other hand, tend to focus on actions and education. As a result, the resume is addressing the wrong question.
You can speak the right language and address the right question, by understanding the process and perspective of the employer. Your resume has to pass through a couple of filters before you get called in for the interview. Most employers will use an electronic filter first, an applicant tracking system. Then the filtered list of potential candidates will be read by the recruiter, who scans for more detail. Finally, those resumes passing these filters is put on the desk of the person who determines the best fit for the job and schedules interviews.
That’s three different perspectives with their own questions; your resume must pass all of them. Intimidated? You don’t have to be. Just remember to focus on the specific job opening is. Tell how you developed a skill like collaboration by being on a team that worked on the very thing they are looking for. The computer sees the thing, the person sees that you know how to collaborate.
Still confused? We offer resume creation in our A La Carte Services and a Resume Critique for those who just need to know if they are saying what the employers want to hear in language that communicates.
It isn’t summer yet, but it soon will be time for the teenage job market to open up for high schoolers looking to start their working careers. Even though these first jobs will probably not become careers, there are a lot of ways the first job does shape the habits and expectations you have about the working world. Some of the standards have always been there: Getting to work on time, not goofing off on the job, doing what you are hired to do, and being trustworthy have always been part of the picture.
But today’s teens are already networking and have a social media presence long before they start thinking about earning a paycheck. Because they are so familiar with digital interactions, and because they are immature, the idea that what they say and do online will affect their future is hard to grasp. It isn’t uncommon for someone to suggest their child work in a friend’s business and find out that their kids’ online activities were unacceptable for the position’s standards. How embarrassing is that?
If you have made an effort to continually ask questions like “Can social networking get you fired?” and listen to your child’s answers, you begin to see what their perspective of online activities is. Pointing out the realities, cases where that behavior did cost a job, furthers the discussion. Start talking about how important online branding is and what it is. Challenge them to do their own research and prove you wrong when you say that employers will look them up online.
This can go a lot of directions every time you have the conversation. Cyber-bullying, sexting, and all the rest of it are hopefully going to come up so you can hear what your teen has to say and tell them what you’ve learned. Online behavior didn’t used to be on the “getting your teen ready to have a job” list, but these days it is probably up in the top priorities.
One of the uncomfortable parts of a job search is discussion of salary.Most of us don’t really like negotiations over salary and fear that putting our current wage on paper might doom us to repeat it. For the most part, you really don’t need to put salary history on your resume. At the same time, if a job posting asks you to include salary history or requirements when applying, they will be looking for that information when you apply. Employers have various reasons for requesting salary information. They may want to screen out those who expect more than they are willing to offer or find someone who is qualified and willing to take the least amount of compensation. They certainly want to know you will follow instructions. You could comply with a request for salary history in several ways:
attach a salary history to your resume on a separate page
include it in your cover letter
use a salary range rather than the specific amounts
It should go without saying that your salary history should be accurate. You will be jeopardizing your career when they check with former employers and discover the truth. At the same time, if you think you were underpaid, there’s no reason to avoid saying so if it can be said diplomatically. Salary requirements can be handled with statements that show your flexibility and willingness to negotiate the overall compensation package including benefits. Here, too, a range can be helpful as long as it is within reasonable limits. Tools like a salary calculator help you figure out what the range for your expectations should be. Salary may not be on your resume, but it is definitely on everybody’s mind, and you need to be prepared to discuss it.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss, “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!”
I tell my kids this all the time–the more you read, the smarter you’ll be, the places you’ll go, the people you’ll see. OK, so that’s my own little Dr. Seuss version of getting them interested in reading. Books and other reading material feed your intellect and affect the way you look at life. One recent buzz around Facebook was the challenge to list the ten books that have changed the way you look at life, right off the top of your head. Not classic books, or intellectual books, just the books you read that somehow lingered in your life. I made my list and it was super hard to keep it at ten. Librarians will tell you that people going through a crisis will often ask for books about someone going through a crisis because it helps to see how others cope with challenges.
In your career, reading a wide range of topics will give you a wide range of perspective on the way people think and strategies you can use for your advancement. It’s like a balanced diet. You need stuff from every food group in order to be healthy and you need to read both fiction and non-fiction to have a healthy view of the world. There is a difference in quality when it comes to what you read. Just as there is a difference in quality of food; you will start to see that difference as your reading variety changes.
Reading anything regularly increases your ability to comprehend and articulate ideas. If what you read is well-written, it helps you develop a sense of spelling and grammar, which gives you a professional edge in your communication.
If you’re unemployed, I’d say it’s a good idea to read something work/career related every day. This is easy to do by subscribing to a few blogs, but working through a book is important. Blogs and websites like those on the Job Resources Page are carefully concentrated chunks of information like an energy bar; a book is like a banquet that has been planned and prepared by a chef.
Dr. Seuss is right: the more you learn, the more places you’ll go. Your career will be enhanced by reading regularly.
