Executive Resumes, Personal Branding & Executive Job Search

Traffic is less conjested, your favorite TV shows are doing reruns, and you can't count on reaching business people in a timely manner. Yup, it's mid-July and people are on vacation. But Labor Day is just 42 days away, and all that will soon change! The college students will be back, crowding the roads, vacations will be over, and managers will begin seriously looking for new hires to round out their teams. Will you be ready?

July and August are good time to be prepared for the upcoming hiring season (in between boating, going to the beach, and riding horses on a dude ranch!) Hiring is up in many professions, such as software development, and stagnant or down in others, like electrical engineering. But regardless of the jobs forecasts, there are things you can do that will help propel you to a new job.

1. Tune up your LinkedIn profile so that it has the keywords in each section, including headline, that will attract searches. Recruiters are taking advantage of the Big Data that is LI available to them, so you need to be highly competitive here.

2. Bring your profile up to 90%+ completeness. Enhance it with visuals, updates, a Twitter feed, or any other differentiating content, including real time content, that will reinforce your personal brand, your unique promise of value.

3. Grow your LI connections to 400+, join and/or identify 5 groups where the hiring managers for your field and function are present and active, and make a commitment to comment on at least one of them daily.

3. Kick your resume up to the next level. Take a look at resume templates on this site and those of my coleagues for guidance on how to ensure your resume looks professional and attractive, is easily scannable in 6 seconds, contains critical keywords in context, and communicates your brand.

4. Develop and/or add to your target company list. Once you have 50-500+ companies, write two stand-alone approach letters. One will be to your top 15 companies, and you will customize each one to specifically address how you can help the company's situation. The other will be customizable only in company name, address, contact information, and job title sought. Be ready to send the letters out in mid-September to hiring managers of your target companies. Get them ready now. Hire a virtual assistant to execute your direct mail campaign if you need to.

5. Develop your networking plan for when your contacts are back in the office after Labor Day. Do research on which of your contacts work for your target companies. When you get in touch, ask them for 5-10 minutes of their time to ask about company culture.

6. Select your tribe - your closest connections whom you can directly keep abreast of your job search efforts. People love a story and your job search is one! They may, in turn, keep their eyes and ears open for you without your needing to even ask. Leverage LinkedIn features to send out notifications to a select subset of your connections, use email, Twitter or Facebook.

7. Let this be the summer you begin to be more active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,and/or Pinterest. Decide which social media platform(s) will benefit you most in your industry and function and become more plugged in to where thought leadership is happening and who is leading the discussion. Consider starting a blog on one of the free blogging platforms and write a post once a week.

8. Prepare to connect or re-connect with your professional association(s). They are goldmines of contacts and opportunities to express your own branded thought leadership.

9. If recruiters are going to be a promising avenue for you, identify the ones active in your space and prepare to send them a resume and cover letter in the Fall so you get on their radar. Another way to get in touch with recruiters is to join the groups they're in on LI and ask to connect with them.

10. Sit down and establish a job search schedule to follow. Begin as soon as you can to follow it. If the above steps seem overwhelming, they can seem less so if you have a plan for making progress on each one of them. If you are unemployed, schedule 40 hours/week for these activities. If employed, plan when you are going to free up 12-20 hours to implement these strategies. Will you get up a half hour earlier? Block out afternoons on weekends? Be as specific and disciplined as you can.

(11) You'll notice that I didn't list checking job boards. I'm going to add that as an extra step, but a step you should spend only limited time on. Much of hiring does take place from job boards, but, for the individual, the chances are not very good that you will get a job from there. Checking the job aggregator sites liked indeed.com and simplyhired.com and one or more niche sites in your field/function should be sufficient. And, if you decide to send in materials, be sure to send them in in ASCII format, with the right keywords and customized content for the specific posting.

What i have outlined is a basic plan for being always ready in the job market for your next great opportunity. I know it seems like a lot, but think about what's at stake. +/-$100k in annual salary, the work satisfaction that can make 40+ of your waking weekly hours great or not so good, a path forward that will meet your goals for progressively advancing your career.

When you consider how important the outcome is to your life now and in the future, pursue these and other strategies in a steady, workmanlike manner. You have had some experience with project management, apply those principles to your job search. It is hard to do today's job search. And it does require learning new skills for many. But the payoff is huge. Good luck! Jean

Been paying attention to the Survival of the Fittest going on before our very eyes in the case of bees? The very bees responsible for pollinating much of the world's crops? This is the current state of affairs: honey bees hives are failing in large numbers, so much so that many growers have to depend on trucked-in bees to pollinate their crops. In China, crops are being pollinated BY HAND!

What is the reason for this serious threat to our foodstocks? Scientists are not sure; some say perticides and herbicides, some say malnutrition (too much monoculture of low-nutrition crops). Still other scientists opine that honey bees have been bred for low aggression traits, so that handlers don't have to wear as much or any protective clothing.

In any case, there is a third option some growers are using: introducing African killer bees to pollinate their crops. This strain appears to be thriving in Texas and other states that have imported these aggressive bees. The danger of course is to humans and animals who can die from these stings. Killer bees sting readily in contrast to the domesticated honey bees. It appears that being highly protective of the honey correlates with robust hives.

I couldn't help but think about this lesson from nature and wonder if it is suggestive of what we are seeing in the new world of work. Not just how to get a job, but how to keep it and how to keep your career growing robustly. The recommendations below are based on commonly understood trends that currently prevail.

1. Keeping your job: Get aggressive about owning the results of your work; don't let someone else taka advantage of your less boastful personality and take the credit - and the promotion!

2. Keeping your job: Abandon the passive honey bee side of you, and fiercely hone your branded value proposition within the company. Get the word out by circulating project status memos, networking internally, and pushing to get on projects that will enhance your brand.

3. Getting a job: Forget waiting around for recruiters to get back to you about jobs you've applied to. Aggressively mine your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, college alumni, and professional groups to make contact with employees of your target company. More about this in other blog posts here.

4. Getting a job: ALWAYS be in the job market. Gone are the days of the "company man." you cannot count on an employer to have your career security as a goal. That's the honey bee way: "OK you took away my protect-the-hive response, now you have to take care of me, your employee." It's not happending. Now, you will be cut loose if it's financially beneficial for the firm. So get your branded value proposition out there internally and externally and get active!

5. Getting a job: Every day of your job search, pick something you can actively do to get in front of decision makers: build a company list, network into the companies, connect with employees, send a direct mail campaign, work your alumni and association member lists. In other words, leave the traditional passive job search in the past and aggressively go after unpublished and post opportunities. Even approach organizations with the idea of writing your own job description.

The work world of the past is the world of the honeybee. The hives are dying. Employers won't look out for you. So aggressively protect your work product from being poached just as the killer bees protect their honey. And aggressively pursue job search strategies that have a high success rate. You need to win in this world of hyper-competitive search and short duration jobs by channelling your inner killer bee!

Where is that? Yup, you guessed it, social media is where recruiters report sourcing 25% of executive hires. And those are 2012 figures! I'm ready to say it straight out:

"If you're not spending a portion of your time every week on one of more of the following -  LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, youtube, Pinterest - you will be seriously handicapped in your job search both now and in the future." Here's what you'll want to do: Leverage the power of social media sites to build your thought leadership and make connections with professionals and recruiters in your space.

No longer is private reputation all that matters. What matters is that you are a player in your industry and function and visible as such. I don't say this to make anyone feel overwhelmed - we all have enough of that! But the executive resume is no longer your only reporting mechanism for your professional achievements and brand. The Internet is where recruiters will first make decisions, based on what they find, about whether to contact you.

LinkedIn is apt to be the first place recruiters will be encountering you. So pay AT LEAST as much attention to getting your LinkedIn profile 95-100% complete and keyword loaded as you do to developing a branded executive resume that can be visually scanned in 6 seconds.

So to fight the overwhelm, I'm going to list FIVE concrete, easy steps you can take to start reaping the benefits of social media for job search. But first, get the basics in place and establish a discipline for "keeping at it" in social media. You may actually find this fun after awhile and a valued addition to your usual professional activities.

The Basics: To start, I suggest you have profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and ZoomInfo. Make sure they are marbled through with the right keywords and that they convey your branded value proposition. Then...

The Discipline: Set aside a half hour a day or 2-3 hours a week (maybe Sun. night?) when you can start to participate in online conversations going on in your industry and functional area. You are aiming to become known. You are also aiming to get to know the movers and shakers in your space and the recruiters who are monitoring where you hang out. Every interaction potentially creates valuable two-way networking opportunities.

The Fun:

- Start curating content relevant to your target market. Mine it from blogs of thought leaders and leading news sources and magazines. Select a RSS reader to aggregate your favorite blogs and enable you to quicky scan for content you would like to comment on and tweet out. There are lots of them. I use Google Reader and now Feedly. Try to do 2/day and space them out, using Buffer or one of the Twitter clients (TweetDeck, HootSuite). Feel free to tweet your own thoughts. One of my clients after implementing this advice says he gets all of his professional information now from Twitter.

- Set up your tweets so they automatically go to LinkedIn as well. When recruiters find your profile through keyword searches, they will see you are part of the conversation in your space. (Good!). Creates credibility and reassures them that you are a solid professional person to contact.

- Write a blog post once a week or comment on blogs you read that prompt a response in you. You will find that this activity will keep you in touch with emerging trends and news and enable you to filter it through your unique perspective, as a specialist in what you do.

- Select LinkedIn Groups you want to be part of. Choose ones where execs in your target company are active and recruiters participate. Comment, ask for opinions on something, link people to relevant content.

- Make heavy use of LinkedIn Updates and Mentions. More on these in another post. This prominent real estate - the Updates - on your LI profile enables you to give real-time information about an interesting talk you heard, infographic you saw, presentation you are giving, or people who have impacted you professionally in a positive way. If you set your Settings so that the updates go out to your contacts, they will start to know you as an interesting person and active in your field. Mentioning someone's name too is something LI is promoting now - the person mentioned will get notified and a potential connection can be made.

This is JUST ONE plan for getting going in social media. There are lots of other possible ways to engage. But, for executives, this one gives you a solid start. For more on how to create a killer LI profile, see other blog posts here. Good luck and let me know how it goes!

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:

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!

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.

A few weeks ago I opened an eBay store and became an eBay seller for the first time. This is a sideline to my regular business, a way to indulge my avocation. It has been a very steep learning curve for me - how to set up a store, how to list and upload images, how to take good photos, how to source and price products, identify vendors, and engage with buyers, etc.

But I can tell you that in just a few short weeks I can see that the level of customer service you provide is everything on eBay. Here is the reason why it's important to provide exceptional customer service as a seller:

If you don't, your seller rating - number of stars and percentage of satisfied customers - goes down and people may not be willing to buy from you. Your rating is very obvious and a key reason why customers decide to trust you. People with Top Seller status, dependent on their rating, in part, get more traffic and can charge higher prices, because their service is known to be trustworthy.These are some ways that can help you get a good rating on eBay:

• Have positive email interactions with buyers.
• Ship out your products by priority mail - 2-3 day delivery.
• Do it within 48 hours of receiving payment.
• Contribute a percentage of every sale to a charity of your choice that is displayed on your page.

With eBay, you learn that it is critical to respond to customers POSITIVELY, VERY FAST, AND EVERY SINGLE TIME. I am struck with the almost-pleading requests many Top Sellers and others make to prospects/buyers below their product description. It goes something like this: "Please, if there is anything you don't like about the product, the shipping, or our communications, tell me first so that I can fix it. Do not just give me a negative rating. Let me make it right. Customer service is VERY important to me."

With your very livelihood at stake, you have to prioritize customer service as a critical value on eBay. So what does this have to do with job search? If you interact with your social networks, LinkedIn, your contacts at companies, interviewers, recruiters etc. with the level of customer service eBay conditions you to, you will be noticed, you will be remembered. How do you do this?

1. Respond to email and phone messages FAST.

2. Send out thank-you notes or emails IMMEDIATELY.

3. Communicate REGULARLY, CONSISTENTLY, AND POSITIVELY.

4. GO OUT OF YOUR WAY to meet the needs of the other.

5. Do your work and engage with other to a STANDARD OF EXCELLENCE.

6. Do 1-5 EVERY SINGLE TIME.

So customer service in your job search shouldn't be just one aspect of the process. Make it ALMOST EVERYTHING - and see what happens. Maybe 5 stars, 100% satisfaction, and Top Seller status will translate into the job of your dreams.

It's amazing, though understandable, that so many people are pursuing job search strategies that are apt to yield no results.

The job search environment is more complex and requires greater sophistication to navigate than ever before. Here are 8 of the things you should not do to avoid getting stalled in your job search.

1. Give your resume to your contact list and assume you've done their networking

2. Failed to get your resume into the hands of the right people at all of your target companies

3. Spend significant time searching on job boards and company websites looking for jobs to apply to

4. Put your profile up on LinkedIn without attention to keywords and your personal/career brand and assume that "if you build it they will come"

5. Spend just a few hours per week on your job search

6. Do your entire job search from home without making appointments to meet with networking contacts and hiring authorities

The new job search is a social search - involving the use of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, among many others. These are places hiring authorities are looking for candidates. And they are places you can also create networking opportunities times 10.

The new job search is more competitive. Recruiters want 10 out of 10 of their requirements met. Hiring authorities can usually find someone who matches their needs on LinkedIn, which has become a Big Data resource for them.

That means there is a premium on alternative job search methods that will produce direct face-to-face contact with decision makers, a context in which you can pitch your value, not just be someone evaluated with a checklist. It also means that, to get results, you need to spend serious time each week looking for the right job.

The savvy job seeker of 2012 has mastered new skills that will hold him or her in good stead for now and into the future - understanding that new changes are sure to come that will require further adaptive skills.