Even if you have no plans to run a business, you have an online brand: it is the persona the internet world perceives you to be. What comes up when your name is put in a search engine? Are you on social media with embarrassing pictures? Why would I tell you to “own” your online brand?
To own something is to be invested in it, to take responsibility for it, and to proactively maintain it.
Any prospective employer is going to be looking at what kind of presence you have online. The positions with more at stake may involve a bit more research, because there will be a desire to know if there’s anything that will be a problem once you are in the company. Security clearances can require quite extensive background checks. Depending on the position you are seeking, what comes up online on your “brand” might cost you a job.
Now is the time to invest in your online brand. It can be an investment of time and effort, or you may choose to actually maintain a purchased site in your name with your professional highlights. A LinkedIn profile is worth the research and investment. Learn about online personal branding and get advice on the type of development your career should involve.
Now is the time to take responsibility for your online brand. Do what needs to be done to clean up your profiles on Facebook and the rest of the social media you are involved in. Maybe you need to tighten up your privacy settings, and perhaps you should have a professional social media page, or a personal one — and be very careful about what is allowed on each. It isn’t difficult to find horror stories about pictures that should never have been posted being circulated beyond what was intended with consequences unanticipated. If you have made a major mistake, fix it to the best of your ability and be prepared to show how you have matured.
Now is the time to proactively maintain it. Make the commitment to own your online brand and consistently check to see how the world sees you. Most of the people in the world will never see you in person, but if they can get online they can find out about you. Do what you need to do in order to keep your brand one that reflects the best about you.
A job search or career change is like building a home: both require thought, research, and careful planning to be successful. When you look at blueprints for a custom-built home, you see the wisdom of many experts compiled to create the perfect house. Codes and construction standards, design details and homeowner’s dreams — it’s all there in the blueprints, ready to become reality.
If the experts aren’t part of the design process, those blueprints will be missing something. It’s like a kitchen designed by someone who only eats at restaurants; the non-cook has no grasp on what is practical for a kitchen. You could end up with cupboards too small for cereal boxes, counters with no outlets to plug the toaster into, and an oven that can’t be opened when standing in front of the stove because the island is too close.
With a job search, there are similar problems that can arise. If you are trying to design your career plans without expert advice, you are going to miss some important factors that will cause problems later on. It’s just the way things work; we learn through mistakes, and if we are smart, we learn from others’ mistakes too.
When you are keeping up-to-date with regular reading of available resources you are going to be able to see where you can do things yourself and where to call in an expert. Our Job Search Resources list contains all you need to accomplish this goal, with links to many experts and tools. You can find links to:
- career research and exploration
- job search sites for free or pay
- social networking
- salary calculators
- self-assessments
- and much more
The more expertise invested in designing the plan, the better your blueprint for a successful job search or career change will be.
Balancing work and family can seem like an impossible task. I struggle with this every day, especially once summer comes and the kids are home ALL THE TIME. As a mother of two young children, figuring out how to juggle everything has become a personal quest of mine. A recent article in The Atlantic looks at some of the numbers in recent studies on work-life balance in the U.S., and it makes an interesting read. Why do so many struggle with this balancing act? Is there ever a happy medium?
The reality is that the process of balancing is dynamic, and it changes as the situations change. Here are some tips to help put this seemingly impossible task into perspective:
- Recognize that family life has seasons. The demands on your time and energy will change as new members are added to the family and as kids get older. Homework becomes more independent for kids as they get older, meaning less homework for mom and dad to help with.
- Schedule family times, just as you schedule business meetings. It might sound cold, or not spontaneous, but it works– especially if you are like me and live by your calendar. Plan some vacation time now and write it into your calendar. It doesn’t have to be two weeks at the shore, but you do need to have fun together as a family. A weekend at a cabin, a walk through town or your neighborhood, or an evening at an ice cream store works, too.
- If the traditional family dinner hour doesn’t work for you, set a 8:30 meetup in your family room with a snack. The idea is to connect at least once a day for a short time because it is cumulative: all those short times build on one another to maintain relationships.
- Turn off the electronics during that connection time! Think face-time instead of screen-time. You can’t give your full attention to anyone if you’re getting texts.
- Say “no” to a few things. Choose not to “do it all” and just do one extra-curricular activity per family member.
- Delegate and get help when you are overwhelmed. You can’t do everything. Sometimes you need to break down and ask for help. I finally did just that. After years of taking care of children, keeping a clean house, and managing a growing business, I finally had to break down and admit I needed some help– in one area in particular– my landscaping. Now, I must add that my husband is a huge help in keeping the house organized and picked up, and is a great with the kids and their schedules, but does he know the difference between a weed from a Spring bud? NO. To him they all get pulled out. So, I hired Joanna. She came in, took one look at what I was attempting to do with the yard, talked with me for awhile about what I wanted to see, and went to work. What a difference a professional makes! I never knew my landscaping could look so good. Delegating that task was the best thing I ever did.
There will be times when family has to be the priority over work: sudden illnesses, crisis situations, school activities, etc. There will also be times when work has to have priority over family because of deadlines. Balance is that shifting of resources to adapt to changing needs and keeping your focus on the priorities you’ve set.
If you work outside the home, the bulk of your waking hours is spent on the job, away from your family. When you are at work, that has to be your focus and your priority. When you are seeking work, you need to spend time on the things that will help you get the job: resumes, networking, and research.
Most of us would say that we work to provide for our family and that our families are also a priority. Deliberately investing your energy into connecting with your loved ones on a daily basis with occasional longer times together helps you maintain that critical balance between work and family. Delegating, limiting commitments, and asking for help allows you to focus on what is important.
Elements of A Professional and Accurate Resume
Resumes
In order to secure a job you must have a resume. There is really no way around it. Not only must you have a resume, but it needs to be professional and accurate. In order to get you started, here are the basic elements of any good resume. You might already know most of these, but in case you didn’t, here they are:
- Heading: this includes your name and contact information. It should be easy to read and centered on the top of the page.
- Career Summary: this is a 5-7 sentence summary of what you have done and are capable of doing. It focuses on your brand, expertise and experience. You need to let the company know what you can do for them.
- Qualifications: this is a short bulleted list of your skills and qualifications for the job (i.e. keywords of the job position, keywords of what you’ve done “Process Implementation” or “Territory Sales”, etc.).
- Experience: this gives a brief summary of your prior work experience. Include company name, your job title, your supervisor’s name, and a brief summary of what your duties were.
- Education: this gives a brief overview of your highest degree of education and/or any additional education that pertains to the job. This could include classes or certifications in a certain area that would help you perform well for the company you are applying to.
Those are the main elements of a good resume. Remember to keep it clean, concise, and easy to read. Also, keep it up to date and accurate–do not add fluff or fake jobs to your experience (you’ll be caught).
These tips will get you started and as you apply for more jobs you will become even better at creating and adapting your resume for jobs.
When you are looking for a job, there are different types of ads to which you will respond. Some will be Craigslist style where you send your resume to a recruiter via a randomized email address. Others will be ads with an Apply button that you click. This button may take you to a company or recruiting agency website where you will be prompted to set up an account. However you apply, most resumes are parsed into an applicant tracking system. The resume is parsed by extracting certain information such as name, contact information, work history and education, and this information is used to populate the fields of your applicant tracking system record. The good thing about submitting your resume this way is that you do not have to fill in long, repetitious forms for each position with information that is already on your resume. The bad thing about parsing resumes is that in order for the applicant tracking system to parse your resume correctly, your resume needs to be very plain in format and text.
Diacritics, such as those accent marks found over the e’s in the word “resume” may cause your resume to be parsed incorrectly. Common parsing mistakes include your name ending up in the incorrect fields, one phone number that is parsed into several different phone number fields, incomplete address and missing work history dates. Incorrect information in these fields may mean that your resume does not come up in a candidate search run by a hiring manager.
Improve your chances to be called for an interview by casting a critical eye over your resume. A plainer resume format that should parse easily uses bold and plain text only. We create “ASCII” or .txt (plain) versions of your resume for just this reason– applying online and working with recruiters. Leave out the unusual diacritics and the ampersand (&). An ampersand will cause havoc when a resume is parsed. Clearly demarcate resume sections by adding a couple of line spaces between each section. If you are uploading a resume to a company’s applicant tracking system, you may have to fill out some fields by hand, while others are populated by the system. Check all fields for accuracy before you hit Send.
The plan used to be that if you did not know what you wanted to do after graduating from college, then you could temp for awhile. You could try on different jobs and figure out what you liked without making a commitment. It could take you a few weeks or a few months, and all the while you would be earning some money.
That plan or blueprint has changed in these times of recession. More and more, the jobs offered out there are listed as “temp, ongoing” or “temp to perm.” Employers are trying out the candidates that they choose to hire without investing a great amount of money in terms of pay or time in terms of training. If it works out, you may be hired from a temp position into a permanent one. However, this means you have to be willing to take a gamble: low pay and no benefits now for higher pay and benefits later. You also need to hit the ground running. Offices are running very lean these days, with a few people doing a lot. People who temp or do contract work often feel as if they keep having to “start all over again,” paying their dues to get into a better-paying position.
How you perform your job is important. It can be tough in a temp position because the permanent people may feel like there is no justification in investing time to help you learn the ropes. It is also difficult to live on a low salary while trying to figure out how to pay for basic things such as health insurance and health care. However, if you want to be considered for a higher-paying, more permanent position, you have to do the job well.
This is a situation where a strong resume can help you. A resume not only gets you an interview. It can also help you negotiate your way into a more permanent position. Combine a strong job performance with a resume that illustrates that you have the education and skills to perform a higher level, permanent position. Watch for on-the-job information that you can use to make you a compelling choice. You may have skills on your resume that you are not using in your temp position now; however, you need to highlight those skills that make you a valuable asset to the company, so valuable that they will want to keep you on permanently.
It is very easy to think that, when you have sent out hundreds of resumes, those resumes disappear into thin air. However, if you post your resume online or email it in response to a job ad, your resume usually gets stored in a database. This database could be a job aggregator like Career Builder, or it could be an applicant tracking system for a company or staffing agency. Just because you do not get a response to your job application, it does not mean that nothing is done with your resume.
What is does mean is that you want to be careful who gets access to your resume and the information on it. Many people eagerly post their resumes on a job aggregator only to be contacted for jobs they do not want, such as franchise opportunities or life insurances sales or other jobs that require you to put thousands of dollars down to get started. One thing that smart job seekers do is to create an email separate from your personal ones for just this purpose, that way your personal email won’t be bombarded with annoying spam mail. If the company is interested in you, they will email you. However, be sure that you regularly check both your email inbox and spam for messages from potential employers.
Putting your resume on LinkedIn is also another way for your resume to ‘live on’. As LinkedIn can be used as an online version of your resume, it will still be working for you even when you aren’t in an active job search (as long as you keep up with your profile and don’t ignore it).
It’s important to remember that once your resume is ‘out there’ in cyberspace either on a job board or LI, it will stay there until you remove it. Be strategic about where you put your resume and you will have better results.
Running a business entails making a business plan before you start the business and following up on that plan once the business is up and running. You should treat your career the same way. Do not wait for your employer to offer you opportunities to develop your skill sets. Even if you do have a job right now, you should continue to network. Find out what is happening in your career field, who is hiring, who is firing. You should know the career trends so you are the one who decides when you make your next career move, not your employer.
The days of the company taking care of your career development are long over. While you do not have to become a business entrepreneur, you have to be an entrepreneur when it comes to your own career.
Think about how you come across professionally on your resume, in correspondence and on the telephone. What type of professional do you want to be? How are you going to brand and market yourself? Your brand is your reputation or how people see you professionally. You may never need an executive bio, but it is a good exercise to write one anyways because it helps organize your thoughts on who you are professionally and how your career development has progressed.
