Master Class In Personal Branding

Master Class in Personal Brandingâ€"Lesson 2: The Resume Isn’t Dead Yet (But It’s Not Helping You, Either) “The stories of my demise have been tremendously exaggerated.” -Mark Twain As we covered within the earlier post in this sequence, personal branding is a real opportunity to establish what's important to you and to clearly talk your unique differences and qualities to guide your profession by using your strengths, abilities, passions and values to separate yourself from your competitors. But how do you talk all that with career advertising paperwork that replicate the new strategy to job seeking? Resumes within the New World of Work With know-how driving much of the best way we go about finding a job, there have been quite a few articles and reviews trumpeting the impending end of the resumeâ€"which is premature at greatest and, at worst, has proven to be an exaggeration. However, when you think about a number of the following statistics, you can understand why many hiring managers, HR professionals and recruiters don’t take the resume as a doc of truth: “23% of seven,000 resumes had misrepresentation.” -Christian & Timbers “forty four% work historical past inaccuracies â€" forty one% false schooling credentials.” -ADP Screening & Selection of 2.6 million resumes “sixty one% of HR professionals found inaccuracies after background checks.” -Society of Human Resource Management And it’s not simply the resume that has employers involved and wanting extra concrete proof of a candidate’s success. Insights from different surveys embody: “Employee fraud prices corporations $one hundred twenty billio n a year.” “Employers lose 72% of negligent hiring fits.” “7% of all job candidates have a legal report.” The resume as a profession advertising document certainly has its place. And whereas the death of the resume keeps being predicted with the appearance of more technology, it will likely be a very long time before we see it disappearing or being changed utterly. However, the normal job search is changing, and with that, the method and the documents used within the job search want to change as properly. The Power of Personal Branding It has been quoted for many years that the overwhelming majority of positions at the moment are being crammed via referrals and networking. Certainly within the present world of work, employee referrals are a rapidly rising supply of new hires for many firmsâ€"in some instances, representing 50% or greater. The added use of social media to faucet into private networks and contacts will only see this number rise. But for the job seeker, these forms of job looking out (referrals or networking) is probably not one of the simplest ways to secure an employer’s interest in your distinctive skills and experience. This is particularly relevant should you or your referrer have little or no understanding of job alternatives out there or the way you may slot in. Job seekers, grateful for the introduction, blindly hand over their resumes to be handed on down the road, instantly losing much of the management over how they position themselves to be perceived. They may not even have the name of t he hiring supervisor or the contact who will be dealing with their software, and now they’ve diminished their chances of having much affect within the process. Anyone in mid-career (with at least 10 years of professional expertise) is definitely able to supplying sufficient info to put in writing a three-6 page resume (not the accepted length!) somewhat than a 1-2 web page targeted resume. The bother is that if an organization is hiring for a variety of positions and is accepting referrals, you may be suitable for more than one function primarily based in your experience, however your generic resume is a possible barrier to your being thought of. It also needs to be remembered that there shall be many cases where a job hasn’t been posted or marketed. Companies are far more prepared and likely to be looking out for good expertise, then create a place for them, or to have been working “gentle” till they arrive throughout the right candidate. That’s the place private branding can are available in to create completely different profession advertising paperwork as door openers, giving a job seeker time and, hopefully, higher knowledge to follow up with a targeted resume as soon as specifics of a place or openings are identified. Discovering Your Personal Brand Some of the important thing elements of private branding are to know yourself from each an inside and exterior perspective. Being capable of establish and talk your key strengths and differentiating attributes can be used to your advantage in creating highly effective career paperwork that make folks take discover, yet don’t give away all of your data in one go. Unique paperwork that give people who don’t know you an actual sense of who you are and what you’re capable of make a lot more sense than a dry, 1-2 page resume. In order to create these paperwork, though, you first need to identify your personal model. Let’s start with some questions: What Do You Know About Yourself? “Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.” -Henry Van Dyke How typically do you're taking time to mirror on your strengths? Many professionals are very poor at spending enough time on their own personal development within the form of a regular evaluation of their skills and skills. In reality, it'd only be in their annual reviews that they do that, and those experiences are not all the time very constructive ones. If you’ve ever needed to endure a efficiency appraisal, the standard catalogue of occasions can run like this: Fill in very lengthy self-evaluation type taking a look at all areas of your performance over the last yr. Seek the input of friends, colleagues and managers. Sit down with supervisor for an hour to evaluate the entire above. Spend the primary 5 minutes reflecting on your strengths. Spend the remaining 55 minutes figuring out, dissecting, analyzing and navel-gazing at your weaknesses. Create an motion plan around how you'll convey your weaknesses as much as an (at finest) common level of efficiency. Feel like you’re treading water and never progressing as fast as you want to. Repeat yearly to the point of absolute frustration. Some may view this as somewhat simplistic or harsh, however the reality is that only 42% of Americans consider that working totally on their strengths will make them more profitable. (That drops to an alarming 24% of Japanese and Chinese workers.) Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton tackles this subject head-on and is a extremely really helpful read for anyone excited about building their private model by way of understanding their key strengths. Very often, it’s difficult for us to articulate our top strengths and how they may be reflected in our careers so far. This e-book provides you a chance to take the “Strengths Finder” evaluation online and have your top 5 strengths recognized with explanations. You ca n then take this data and create your examples, or tales, of how you could have used every power in a piece scenario. So in interviews, you received’t solely be itemizing what you think about your strengths to be, but in addition giving reference and context with a concrete instanceâ€"very powerful and memorable when the interviewer is doing a review on the end of the day. There are many assessments and tests that may be taken to understand extra about yourself, nevertheless it’s better to find one or two that resonate and make sense to you, and work with those, than to take a battery of tests which might be extra likely to confuse than verify. Another good advertising exercise to conduct is a SWOT evaluation (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). In each area, ask yourself these questions: Strengths â€" What are my strengths? What do I have that's positive that can help me obtain my objectives? Weaknesses â€" What are my weaknesses? Where am I challenged essentiall y the most? Opportunities â€" If I were in a position to overcome those weaknesses and make the most of my strengths, what is going to result for me? What is the upside? Threats â€" What is the draw back if I don't handle these challenges? It’s not enough simply to concentrate on your strengths. Take the time to discover in case you have other hidden talents, either by way of your own analysis or from the suggestions of others (ideally both). The basis of strong private manufacturers is constructed partly on maximizing strengths. Okay, we now have a great sense of what we think, however what about others’ perceptions? In the following publish, we look at “What Others Would Say About You.” Known by his clients as The Career Hacker, Paul Copcutt was described by Forbes magazine as a world main personal brand expert. Paul helps folks uncover their uniqueness and communicate it in an genuine means that gets them observed and remembered, for the right reasons. Over the years, he has impressed and labored with hundreds of people from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 executives, and he often speaks to business audiences across North America. Visit his website, Square Peg Solution, and find him on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Image: photobucket