Executive Resumes, Personal Branding & Executive Job Search

I was prompted to write this post in response to a comment on an earlier blog post found both here and at CareerHubBlog:

7 Key Ways to Use Social Media in Your Job Search

Rory says:

I just had to write a quick post to let you all know about an intriguing trick interview question and the trick to answering it!

I was talking to an IT Director who said that he was asked this question when he was applying, earlier in his career, for a position managing a Help Desk. He was offered the job on the basis of his answer. The hiring authority told him other candidates failed to answer this question in a way that would convince him that they had an innate sense of customer service - that is, a natural tendency to deliver top-notch answers, support, and solutions.

How did my client answer?

"What kind?"

A brilliant answer that showed that his first instinct was to determine the needs of the customer.  Other people may have answered: "Yes, I know how to bake a cake," or "If I have a recipe," or "Only if I have the ingredients," or "I'm not that good at baking cakes."

Companies use so-called "trick" questions to uncover qualities in a candidate that straightforward interview questions cannot. Candidates are pretty savvy as to what the interviewer is looking for when asking a question. Questions like the one my client was asked is less easy to "game."

So, how can you be prepared to answer a question that seems to come out of left field? Take a minute to think before you answer. It's OK to do that, even to ask, "Please give me a minute." Consider what core skills are required by the job. How does the question relate? Is it analogous to what you would be doing on the job? What answer could you give that would translate over to the job in question?

This tip may help - or not. Giving the right answer also may not indicate who is best for the job. I can imagine a person who gives the right answer to a trick question might be someone who has a particularly "creative divergent" thinking style, rather than someone with the core skill supposedly being tested.

But if you take a minute, you may be able to "psyche out" the real question behind the question!

PS I can bake a chocolate cake. But only with a recipe and the right ingredients. I'm not so good at white cakes. Why would you want a cake? What's that have to do with anything. I love cake! JC

One of the biggest concerns my executive clients have is how to use social media in their job search. They know that it's the new kid on the job search block, but they themselves have rarely gone beyond a bare bones LinkedIn profile (LIP). Facebook evokes shudders of horror, and Twitter is deemed trivial.

Some rethinking might be in order. Life calls on us to go out of our comfort zone on occasion - and this may be one of those times. See what you think about these steps to start actively leveraging the good in social media to promote your personal brand for job search and career advancement. Do they feel doable to you?

1. When you see a job you're interested in anywhere, use LI to connect with a couple of managers in the company that posted the job. Ask for 5-10 minutes of their time - say that you are interested in the job and want to find out a little bit about company culture, trends, etc. If it feels comfortable, request that they forward your resume to the hiring manager (not HR - submit that separately as instructed in the job ad). Why would they help you? Employees frequently get financially rewarded for referring a candidate that gets hired.

2. "Rinse and repeat" for your other social media sites: Identify employees, ask for a brief conversation, ask that they forward your resume to the hiring manager.

3. Reach out directly through LinkedIn to the recruiter or hiring manager. Express interest. Send your resume.

4. On Facebook, go to the company pages set up by your target companies and "Like" the company (recruiters say they notice "likes" more than comments!).

5. Expand your online footprint, so that when your name is Googled (and it will be!), you show up, on brand, in a number of places, not just LinkedIn.

6. Search for jobs on LI, Twitter, and Facebook every day or every other day. They (and job apps created around them) all have extensive job listings. To find third-party apps, Google like this: "[Twitter] job search."

7. Watch the activity of companies you are targeting. If you see they are going through M&A (mergers and acquisitions), opening up new offices, expanding product lines, etc., use that information to position yourself as a "solution" in a letter direct to the hiring manager (US Mail) or via email.

This is a limited list, but if you implement some or most of these items, you will be in a good position to both attract recruiter interest and get interviews. Practice until you become adept at leveraging the personal promotional potential of social media sites. Take the advice of my client who "poo-pood" these suggestions at first and now uses Twitter almost exclusively for Healthcare IT professional information. Do it and see. You'll be glad you did.

Tags: LinkedIn, Twitter, networking, social media job search, Pinterest, youtube

Usually we think of "passive" being a negative descriptor, right? Well, in terms of job search and career management in general, being passive in social media is good! Being active is good too! It's a case, not of either/or, but of both/and. Today we're going to talk about the passive job search via social media. Once you implement the tips below, you can be attracting recruiter interest 24/7.

With the acceleration of social media use by recruiters and hiring authorities, no professional in transition should delay in taking advantage of these new job search channels. Here are some tips:

Passive Social Media Job Search - Make sure that when recruiters are searching for candidates on social media sites, they can find you. These are active things you can do so that you can passively job search.

1. If you haven't done so already, put up a 100% complete LinkedIn profile (LIP): professional headshot; keyword-relevant, branded Headline; keyword-rich, branded Background and Skills & Expertise; Experience section with top accomplishments with their contexts; URLs for your personal website and your personal presence on Twitter Facebook, Pinterest, youtube, etc., and Recommendations.
2. Enhance your LIP by joining groups and adding slides. Please note: former LI applications are being switched over to a new format in the form of media links to images, presentations, videos, documents. This feature is not rolled out to everyone yet. When it is, jump on it.
3. Consider posting frequent updates in your LIP "Activity" space. If you have a public job search, keep your network (or a select number of your close connections) posted on your jobs search activites. It will keep you top-of-mind as they hear about job opportunities.
4. Expand your network to 500+ by sending invitations to connect to managers in your target companies (where you'd like to work), recruiters in your industry, and everyone you know.
5. Participate in select LI groups. Set aside dedicated time each week to make comments and start discussions in groups where your target companies, industry thought leaders, and recruiters hang out.
6. Consider setting up a professional Facebook page. Facebook is the #2 place recruiters go among the social media sites.
7. If you use Twitter, set up your Twitter feed to forward to your LIP. This frequent updating will improve your chance of being found in a Google search. Google loves new content!
8. Get active on Twitter. One of my clients said he "poo-pood" this suggestion when I made it. Now that he has his great new job at 10% higher salary, he says that he gets the vast majority of his professional information from Twitter! Follow thought leaders and recruiters in your field.
9. Tweet professional comments and interesting links on Twitter. Re-tweet, with comments, interesting tweets from people you are following.
10. Comment on other people's blogs or arrange to be a guest blogger on blogs that have good visibility to people who might be in a position to help you with your job search.

This is a limited list, but if you implement some or most of these items, you will be in a good position to both attract recruiter interest and get interviews. Take the advice of my client: even if you "poo-poo" these suggestions, do them anyway! You'll be glad you did.

In our next blog post, we'll have 7 tips for actively job searching via social media.  Stay tuned!

The CareerXroads Source of Hire Survey for 2012 surveyed mid- to large-sized companies hiring for $150k-$300k jobs. 36 competitive firms responded with 2,139 total jobs filled. The results suggest some interesting directions for executives in job search mode to go. Here is some of the data, followed by implications for your job search and other job search best practices.

• 41% of jobs are FILLED INTERNALLY: Think hard about internal promotion rather than leaving the company to meet your career objectives | It's a great way to get an edge over the competition.
• Referrals - 28% of ALL EXTERNAL HIRES come from referrals | This is the highest percentage out of all external sources | Referrals have always been #1, but with significant numbers of those referrals coming from internal employee referrals, you would do well to leverage your offline and LinkedIn and other social media contacts to connect with employees of your target company.
• Job Boards account for 20.1% of hires | This is surprising since job boards have largely been viewed as an unfruitful source for executive job seekers | Drill down and we find that 1/3rd to 1/2 of those surveyed say that POSTING jobs results in hires, not searching for resumes posted on the job board | So, DO spend a limited time each day looking through online job postings and DON'T post your resume | Best job boards by the numbers? Indeed.com, CareerBuilder.com, and Dice.com (technical job board).
• Career Sites yield 9.7% of hires | So, add visits to your target companies' career pages and profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter | Don't forget to "like" your targeted company on their Facebook page (recruiters like that!).
• Recruiter Initiated: 9.1% | Put time into building relationships with a few recruiters in your space and/or function - preferably before you need to look for a job | Consider selecting executive retained recruitment firms that are small-to-mid-sized where you may have a better chance of making a personal connection | Reach out to the individual recruiters through your LinkedIn connections or your LI groups | Submit your resume to recruiters online databases, either through an email blast or one by one.
• Social Media: 3.5% | Although this number is relatively low, it doesn't reflect the INFLUENCE social media has on the large numbers of recruiters who use social media to vet a candidate they may indentify in other ways | > 80% of recruiters spend time on social media sites | In order of preference, they are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest | Without fail get a great professional headshot and keyword-rich, 100% complete profile on LinkedIn | Consider regular tweets and retweets on Twitter and a professional profile on Facebook | Social media is part of the hiring landscape and its influence is only going to increase, not just in hiring but in overall personal and professional branding.
• Other external sources of hire: Colleges 6.6% (must be for <$150k jobs - brings into question whether all the people polled restricted their answers to the $150-$300K range) | Rehires (4.3) | While we're on the subject, though, leverage your alma mater's alumni list and contact info, if you can get it, to network and get the word out - preferably to people in your industry and/or function, adjacent spaces and/or target companies | Do the same with association membership lists.

Stay tuned for the 2013 survey which we will bring you up to date on when it comes in - and good luck!

Conferences can be goldmines for executives involved in a confidental job search. Here are 10 tips:

1. Do NOT ask about positions or do anything else close to looking for a job. Being paid to rep your company, you have to strictly observe your charge, loyalty to your company.

2. DO collect relationships lavishly - business cards from everyone - but, also, make an attempt to make a real connection so that you are memorable - use your brand "The strategic cloud computing expert with a business focus." Any non-work connections/interests will help you be memorable as well.

3.  Offer to help new contacts in any way that you can - including connecting them with people you know to help them with their job transitions, if they ask about that.

4. When you get home, invite all the people on your business cards to connect on LinkedIn - also follow them on Twitter.

5. Email the ones you feel you can trust with knowing about your confidential search and ask for a couple of names of people to contact at companies for which you may want to work. Be specific about position - Senior Director of IT - and size of company and industry, so that your contacts can be most helpful to you. Offer to do the same for them, either now or at any time in the future.

6. Select a trusted group of LI connections whom you want to keep updated on your job search. Send an update from LI each week or two telling them about any interesting new meetings or developments in your job search - to keep you "top of mind."

7. For all your connections, including your new conference ones, do regular LI updates - weekly or biweekly - about any (non-job search) activity at your company, your professional pursuits, etc. - again, to keep you top of mind.

8. Join LI groups where key connections belong. That includes recruiters who place IT executives!!!

9. Leverage the new contacts you've made at the conference and send out regular newsletters or links to your blog posts to them. If you don't have either now, consider either or both. They are fantastic networking vehicles.

10. Keep your new contacts alive through occasional personal emails or quick phone calls.

Networking is still the best way to get a job. Make it part of your professional life no matter whether you are in job transition or not. Contacts from conferences - because you can meet so many face-to-face - can be especially valuable, if you use the techniques above. Good luck!

Image attribution: FHSMUN 34

A recent survey asks recruiters what is the #1 way to get on a company's radar on Facebook? 86% say to "like" them on their company page.

If you've never checked out the company pages on Facebook, now's the time. Some companies have a robust, built-out presence - others have almost nothing. But if companies you are targeting are active on Facebook at all, you have a golden opportunity to interact with them there.  You can comment on the company's news, keep tabs on what they are doing, and "like" even specific comments.

It sounds as though recruiters are monitoring the activity - and it would benefit the job seeker who is part of it.

As job search coaches, my colleagues and I are experts at helping clients plan and implement their job searches. We teach about social search (leveraging social media), Web 2.0 networking, the Direct Approach, uses of job boards, how to work with recruiters, email and direct mail campaigns etc.

The only trouble is ... sometimes the very nature of job search can cause people to feel uncertain, not in control, anxious, vulnerable, over-eager, even desperate. And these feelings tend to undermine both the activities of job search and interviewing.

To complicate matters, clients frequently are dealing with feelings related to short- or long-term unemployment or sudden termination due to company changes beyond their control (mergers, acquisitions, natural disasters like Sandy, a shift in the company's strategic priorities) or complications such as personnel conflicts or perceived non-performance.

The inevitable emotions that accompany any of these circumstances need to be acknowledged, validated and processed so that they don't creep into your voice, body language or job search effort. Talk to a friend, or get short-term counseling if you need to.

Even if you have a solid position of employment and are just looking around, you will most likely experience a degree of tension about being assessed or judged by hiring authorities or recruiters as they consider you for opportunities.

So, stress, anxiety, self-doubt are often unwelcome guests at the job search party.

This is where some radical healing is needed. This is where some simple Buddhist practices can change your stress into calmness, your anxiety into serenity, your self-doubt into confidence. Practicing the following breathing exercises as presented by Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh can transform the way you go about your job search.

Try saying these to yourself, breathing deeply in and out, a couple of times a day as you go about your job search. Picture yourself in your mind's eye as a flower, mountain, still waters, space and as a living being and internalize the helpful feelings that accompany those pictures.

Breathing in I see myself as a flower, breathing out I feel fresh

Breathing in I see myself as a mountain, breathing out I feel solid

Breathing in I see myself as still waters, breathing out I feel calm

Breathing in I see myself as space, breathing out I feel free

Breathing in I am alive, breathing out I smile to myself

Thich says, "The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present - that is the only thing you can do."

Try these practices and see if your job search doesn't start to feel more purposeful and skillful. You may find that you feel more serene as you go about your job search activities, secure in your own unique value in the world and focused on the things you can do in the present, knowing that they will lead to a future that will be a good one for you.

Image attribution: fastcodesign

Why the resume as ad? To borrow a phrase from the campaign, do the math!

• 141 resumes submitted for each job (way too low an estimate IMHO)
• Each recruiter manages ~22 openings at any one time (multiply times 141 for the number of resumes a recruiter has to process at any one time)
• Only slightly more than a quarter of recruiters use applicant tracking technology; the rest have to visually scan resumes
• Only 10 applicants on average are screened for a position *

So, do you think the thoughtful summary, job descriptions, and accomplishments on your resume are going to get read and that the material will prompt the recruiter to choose yours out of hundreds to be one of the 10 marked for follow up?? 

Here’s what I think, having been in the resume writing industry for 19 years now. Today’s resume – which has only 30 seconds to be reviewed by a recruiter – has to act like an ad. Look at an ad. What are some of the elements that make it work?

• A brand - something that makes it memorable, the way Coke's brand helps it compete against Pepsi and generic colas
• A tagline - to capture the essence or strong theme of the brand
• Large letters to help the main message stand out, with smaller letters and fine print for critical details
• A website to link to for more information on the product
• A quote from someone or a picture of a famous endorser for the product
• Color - eye-catching
  
• Unique design and font - an ad tries to attract visual interest
  

It is possible, and even desirable, for resume writers to amp up their resumes with some of these elements. One way a resume should be different from an ad, though, is that white space, although necessary, shouldn't own so much real estate that there is no room for descriptions of primary accomplishments for each position.

(Please note: only a stripped down .txt version of your resume should be submitted where there is a chance that it will be processed by an Applicant Tracking System. Use your highly formatted resume for human eyes!)

With those points noted, let’s take an ad's elements one at a time and consider how you would build some of its successful features into your resume:

• The brand you are looking for is your career brand/personal brand. It is your industry, function, value proposition, and differentiator(s).
• A tagline is a short phrase that serves as a quick handle for people to remember you by: “The technologist’s instructional designer.”
• Large letters: go for size 16-18 font for your desired position as the “title” of your resume and 14-16 for your brand and tagline.
• A website link, or LinkedIn profile if you don’t have a resume – with a link embedded in the text towards the top of page one.
• A quote from relevant third party to lend credibility, if you wish.
• Color! Since most resumes are viewed online (laptop, smart phone, tablet), any color you select will help that part of the text stand out; use it for your brand statement and perhaps the main contribution in each position.
• Font. Again, because most resumes are viewed online, you can be creative with fonts, design, and other visual elements, remembering to be more conservative for more conservative industries, such as banking, and more creative in marketing, design etc.

Click here to see examples of resumes that are a fast read with easy-to-grasp "reasons to hire." These are not extreme examples of the resume-as-ad and don't include every element of an ad, but they have enough to have attracted the interest of recruiters.

So don't hesitate to tap into the power of Madison Avenue to help your resume become one of the 10 selected by a recruiter for follow-up!

* Image attribution: Dell

** Statistics courtesy of HR Tech Blog

If you look at resume from the nineties or earlier you will commonly see objective statements starting off resumes. They would read something like this:

Objective: A sales job where I can contribute to a company's growth while continuing to advance my career.

Do you want to write this kind of objective statement on your resume these days? NO! This kind of objective statement is an indication that you have not kept up with the times. Even more importantly, recruiters - internal and external - don't care in the least about the benefits you will receive - only the benefits their organization will receive.

Why write this blog post at all, since most people know not to write the old-fashioned kind of objective statement? Because there are reasons why including an objective on your resume is absolutely critical!

1. If you don't say right at the top what position you are seeking - the exact title - the recruiter may not spend the time to figure out which of the several titles you've held - or some other - you are going after! You have only about 120 seconds to provide the recruiter with a "fast match" between your resume and the open job. Make it as easy as possible!

2. If you don't include the position title you are going after - even if you haven't held that one exactly - software used to process resumes will likely not retrieve your resume in a keyword search by a recruiter. And all your time and effort on your resume will be wasted! With 70% of large companies using Applicant Tracking Systems, you can't afford to leave out a critical title keyword!

Here are a couple of examples of ways to use objectives in contemporary resumes. Give your resume a heading, often a title. That's easy if you are a VP of IT and those are the only jobs you are applying for. But what if you've been an VP of IT and you want to apply to a CIO job? You'll want to be sure that title and keyword are prominently featured in your resume. Here's an example:

Targeting: VP of IT / VP of Information Technology | CIO / Chief Information Officer

Under that title, put your branding statement, industry, areas of specialty, or key selling points, whichever is the most strategic. But by including the word "targeting" and the exact position title you are applying for you will allow the reader to immediately categorize you as someone at the right level. Including both the title you currently hold and the title you aspire to also provides you with the critical keywords for electronic processing of your resume.

To make it even more complex, if you are sending your resume to a networking contact and tell him or her that you are looking for the top IT management position in a company, you have to do something more. Since the top tech person in the company goes by different titles depending on a number of factors - such as the size and history of the company - you'll need to cover the waterfront:

Targeting: VP of IT / VP of Information Technology | CIO / Chief Information Officer | Senior Director of IT / Senior Director of Information Technology

That way you enable a "fast match" when a hiring authority or recruiter considers your resume for a particular job and job title. You also have provided the necessary keywords to keep your title options open. Notice that I spelled out "IT" so that either "VP of IT" or "VP of Information Technology" will capture search engine attention.

We've devoted a lot of time in this post to a small number of words on your resume, but they are critical ones. So think like a time-challenged recruiter and like a computer to increase your chances of being considered for a job!

Image Credit: clouducation.wordpress.com/