MeInc – Build Your Personal Brand & Improve Your Professional Communication Skills

Start thinking of yourself as a company as MeInc, a financial entity that must survive and prosper over the long haul. You are MeInc, a brand new start-up with a successful future to be won.

As MeInc, you have products and services to sell: those skills and experience you’ve accumulated over the course of your working life. These product and services have to fulfill the needs of your customers, or the sale will go to a competitor.

This is Not My Beautiful Life

You live and work in a far less secure professional world than anyone has ever known. No longer is there any such thing as job security. You are somewhere in the throes of a half-century work life, a career in which you are likely to have three or more distinct careers and statistically likely to change jobs about every four years, where economic recessions come around every 7 to 10 years and age discrimination is going to begin to kick in around age fifty.

When I first started to write the Knock ’em Dead books in the mid-1980s, I was called a communist and worse and asked how I could suggest that Americans be disloyal to their employers. History has shown it was the corporations that broke the employment contract. Even today I still hear the old tropes of blind loyalty out everyday, I’m sorry, they just don’t work and if you believe these sorry myths your life and the lives of your loved ones will suffer.

This is a wake-up call: You need a tougher, more pragmatic approach to your professional life, you need to survive and prosper. You need to find a better way and this is my topic.

Join Martin every week to learn more about writing a killer resume, getting more job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers at his free weekly webcast, Mondays at noon central. Details: http://my.knockemdead.com

Your Resume - How Long Should It Be?

While you employ a resume to open doors and get you into conversation with employers, those same employers use it as a time management tool, screening out as many candidates possible.

On top of this conflict we pile the biggest resume mistake people make: believing that your resume is meant to be a simple recitation of all you have done in your career; this leads to an unfocused and ultimately ineffective document.

A Resume for Tough Economic Times

Your resume doesn't work because it is probably too general, too unfocused because you have omitted the critical steps of understanding exactly what the customer is buying and customizing what you have to offer to their expressed needs.

Your resume goes into resume databases that can have over 30 million other resumes against which yours has to compete. A resume that's simply a recitation of all you have done in your career is too unfocused to work well in this environment.

Critical Target Job Deconstruction: A Strong Focus Leads to Better Resume Results

The most productive résumés start with a clear focus on the target job, and look at its responsibilities from the point of view of the selection committee. Let’s start Target Job Deconstruction to determine the proper focus for your job-targeted resume:

Step One. Collect 6-10 job postings of the job you are best qualified to do. Save them in a folder and also print them out. Not sure where to start? Try www.indeed.com, it’s a job aggregater (or spider) that runs around thousands of job sites looking for jobs with your chosen keywords.

Resume Getting Lost in the Resume Databases?

Your resume is quite possibly getting lost in resume databases because it can now be in competition with millions of others in a single database. The Internet has affected both the way we look for jobs and the way recruiters search for employees.

How database searches work: A company needs a new Operations Manager, and the recruiter logs into a resume database and types " Operations Manager " into the Job Title dialog box. S/he then moves to the next dialog box and is presented with a basic list of keywords often used to define the responsibilities of that job, this list is then added to with that employers complete requirements.

The search feature reviews all resumes in the database. Your resume and millions like it can be scanned in seconds, ranking your resume by the number of relevant keywords it contains. The higher your resume's ranking, the more likely it will get read by human eyes. Add that recruiters never read more than the top 20 resumes and you can see why the average resume is challenged in this environment.

Resume database technology focuses on skill sets, what we think of as the professional core competencies we apply everyday at work. For example in a search for an Operations Manager, some of the keywords likely to be used might include: Strategic Business Planning, Project Management, Cross-Functional Team Building & Leadership etc; if the search were for a Software Developer, the recruiter might search for keywords which like Unix, Solaris, HTML, Java, XML, Visual Basic.

This means that without the right keywords, your resume is far less likely to rank high enough to actually be evaluated by human eyes. So it is important to use the widest a selection of relevant keywords in your resume, and to use them often.

The first step in making your resume work with these recruitment realities is to identify all the skills you have developed over the years that are relevant to your target job. See A Resume for Tough Economic Times for advice on how to decide exactly which keywords to use in your resume.

You will want to make sure these keywords appear whenever they apply to a particular job and more importantly you will want to add a Core Competencies section to the front of your resume, after contact information, your Target Job Title and any Performance Profile or Summary. Here's an example of a Core Competencies section from an operations management resume:

Professional Core Competencies

Strategic Business Planning • Project Management • Cross-Functional Team Building & Leadership • IT/IS • Human Resources Affairs • Employee Benefits • Risk Management • Hiring, Training & Coaching Negotiations • Research & Analysis • Financial & Business Modeling • Finance & Portfolio Management Acquisitions & Divestitures • Operating Policies & Procedures • Inventory

There's no need to use definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions and a Core Competencies section can be as long as you require...

Adding a Core Competencies section to the front end of your resume and then repeating those same words in the context of the jobs in which they were used has two major benefits

• It's a concise review of all the hard skills you bring to the table and is a real attention grabber to a recruiter
• It multiplies the occurrence of keywords likely to be used by recruiters in the database searches and will dramatically improve your resume's ranking

Including keywords for skills you don't possess may get you a telephone interview, but it will also quickly reveal you as an impostor; so don't use keywords to extend the "reach" of your resume.

Join Martin every week to learn more about writing a killer resume, getting more job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers at his free weekly webcast, Mondays at noon central. Details: http://my.knockemdead.com

How to Choose a Professional Resume Writer

A resume is the critical marketing tool for any job search; it brands you, makes you visible to recruiters, and opens the doors of opportunity. If it works, you work; if it doesn't work, you don't work. Quite simply, it's the most financially important document you will ever own.

This means that writing a resume is serious business that

• Requires an understanding of how recruitment and hiring strategies affect resumes
• Demands the clarity of objective analysis to decide how best to package the commercial commodity that is the professional you
• Insists on unique writing skills, because resumes abide by their own rules

When you've done the best you can and see that resume writing is never going to be your strength, you begin to realize that with your personal stability and professional future at stake, maybe you should think about a professionally written resume.

Ten Great Tactics To Punch Up Your Resume

1. Target Job Title. A clear Target Job Title, coming right after your contact information helps resume performance in database searches and gives a reader immediate focus. 80% of resumes lack a Target Job Title.
2. Telephone Contact. Most telephone services allow you alternate telephone #’s with distinctive ring tones at no extra charge. An alternate number for job search activities can stop mis-handled calls and help keep your search confidential if employed.

Gathering Information For Your Resume

In the process of examining your work history, you will generate a mass of notes and an intimate awareness of yourself as a professional. This great mass is the raw material of your professional persona, like the sculptor's block of stone, at which they chip away to reveal the masterpiece that has been hiding there all along.

How to Get Your Electronic Resume in Front of Human Eyes

Technology has changed the nature of our jobs and the way employers look for their staff. One of the most challenging of these changes, for job hunters, is the use of electronic resume screening and tracking systems.

When human eyes are replaced with initial computer screening, your techniques for landing interviews have to adapt to the changed landscape. Your emailed resumes now frequently go directly into a computer database and wait there to be matched with company needs. So while technology makes the distribution of resumes easier, it creates another hurdle for you to clear.

Resumes Are All About Deliverables!

When employers add someone to the payroll, the job title and its responsibilities have been analyzed, justified and budgeted months before that position opens up. No one is added to the payroll for the love of mankind; they are added to make a contribution in a particular area and in a very specific way.

Every job, in its own small way, is there to help a department, and in turn a company, make a positive contribution to the end goal of profitability by helping to earn money or save money for the company or to increase productivity; think about how your job can help toward delivering on these goals in some small way.

Resumes, Resumes, Resumes!

An effective resume is a finely tuned document that has to pack a lot of information, and punch, into a limited amount of space. It cannot simply be a recitation of your work history, like your father's resume, because that strategy no longer has traction.

When employers add someone to the payroll, the job title and its responsibilities have been analyzed, justified and budgeted months before that position opens up. No one is added to the payroll for the love of mankind; they are added to make a contribution in a particular area and in a very specific way.

Every job, in its own small way, is there to help a department, and in turn a company, make a positive contribution to the end goal of profitability by delivery of either product or service. So, when an employer looks at your resume it is with a very specific objective in mind:

Does this resume reflect a person who can help me deliver on these specific challenges? From this question, we get employers conceiving a job in terms of its deliverables, rather than solely in terms of degree and years experience required etc.

This means that for your resume to be effective, said resume must begin with a clear focus on, and understanding of the deliverables for a specific target job. Only when you have this focus can you begin to look backwards into your work history for those experiences that best position you for the target job, and enable you to tailor a killer resume. You'll find a link to a resume template/sample later in the article.

If you are new to the professional world, engaged in a career shift, or just want to be sure that you are on target, you might want to execute a little research to ensure your resume has the proper focus.

If you want clarification on a target job, analyze job postings, and visit the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages at bls.gov, which gives you detailed analysis of hundreds of jobs. Following that, talk to people who are actually doing the work and have them deconstruct the job for you. If you already work in the field think about the best people you have known doing this job and analyze what they did, and how they did it. Then apply the same analysis to people who have failed in the job, and why. This kind of strategic thinking will give you the focus you need.

As the years pass and you gain more experience, this process becomes increasingly important as a tool to keep you on track. The reason being that after just five years in the professional world, there are usually two or three jobs you can do; and when you get fifteen and twenty years down the road you could have twice that many professional options. Often resumes that attempt to reflect great breadth of experience can seem unfocused.

Experienced professionals have to be fully conscious that employers are not looking for Swiss Army knives, they are looking for someone with critical "must have" skills to apply in a specific area, those additional "nice-to-have" skills are just that, and they don't need to be in a resume (beyond presence in a keyword section) because they will take focus away from your primary thrust.

For any employer, the resume screening process is one of the most mind-numbing steps of the interview cycle. Typically, resumes get a first time screening that spans no more than 30-45 seconds with the majority of that time spent on the first page; remember that the reader is looking solely for people with specific experience related to the needs of a carefully defined position.

This means that the first page of your resume needs to pack a knockout punch, and the best odds for achieving that is with a clear focus on a target job. Only with that focus can you demonstrate your understanding of a job's deliverables, along with your experience and achievements in each of the deliverable areas.

Join Martin every week to learn more about writing a killer resume, getting more job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers at his free weekly webcast, Mondays at noon central. Details: http://my.knockemdead.com

A First Look at Cover Letters

The right cover letter can get your resume read with serious attention. Here is a little-known type of cover letter, called an Executive Briefing that gets great results. The only restriction on its use is that you must have details about the job opening and it has greatest impact when sent to someone directly.

Like many great ideas, the Executive Briefing is beautiful in its simplicity. It works as as an e-mail or on your standard letterhead. The job's requirements are listed on the left side, and your skills, matching the job's requirements point by point, are on the right. It looks like this:

Resumes For Promotions!

You think of your resume as a tool to get a new job at another company and forget to recognize it as tool to get a promotion where you are.

You need a job-targeted resume for pursuing internal promotions because

Education Pays Again

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of all work, so if you aren't learning new skills every year, you are being paid for an increasingly obsolescent skill set. At some point this will affect your employability. Employers really appreciate people who invest in their future, and here's some proof from the US Dept. of Education:

Of post-secondary students who enrolled in any AA degree program but didn't graduate 48% got better job responsibilities and 29% got raises!

If they actually graduated, it gets even better: 71% gained improved job responsibilities and 63% got raises.

Nothing to lose and everything to gain and being enrolled looks good on a resume, enter under the Education section of your resume with a projected graduation date.


Join Martin every week to learn more about writing a killer resume, getting more job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers at his free weekly webcast, Mondays at noon central. Details: http://my.knockemdead.com