Executive Resumes, Personal Branding & Executive Job Search

The vast majority of employers and recruiters search LinkedIn before deciding whether to interview you. If you're conducting a job search, do you know how to optimize LinkedIn to your advantage? Here are a few ideas. Please add additional ones in comments!

1. After your title, add your industry (if that's the one you want a job in) and then pump it up with your brand if you wish: "Go-to SAP Project Manager"
2. In your summary, nail your value proposition and competitive advantages.
3. Use the common keywords recruiters or hiring authorities would use when searching for someone like you.
4. Put in a comprehensive list of keywords under Specialties to attract search engine attention
5. Under Experience, just hit your main achievements and contributions. Use numbers whenever possible.
6. If your title isn't the one a hiring manager would use to search for someone who does what you do, put your formal, legal title in, then a slash, and then the title that you would have in most companies: "Business Continuity Analyst / Business Continuity Manager"
7. Make your profile as complete as possible. Include links to any websites or blogs and to your Twitter and Facebook pages.
8. List all your educational institutions, training, associations, and memberships to provide keywords that may help other users find you.
9. Include a headshot. Make it professional even if it's taken from your digital camera.
10. List your interests, community involvement, and extracurricular activities. They give you individuality and make you memorable. Also, studies show that skill in one area (swimming) tranfers to perceived skill in your professional area (Program Management).
11. List your LinkedIn groups.
12. Consider which applications you'd like to download (see bottom of your profile). 
13. Participate in the Answers feature in your field to demonstrate subject matter expertise and thought leadership.
14. Join one or more groups related to your field of expertise. Contribute to it regularly. This helps your reputation as a thought leader.
15. Ask as many people as you can to write a recommendation (stick to professional contacts).
16. Recommend others. They may return the favor.
17. Consider embedding a video in your site - it's a real differentiator and allows you to show your enthusiasm and expertise in your field.
18. Connect to people you know and have confidence in.
19. Let LinkedIn mine your email addresses and give you the opportunity to invite some of them.
20. Do research on companies you are interested in working for.
21. Find names of people who work in those companies or who have worked there recently (all this can be done in a simple search).
22. Send a message or an inmail if it's available to them to ask if you could speak with them for 5 minutes to learn something about the culture of the company from within.
23. Find out any inside information you can about where the company is going that will help you tailor your message to them.
24. Go to Settings and check the box that says you'll allow inmail and introductions.
25. Go to Jobs and start using the largest job board on the Web!

Logically, I think what he says about the future of IT in US and Europe makes sense. I have, however, seen a flow of jobs back to the US in some cases. Customer frustration with help desk services provided by non-native English speakers and occasional dropped calls have prompted some companies to bring the function back to the US. One of the companies I am aware of has taken their systems administration away from a low-cost Indian provider and given it to a high-cost European one that is providing vastly improved service.

Still, IT professionals in India and China will only get increasingly skilled technically and better at communicating in English as time goes on. So what does the author suggest IT folks in US and Europe do to ensure they will have jobs in the future?

1. They need to focus on more than just cutting costs.

2. They need to develop expertise in another functional area on the business side of the house - marketing, finance, sales - in order to have an inside track on how they can leverage IT to MAKE MONEY.

3. They need to continually work to leverage technologies that provide greater agility to transform business to be more agile and hence more able to respond to market opportunities and challenges.

In addition to these, I think that, even though China is particular is coming on strong in tech innovation, the US and Europe must continue to lead in innovation. The individual technology professional who either pioneers or is an early adopter of an innovation that improves how business gets done will have a job that can't be outsourced.

The same is true, in my opinion, of the IT professional who adds value to the standard job description. An example of this would be my client who is such an expert on iOS and other mobile operating systems that he is an invaluable support to other Team Leads and a highly effective trainer and manager of outsourced teams.

Any other thoughts on how to ensure tech careers going forward?

Now that so many people are branding themselves in the employment market, how do you keep from duplicating someone else's brand and how do you keep them from unknowingly mimicking yours?

Say your brand is that you excel as an operations manager at cutting costs through business process redesign. Well, many, many people probably have that value proposition. So what do you do?

Fortunately, since a personal brand is made up of more than the value proposition, you have the opportunity to fill out the picture more. Consider the constellation that makes up a personal brand: key attributes, abilities, signature achievements, core values, value-add skills, commitments, leadership or working style, outside interests and skills, etc. Synthesizing these into a "living, breathing" personal / career identity makes it possible for your personal brand to be truly unique.

The difficulty comes in communicating the complex picture surrounding the core value prop in a succinct way that comes alive on the page and then finding space for it in valuable resume real estate!

BUT! With the possiblities presented by social media, you can present a more complete and nuanced personal brand than is always possible on a resume.

- If you tweet frequently, your followers will start to know you for your style, interests, values, commitments, knowledge, etc.

- LinkedIn offers some opportunities to present the bigger picture with its links to your personal blogsite / Website and to your associations. By participating in Groups on LinkedIn your audience will come to know the way you think and process information as well as the depth and range of your expertise.

- Facebook with its wide array of ways to interact with it can help fill out some of the picture of you socially.

- YouTube videos in which you talk about some aspect of your work can be tremendously powerful and can communicate many of the intangibles of a brand as well as your expertise and personality.

- If you write a blog, you become available to your public in yet another way. Your "voice" is unique. What you care about, think about, and talk about help define you.

We are all dynamic, living personal brands ever evolving. That makes us different from product brands. But it makes it more challenging to fully communicate too!

January 2, 2011, Monday, and we're face-to-face with it: Will we be able to do what we weren't able to do in 2010? What will make us any more likely to succeed than we were before? If will power didn't work before, why would it work now?

New research sheds some light on ways to build the habits that have eluded us in the past. A Wall Street Journal article on the subject suggests 5 ways to boost our likelihood of success. If you're a job seeker, here are tips adapted for you:

1. Establish positive thought patterns associated with your goal: i.e., "I will feel so capable, confident, and relieved to get the job offer I want." Might include making a "vision board" to visually represent what success would look and feel like.

2. Associate negative thought patterns with doing nothing: "I'll feel blue, discouraged, hopeless and as though I am not great at what I do for a living if I don't diligently go about job search in the most intelligent way."

3. Get an accountability partner - someone you can talk to who will hold you to your task commitments.

4. Reward yourself for successes small and large - whatever works for you: a ski trip, dinner out, new clothes, 10 iPhone music downloads etc.

5. Break down the total job search process into discreet, quantifiable tasks.***

*** For job seekers, this may mean practicing the critical habits that make success most likely, including such activities as:

* Make a certain # of networking calls daily

* Set up a target number of lunch appointments with contacts each week

* Go to ?# networking meetings per month

* Tweet 3 times daily to build your social media presence

* Blog ?# weekly to establish thought leadership

* Spend ?# minutes daily working your social networks for contacts and leads

* Execute a direct mail campaign to ?# of hiring authorities in your target companies

* Develop your personal brand and express it in all your materials (within ?# weeks)

* Work on your success stories until you have ?#

* Devote ?# minutes a week to practicing your elevator pitch

It IS possible to succeed where you haven't before. Try the 5 tips above and see your resolutions lead to new success. Happy New Year to all!

It happens to women a lot. It can also happen to men. You think someone's written a great recommendation for you. So many positive things are said, including: caring, collaborative, compassionate, good with people. But these turn out to be the very qualities that may put you out of the running.

Mikki Hebl's research (supported by the National Science Foundation) is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. She's found that the words used to describe women are different from the words to describe men. Men are described as leaders, assertive, ambitious, confident, bold etc. And the "male" characteristics are the preferred ones in hiring decisions.

Her research suggests that "gender norm stereotypes—and not necessarily the sex of applicants— can influence hireability ratings of applicants." So men can be victims of these stereotypes too. The research was done on hiring in university environments, particularly in science and engineering. I would guess that this dynamic would be even more true in private industry, particularly in technology and engineering.

Lively comments on the show segment ranged from: "Women should be more like men because 'male' traits lead to business success" to "The prevailing mythology of the white male in our culture is one of dominating other groups and progressively colonizing them (slavery, Native American subjugation)." I'm paraphrasing here.

My comment is: "Studies show that work gets done better if the leader has strong “communal” skills – the Lone Ranger isn’t the successful executive after all, despite the mythology around that and the words used to describe leaders. In fact, in a Harvard Business School article, it was reported that a study found that having a high 'emotional IQ' is a better predictor of CEO success than traditional high IQ."

This is a very loaded topic - one of the commenters said that our ability to be more communal as a species will ultimately determine our very survival.

In practical terms, if you want to get a job, ask your references to describe you in terms of your individual achievement and your qualities as a leader/manager, not in traditional female descriptors. At least until the culture changes!

LinkedIn is having a great discussion about personal brand reinvention based on an article in the Harvard Business Review. Most comments have to do with someone changing dramatically from a software engineer to an artist, etc. But there's another kind of career reimagining that needs to happen for entrepreneurs who want to transition within their own industry.

Here's the scenario in which a job seeker MUST change their personal brand even if they're not changing their industry or even changing their chief competency: they've been running their own business for a number of years and now want to transition to being an employee of a company. It's doable, though not an easy sell.

Usually they can demonstrate extensive knowledge of the industry and superior capability in one or more functional area (usually more). But the hiring authority has concerns about whether a CEO / entrepreneur would be happy or committed over the long haul to working in a situation in which the org chart has clearly defined boundaries between jobs. Employers may have concerns that the entrepreneur would be reporting to someone else for the first time in a long while.

The imperative for entrepreneurs is to infuse their personal brand with elements that assuage those concerns while conveying an irresistible value proposition and even exalting their entrepreneurial experience as a competitive advantage in certain cases.

1. Brand Reassurance: Some of the elements of the new brand might be extensive experience consulting within companies, working with internal and external teams, reporting to program managers or other managers / executives, interfacing and interacting comfortably up and down the organization etc.

2. Value Proposition: The value proposition would depend on the function and industry. For example, an independent sales rep might be able to report having an extensive database of C-level contacts in Fortune 100 companies and a strong closing ratio. Both would be highly valuable to the right company.

3. Turn Your Liability into an Asset: Entrepreneurs may also find that the very fact that they have a mindset of taking a great idea and commercializing it in the form of a viable long-term business is valuable to the right kind of company - a mid-sized to large company that has institutionalized an intrapreneurial approach in some or all of its groups - or - an early-stage company or startup that is looking for proven entrepreneurial talent.

Because it's a harder sell than making a move as an employee, the entrepreneur must nail these new aspects of their personal brand - both in their networking and in their resumes, cover letters and other marketing materials.

I couldn't resist the article "What Real Men Watch" in the Wall Street Journal, even though I should have been reading the business news! Turns out that the tv that's attracting upscale male viewers (accustomed to 8-12+ hours a day of offices, cubicles, and computers in the workplace) is reality tv described as "real men in danger" and "testosto-reality." Advertising dollars are flowing to shows like "Swamp Loggers," "Ice Road Truckers," and "Deadliest Catch."

You know, I'm a woman, but I can relate! What happens to our heads after days wrapped up in electronic, business, and technical communications - working exclusively in built spaces?

I watch my 2-year-old grandson aggressively driving his "digger" truck up the side of a dirt mound around the tree, pushing dirt in front of it until he can dump in over the other side. Very satisfying!

An element of danger, an encounter with the real resistence of the natural physical world, a great effort towards control of an unpredictable physical (not intellectual) reality - these seem to be the common elements of these shows that upper middle class guys are watching. There's a romance to blue collar jobs for them.

Where else can men who were once little boys playing with trucks in the dirt go for that element of raw physical risk and an experience of wrestling for physical control? 

Some guys I know buy, repair and ride motorcycles. Go to race tracks. Fish offshore. Run sled-dog races.

My work is all about career management. This article makes me wonder about whether what men do in their leisure time isn't a critical part of peak functioning in a cubicle world. And that maybe what folks do outside of work has a very real impact on ability to survive and thrive in the day job.

I actually think that (some) women too may need an antidote to a day spent indoors interacting with iPhones, laptops, colleagues and clients.

What I do to get this elusive high is sail off the coast of Gloucester, MA - and the emptier the bay is of boats, the fresher the wind, the better. Freedom all around. Afloat in a wind-wave-water-tide-sky environment that can change instantly - and require a physical response to avoid danger.

When the sailing season came to an end, I felt a little desperate - what are we going to do to experience wilderness in the long cold months ahead? All I could think of was snow mobiling up in the New Hampshire wilderness - I've never done it, don't know if I'd like it, but there might be thrill in it.

Not that I don't love my work. But the truth is that it's so left brain - as is so much of what many of us do. I do get a chance to be right-brain creative, too, in my work. Still....there's something missing.

You hear so much about work-life balance. Maybe we ought to be talking more about work-thrills balance. Men and women who work in built environments, what do you do for thrills? Does your career leave you hungry for something more raw? Or not?

There's been a trend in resume writing - particularly executive resume writing - to leave off interests and activities unrelated to the person's profession. The thinking was that it's not a good idea to distract readers from the person's consistent career brand as described in the resume. Those extras have been considered simply irrelevant.

But I was struck to read about some research that has implications for what a job seeker should do about this matter. Craig Lambert, in a Harvard Magazine article about Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy, discusses the finding that competence in one area generalizes to overall competence. So, if a job seeker lists "sailing" as an interest, the reader will be more likely to think that that person is competent in his/her job.

My new advice? It doesn't matter how removed the interest or activity is from your profession, include it if it demonstrates an ability or skill that you have. Cello playing for a CFO. Competitive swimming for an IT manager. Sled dog racing for a construction manager.

You get the idea. You'll be considered better at what you do for a living than a comparable competitor with no interests / activities.

Do you usually think that it's what you say that counts the most in terms of getting a job offer? Think again!

That's not to say that you shouldn't go into an interview fully prepared to get your message across, ask good questions, and answer questions skillfully. You must do so to be competitive. But new research indicates that how you stand and sit may have more impact on how you are perceived that you imagine.

Harvard Magazine has a fascinating article called "The Psyche on Automatic." Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has found that, in order to be considered competent, you need to be sure that your posture sends the message that you are "powerful." There's a high correlation between perceived power and competence. And your posture is an important way to give the impression that you are powerful - or not.

In a "power posing" study, high power postures are "expansive positions with open limbs" and low power postures are "contactive positions with closed limbs." She advises women MBA candidates to stop crossing their legs and shrinking their physical presence. "Be as big as you are," she says. For men and women, the more you can spread your arms, keep your feet on the floor, and take up maximum space the more you will be perceived as powerful and therefor competent.

"In all animal species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with high power and dominance," Cuddy says.

There's more! Nonverbal cues of confidence and happiness produce a mirroring effect on the person you are with and therefor a sense of connection with the other.

And, a natural smile (which affects the eyes as well as the mouth) releases neurochemicals that "correlate with happy feelings." So, you are more likely to be perceived as warm and competent. These findings go to the "likability" quality that makes such a big difference in being successful in all aspects of life.

The takeaway for interviewing? Make sure that your body and your facial expressions communicate competence, confidence, and warmth - while acing the content part as well! You'll be a strong contender for the job.

Of course boomers have to use up-to-the-minute best practices in resume writing, job search and interviewing when looking for a job. But there is one overriding factor they have to nail: their value proposition. Often boomers have an advantage in this, because they have already had accomplished careers and a strong track record.

What's a value proposition for a job seeker? It's the benefit they can (often uniquely) provide to the potential employer that matches the needs of that employer. How do you use it? At a minimum, in your resume, cover letter and LinkedIn Profile. How else must you leverage it? In your networking and interviewing.

One of my clients was 62 and had been out of work for a year when he applied to a Director-level job. Despite a strong competitive field of younger applicants, he got the offer. Why? Because the value he offered was so clearly and boldly spelled out in his resume. And because he interviewed keeping the value prop as his central message. How could the company resist? He was offering the exact value that they needed to solve the "pain" they were having.

So, don't neglect this critical value messaging as you go about your job search. It will override any concerns employers may have about age (even if that concern is not expressed because of possible legal ramifications). But only if clearly, powerfully and consistently expressed on paper and in person!