Executive Resumes, Personal Branding & Executive Job Search

In a great deal of in-person interviews, the way that you present yourself and the way you are received are as important as the accomplishments that you bring to the table. How do you brand yourself to ensure you make the best impression? Most people have developed their “brand” or image generically rather than intentionally creating a professional identity that may set you apart. Whether you’re looking to re-brand or upgrade your current image, your physical appearance plays a significant role. To help you out, here are a few important insights on how to create a professional brand:

1. Attire: When determining a dress code for your branding, it’s always best to review your current environment. Try to research the company culture. What are your colleagues typically wearing? A suit is the safest option, but here is where company culture comes into play. A pair of freshly pressed slacks and a collared shirt, for both men and women, could be exactly what you need to show that you are the perfect fit. In addition, be sure to complete your look with conservative jewelry and a pair of polished shoes.

2. Skin care: Clear, glowing skin quickly portrays your overall health. Enlist in the help of a skin care professional to help you determine your skin type and specialized needs in order to achieve your goals.

3. Grooming: Your grooming techniques can relay your personality and set you apart from the rest of the workforce. Whether you choose a full beard, 5 o’clock shadow, mustache, or decide to be beard-free, make sure that your facial hair is well-kept regardless of the style. Be sure stray hairs have been removed, beard length is tended to, and trim up with edges using a fresh razor.

4. Hair style: Your hair style can exude personal characteristics and play a large role in your overall style. Regardless of the style you select, be sure your hair is freshly washed and styled. When trying to choose a haircut and color for yourself, it’s always best to be conservative to avoid distracting leadership from your skills.

5. Makeup: When deciding your makeup, opt for a look that simply enhances your features as opposed to creating a look that requires heavy lipstick and fake eyelashes.

6. Manicured nails: Your nails might seem like a small detail that no one will notice but in fact it conveys your attention to detail. In order to communicate this great characteristic, be sure to clean and frequently trim your nails.

7. Oral Health: A smile can quickly disarm a colleague and show that you’re warm and welcoming to their ideas. Removing stains and making sure you have fresh breath will portray this.

When creating a personal brand identity, it’s key to remember that it doesn’t have to be generic. Creating a brand that is unique to you and your industry can help you increase your chances of landing a position. Do you have any unique branding tips that have personally helped you?

Image attribution: aliexpress.com

Do you know if your activity online is being monitored by your company? Have you been informed about privacy policies?

Thanks to Jana Rooheart of RecruitingBlogs.com we have these stats:

• 43% of USA employers track emails of their employees
• 45% use key logging
• 66% monitor Internet activities of their employees.

Rooheart informs us that, "Special software for employee monitoring (e.g., keylogger) is installed on workers’ desktops, laptops or company cell phones."

Employers may be monitoring for any or all of the following reasons:

• Checking up on employees to protect against security leaks of internal, proprietary, and/or private information or data.
• Monitoring time an employee spends "wasting time" on social networks or surfing the web. The employer then has a window into issues of productivity as well as employee effort.
• Acting as content decency police to flag and possibly discipline use of inappropriate language or the viewing of innapropriate material.
• And, in the area that interests us most here, checking to see if you are looking for another job.

As a coach and career consultant dedicated to helping clients get great new jobs, this last point is of the most interest to us.

If an employer suspects you may be looking to change jobs, s/he may react in any number of ways: do nothing, speak to you about how s/he can make your work more satisfying, reprimand you for use of company devices for private use, sideline you from key projects, or even fire you.

If you are looking, even casually, for another job, be sure to confine your related activities to a home computer or personal cell phone. I know it can be seriously inconvenient, but using any device that is on your employer's network can put a real monkey wrench into the works.

Image courtesy of: http://www.veinticincoproducciones.com/

Sam has a title problem. He is VP of IT for a small company. He basically manages all aspects of IT, from infrastructure and application development to information security and cloud computing. He manages a couple of technical resources. But now Sam wants to change jobs. He seeing layoffs at his company and hears rumors of financial insecurity. Now he's started a job search targeting larger, more established firms.

But, guess what? He’s not qualified to be a VP of IT for a mid-sized or large company. BUT, he might be able to get a job there but hold a less senior title. He sees a Senior Project Manager job he thinks would be a good fit. He would be managing a globally distributed development team of 30. He would also be making more money than in his current job, even though the title is two to three management levels below his current title.

But, if he doesn’t do something about his title, he may find his resume never makes it past ATS (applicant tracking systems) to the recruiter seeking to fill the open position. (The recruiter will be searching for the keywords “Senior Project Manager.”)

If his resume passes the ATS hurdle, it still has to convince the recruiter that Sam has the skills, knowledge, and experience required.

Let’s say Sam can work the keywords into his resume so it gets retrieved in a search for “Senior Project Manager,” what does he do then about conveying what he has accomplished as VP of IT? The recruiter won’t work hard to see if somewhere in his current job he has done the duties of a Senior Project Manager and demonstrated relevant skills. S/he will want to see terms like and content about: "project life cycle management" and "Agile/Scrum." Sam has to make that experience abundantly clear. (And probably strip away much that he accomplished that isn't immediately relevant.) You can see the challenge here.

Titles for managers in technology have proliferated. And, as you can see, they often differ significantly from company to company both in the actual terms used and in the responsibilities associated with them.

Why is this a problem for you? Because you need your target title keywords in your resume, even though you haven't held the title. And, your current title is probably the single most important part of the recruiter’s first impression of you. And if it’s different from the job title you are applying for, most recruiters will not take the time to go deeper and your resume won’t make the interview pile.

Increasing, I'm seeing clients with title problems. Some are like Sam's. But here are a few other common scenarios:

• A job seeker has a VP title but it is ideosyncratic to his current company. Some very large companies have title progressions that don't correspond to the common title-and-responsibility pairings in most of the rest of the corporate world.
• A job seeker has managed 100+ resources at the C-level in a small company in a previous job, but he has been working at a large company for several years and holds the title "Manager," not Director, VP, or CIO/CTO. How does he get back into the executive ranks?
• A job seeker is a Senior Director in his current company but has huge responsibilities, hundreds of reports, large strategic impacts. He is obviously under-titled. How does he get the recruiter to see him as a VP or SVP?

These are some of the challenges my clients are facing everyday.

It's tricky to write a resume or LinkedIn profile so that a recruiter sees the job seeker as qualified if some of the above scenarios pertain. I recommend that job seekers work with a qualified and experienced IT executive resume writer. As you know I usually provide DIY solutions for issues I raise in my blog posts, but this particular one needs broad knowledge of the IT landscape and top-notch strategic resume writing skills.

Be aware that title problems are very common – and there are solutions. Contact one of my esteemed collegues or me if you need help. Good luck!

It would be hard to miss the macro trends affecting the IT industry today: BYOD (bring your own device), automation and outsourcing, Big Data, the as-a-service revolution (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, UCaaS, etc.), to list a few. These trends are bringing with them new IT jobs. That's the good news. The bad news is that older jobs that deal with technologies becoming rapidly obsolete no longer represent a way forward for many.

This is a serious issue for IT folks.Take a look at what the experts think. CIO magazine lists the jobs they see as having no future:

• The IT manager who lives to turn down requests: the one who doesn't have a BYOD/Mobile Device Management strategy, for instance.
• Specialists who go deep in a specific hardware, application, programming language, or development process.
• Desktop repair techs.
• System administrators.
• Technologists who have been relying on a long list of technical certifications after their name to get them a job.
• Web designers.
• Unix server specialists.
• Mainframe programmers.
• IT managers who guard their turf and reject integration with business teams.

If you are one of these people, you will be interested in reading CIO's article.

In the fast-changing world of IT, successful careerists accept the need to continually train in new technologies and competencies to prepare for emerging job areas. What works now to get a well-paying job may well also become obsolete in 10 years or fewer.

What you want is mastery of an area that seems to have "legs" going forward (as of September, 2016). Here are some qualities and skills that will help you gain job security for the foreseeable future:

• An ability to say "yes" to change.
• The willingness to work with teams across IT and business to achieve business goals.
• Becoming a flexible generalist who goes beyond a specific programming language, piece of equipment, or application solution: be the one continually broadening his/her skill sets to surf the wave of new and emerging technologies.
• Workstation repair techs who have shifted to server repair and diagnostics in response to Big Data and the proliferation of servers on site, off site, and in the cloud.
• Shifting from systems administration to a hot new domain such as data analytics or security.
• Mastery of a scripting language, Python, Ruby, or PHP, instead of going after one of the older certifications.
• Shifting from Web design to SEO and marketing.
• Moving beyond a Unix focus to mastery of Linux and and open source solutions.
• Shifting from a narrow role as coder to becoming a software engineer who can align technology with the needs of the business.
• Moving beyond the IT silo to design solutions that save money, make money, or drive business innovation and productivity.

FYI: CIO magazine also lists in-demand skill areas that are associated with higher salaries: Spark, Microsoft Azure, cloud, Jira, security engineering, Cassandra, Salesforce, electrical engineering, big data.

Be a savvy careerist. Keep your head up and observe the way the wind is blowing. Adapt  your career accordingly and you will go from strength to strength!

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In my previous post, I discussed how to power your job search by using the LinkedIn Posts feature. In this post, you will learn tips for creating content within LinkedIn to help you build your brand, mindshare, thought leadership, connections, and ultimately give you a serious edge on getting the job of your dreams.

So, how is publishing on LinkedIn relevant to executive and professional job seekers?

As a creator of content on LI you can pursue a number of career advancing strategies:

You can build your thought leadership and brand, deepen your connections, and extend your online footprint to impress prospective employers. Anyone who works in technology functions or fields should show how tech and LI savvy they are by using this method.

What are some easy ways you can push out content?

• Use the Share an Update feature on your home page. See it towards the top of your home page. Your update will be brief and may or may not include a link to a longer blog post, article, white paper, resume, etc.
• Write a Post using the Publish a Post feature also on the menu bar on your home page. This is LI's long-form publishing feature. When you publish an article/post, it will be viewed by some subset of your connections. People may Like, Comment, and Share your content thus distributing it even more broadly.

Before you generate content, be sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and strong. That way, when all the people you inspired by your published words come to your profile they will see you in the right light and see your brand. So be sure to communicate your target position and industry, what you excel at, what differentiates you, and your values and style. Good luck!

Become a power user of LinkedIn content and reap the rewards for years to come!

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So, what is the reason the market experts give for why Microsoft (MS) bought LinkedIn (LI)? You won't be surprised to know that they don't all agree. The most interesting reason, I think, was put forward in Forbes: Content. It is a play on Content is King. Turns out the content on LI has the advantage of being current and some of it is great!

This morning I turned up posts on how technology is disrupting the consulting business, another on how making little changes can make a profound impact on your career and earnings, and the 3rd gave me an idea for an important book to read that was on Bill Gates' suggested Summer Reading list. And those are just the ones I read of the 40 or so post titles I scanned!

So, how is this relevant to executive and professional job seekers?

As a consumer of content on LI you can pursue a number of career advancing strategies:

How do you leverage content on LI to propel your job search?

Quickly scan Posts each morning. Find it in the drop-down menu to the left of the Search bar at the top of your screen. Then quickly scan the Posts that pop up. LinkedIn has an algorithm to provide content that has some relevance to you in some way.

As a job seeker, you can find a whole other collection of Posts.You can narrow down by subject using the Search feature at the top of Posts. Enter your target company or companies where you want to work. You will quickly find out what's going on in terms of the thinking, culture, business plans, innovations, trends, hiring etc.

You can also search by subject matter. For instance, if you want to be a Channel Manager in the cloud industry, see what comes up in Posts when you search on some or all of those keywords.

Read the 1-3 most interesting Posts you find.

Don't stop there!

• Make a comment after the posts you found interesting. Your name with a link to your profile will be included. The company employee who wrote the post will appreciate your interest and contributions. Do this regularly and you will be building your thought leadership and well as your social reach.
• Check to see if your target companies (where you really want to work next) are seeking to hire someone like you and have posted a job on LI. If so, send an InMail to the recruiter. Mention that you've been following their posts and name one thing you found particularly interesting. Say that you have an interest in the target job and suggest that they review your (great) LI profile. Then follow the directions and apply.
• And/or search among your connections for an employee of the company. The posted job on LI will pop them up when you look at the job ad. Contact them via InMail or directly, if they are 1st degree connections, and ask if you can talk with them for 10 minutes or so about where they see the company heading or what the culture is like. (These questions go over way better than "Can you help me get a job?") After building the relationship, if it feels comfortable, ask if they would take a look at your (great) executive resume and give you feedback. And ask if they would submit your edited resume to their company. Resumes submitted in this way have 10 times the chance of getting you hired! And employees are often compensated for referring a person who gets hired, so they have some motivation to help you!

In my next post I will discuss how you can improve your job search and career by becoming a creator of content on LinkedIn!

Become a power user of LinkedIn content and reap the rewards for years to come!

 If your career is a car, are you driving down a straight road? Or, do you picture yourself going around a rotary, seeing a number of exits, and then selecting one? In other words, is your career path more like a straightaway or a rotary? This is an important question to understand as you go about your personal branding,executive resume writing, and career management.

Let's imagine you are a VP of IT. Did you get there by starting out as a programmer, progressing to managing a team as a Team Lead, then a Project Manager, then moving up to Program Manager, then Director of IT, and now VP of IT? That's the straight path.

Many of my clients have progressed along a straight and logical path very similar to the one just described.

But sometimes my clients have gotten to the VP or C-level by different routes. Maybe they did a stint in product management, operations management, or finance, then added technical responsibilities and finally moved into their current leadership position in IT.

Is one better than the other? What is your opinion? There are benefits to both. The straight road folks have a sense of IT at both big picture and granular levels and deep expertise in how IT should operate. The rotary people bring to IT perhaps a broader grasp of overall business needs and the role IT can play in leveraging technology to meet business objectives.

Which is an easier sell to recruiters? Probably the straightaway applicants, at least for now. But, the rotary applicants have a strong case to make too. They deeply understand how IT and business can work together to drive corporate growth.

The interesting thing to me is the shift that is taking place. Because the 2000s have experienced so much financial disruption, job stints have gotten shorter and many people accepted position because they were the only jobs on offer in the constricted hiring environment. The new position may well have taken them off the straight path into lateral roles and/or different functions. That would be the rotary career

I'm glad that recruiters are viewing shorter stints as not always negative. And that they are more able to view different functional experience as conferring unique benefits. It means there's more room to be YOU in your working life and that is always good!

Look ahead, is your career going to branch out or steadily climb within your function over the next 10 years? In both cases, make sure you keep your eye on trends in hiring and functional roles. The latter are changing rapidly with the adoption of cloud computing.

The new IT leaders are expected to REALLY know how to leverage IT to be a true business partner. If you want to be a VP of IT via the more predictable path, make sure to get cross-functional exposure via projects and consulting within the business to strengthen your credentials.

If you come into IT managmeent from an adjacent functional area, don't fail to tap the deep dive expertise of technical teams and project managers to guide your leadership decision making.

Remember, if you have a rotary-type career, be very careful in how you write your resume. Clearly articulate and support your unique value proposition. And shape your more varied career in such a way as to make your value for the desired job obvious. Good luck!

Traditionally – pre-2008 meltdown but definitely before the dot-com boom – having too many jobs in short period of time on a candidate's resume was clearly an issue for hiring authorities. They assumed the person would be a short-term employee and reduce the ROI from recruiting, onboarding, and training them.

Recruiters believed that short stints at several companies showed that the applicant wasn't committed, got easily bored, and/or was easily dissatisfied. Many resumes would be disqualified based on the job hopping factor alone.

Has anything changed? Interestingly, a lot! You will still encounter hiring authorities who have concerns when they see short stints. But here are some additional considerations that may actually work FOR you today if you have shorter stints on your resume:

1. Voluntary job hopping that isn't too abrupt is increasingly viewed as someone having a positive appetite for professional growth. They appear to thrive on expanding their horizons, professional skills, and knowledge base. Frequently, job changers who switch after 2-4 years are also considered to have skills in getting up to speed quickly in new and different corporate environments. They are also seen as having a richer and more diverse network. Conversely, having a tenure in excess of 5-8 years is now often viewed unfavorably. It is assumed that the candidate lacks ambition, creativity, and drive. However, if s/he has a strong pattern of promotions to new challenges, that may overturn the common conceptions about a too-long tenure.

2. Thanks to Gens X and Y (Millenials), many younger people have broken apart the old way of thinking. They, in general, have no dedication to the old paradigm of working one's whole life for a company and then getting the gold watch. No, that's not for them! They are highly tech savvy and have experienced the free-wheeling world of the Internet. They are nimble in their approach to work, and they want and expect to achieve job satisfaction. They also are still exploring and don't necessarily want to be too niched in any one role or industry. The agility with which these generations are working affects older workers as well.

3. The business environment has undergone a silent revolution. The pace at which companies or divisions are being acquired, merged, spun off, or simply dropped is stunning. Your job – even your career – may well be caught up in these changes. Loyalty of employers to their employees isn't a value conpanies have much anymore. Career-minded employees are now always ready to jump to the next great opportunity. Their LinkedIn profiles are built out and up to date. They welcome the right recruiter inquiries even if happily employed. They want to see what's out there that might be better. Studies have shown that people who change jobs more often get more money.

4. Everybody's doing it, so it's becoming less of a red flag and more a SOP (standard operating procedure). Here's a statistic to note: Since 1990 the percentage of people who stay on a job less than two years has jumped from 16% to 51%. Recruiters are adjusting to this new reality.

So, don't get discouraged if you've had shorter job stints. Your resume can go a long way towards turning that history into a plus for you. Good luck!

OK, so you're all set with a LinkedIn photo that's both professional and engaging, keyword-driven content, endorsements, testimonials and all the other features we've talked about in LinkedIn. Now there are some new ways for you to leverage LI to get your next job. According to Lily Zhang of The Muse, who has researched what's new on LI, there are some new features to take note of. I discuss 3 of the best:

1. Endorsements - redeemed from the junk pile! Most of us have viewed the endorsements section of LinkedIn profiles to be kind of weak and a waste of time. But now recruiters can search and sort potential candidates by the skills listed in your endorsement section.

So, what can you do? When writing a LinkedIn profile, make sure to include the top keywords for the position you want in your Summary, in a skills list you create, and in your job summaries. Also, respond to the questions about your contacts' skills when they pop up, both because this practice enables you to help others and also because it invites reciprocol endorsements.

2. A Shift to an Instant Messaging / Chat format for emailing within LI - Yeah! For more than a century job seekers have relied on longish cover letters and for the last couple of decades on lengthy emails to communicate with recruiters. And LinkedIn, as a relatively old social media job search technology compared to Twitter, FB, and other platforms, hasn't innovated until now in its intra-LI communications.

What can you do now? Take advantage of the speed and power of the fast-read messaging you can do to recruiters now. We have become a society that prefers its communications in quick bytes. Practice your one-sentence or multi-phrase personal brand statement and add a short request to recruiters. If you really want to write a long email, go ahead, but it may not get read.

3. Network within your LinkedIn connections easily when you see a job you like - streamline your process! I've recommended for a long time that networking within the current workforce of a company you are interested in is a great way to get an employee referral. This channel is a super powerful and effective way to get hired (one of of 10 chance compared to 1 out of 100). Now LI has cut out several steps from the process of identifying appropriate employees to contact.

What can you do? Absolutely take advantage of LI's employee suggestions to network within your target company. It's a big time saver and may even make this process easy enough to actually implement!

There's another reason to leverage the inside company connections you can make when you uncover a job you are interested in. LI has blocked one of the workarounds you may have relied on in the past to contact someone out of your network with the Free version: you can no longer email within Groups. I guess it had to happen sometime. At least now the process has been made easier in another way.

What are some takeaways from these new LI changes?  Fullly utilize LinkedIn as one of your most valuable resources, surpassing even the executive resume in many cases. Reread the blog posts on this site that talk about how to optimize LI for job search. And continue to sharpen your pencil to master short-form communication. Look to LI to further streamline the profile. Keep your eye on the future: candidates will at some point be sourced primarily from the Internet, so build your online identity and expand your online footprint now.

Want help writing a LinkedIn profile? Contact me now. Thanks!