Chapter 8
Create Your Career-Marketing Tools

In communicating your brand to your target audience, you can make use of traditional career-marketing tools: your resume, biography (bio), and cover letter. Of course, in today’s business world, you must be in perpetual career-management mode—thus, you should always have ready-to-go, updated versions of each of these tools. However, as we explain in this chapter, you also need to stamp each of these tools with your brand, so that they stand out in the minds of your target audience members. Otherwise, you risk disappearing into the sea of resumes, bios, and cover letters already out there. After all, your resume is likely sitting in a pile or a database among hundreds of your rivals’, and your bio is just one among the many circulating on billions of Web pages. By distinguishing yourself through these tools, you gain a vital edge over your competition.

Thankfully, ensuring that your career-marketing tools stand out is a relatively manageable task. That’s because most of the tools out there don’t come anywhere near reaching their potential. Consider resumes. Our reaction to the vast majority of resumes we read? Yawn. And Kirsten has seen thousands of these, as a former professional resume writer and volunteer reviewer at job fairs. Moreover, most of the bios we see are no more than laundry lists of credentials. Besides being downright boring, many resumes and bios lack focus: Their creators throw in every bit of information they can think up, in the hopes that some of these bits will “stick” in the minds of the people reading them. But readers have neither the time nor the inclination to figure out what you want from them and why you’re the most qualified to get it. The minute they sense a lack of focus and clarity on your part, they’ll toss your resume or bio in the “circular file” and move on to the next one sitting atop the pile on their desk.

Before you can paint a compelling portrait of your unique promise of value in your bio, resume, and cover letters, you must have invested the necessary soul-searching to determine what separates you from your peers. If you’ve worked Chapters 4 through 7 (the Extract phase of the 1-2-3 Success! process), you’ve done at least some of that soul-searching and have developed a personal brand statement and profile. You can use these to apply your brand consistently and concisely across your career-marketing materials. Next, we take a closer look at each tool in your career-marketing arsenal and explain how to stamp it with your personal brand.

It Is All about You: Branding Your Bio

To create your career-marketing tools, start with your bio. This tool will be a reference for your other communications and will help you infuse them with color and a personal quality. In a bio, you have more flexibility to let your personality shine.

Your bio can be an excellent career-marketing and networking tool. Savvy executives post their bios on the TheLadders.com (the leading job website for 100K+ professionals) Professional Network and get noticed by executive recruiters there. As these executives have discovered, your career bio—if written well— enables readers to quickly grasp your experience, capabilities, and successes. What are the keys to an effective bio? Avoid the temptation to list all your credentials, job titles, and degrees in a tightly packed paragraph. You’ll only bore people with this formulaic approach. Kirsten once had to introduce a speaker at the last minute during a conference and was forced to read a dry recitation of the speaker’s career history from the bio she had submitted. The recitation utterly failed to communicate the speaker’s unique point of view—depriving her of the opportunity to distinguish herself from the many other presenters at the same gathering.

Here’s an example of a boring bio:

After graduating from Harvard with degrees in business and psychology, Ellen Smith started her career in consumer packaged goods. Rising through the ranks to become a brand manager, she left consumer goods to pursue business-to-business branding. Now, as the vice president of branding for a major IT company, Ellen draws on her past experience in the consumer arena to drive brand value for her current employer. A member of the American Marketing Association and IT Marketing Foundation, Ellen teaches marketing and branding at local universities.

Does that bio make you want to get to know Ellen? Probably not. After all, it doesn’t say anything that makes Ellen unique or communicate anything interesting or exciting about her. In contrast, consider this excerpt from Allan Lawrence’s bio:

Allan Lawrence—director of engineering with Marriott’s Renaissance Westchester Hotel in White Plains, New York—is not a typical engineering professional. Rather, he is a revenue accelerator, brand evangelist, and customer-satisfaction specialist who just happens to be a facilities engineer and manager. For Allan, the brand and the customer experience are intertwined drivers of revenue and profit.

An executive focused on excellence, Allan has said, “Every touch point of the customer experience should speak to the brand’s core values; its mission should be apparent. When a customer can see and experience those values while in contact with the facilities staff or its work, the ultimate result is revenue driven by satisfied customers!”

With a 15-year background driving client satisfaction, Allan Lawrence supports the corporate brand initiative by seeking and establishing operational solutions and processes that prevent reoccurring support costs from “leeching” profits from owners and stakeholders. He strengthens the organizational infrastructure by implementing key strategic business initiatives in business continuity, emergency management, energy conservation, and continuous change management.

Many people reading Allan Lawrence’s bio would instantly be intrigued by his claim that he’s “not a typical engineering professional,” his use of lively quotations, and his active, muscular prose (“leeching profits from owners and stakeholders,” “strengthens the organizational infrastructure”). Telling a story can also help you make your bio memorable. Consider this excerpt from the bio of one of Kirsten’s clients:

Robert Francisco is a financial marketing director who helps independent business professionals achieve their professional goals by creatively distilling complex concepts into streamlined solutions. A coffee fan who enjoys roasting his own coffee beans, Rob became dissatisfied with how inconsistently other members of his household made the morning brew. He wanted to express to them how to grind the beans for a consistently enjoyable coffee experience. So, one morning, his household awoke to find a sign that he had placed next to the coffee maker. It read, “Respect the bean.”

From that day forward, the caffeinated mantra became a sort of guiding philosophy for Rob. Now, Respect the Bean is the name of his blog. Constantly brimming with ideas for businesses, everything that Rob does relates to his desire to maintain authenticity.

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

—Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice of the United States 1930–1941

In Step 1: Extract, you distilled all your insights about your vision, purpose, goals, values, and passions into a one-sentence brand statement. Your bio should begin with your brand statement and then provide the who, what, where, when, and why details that make your story compelling. Write in a style that reflects your attributes, and strive to make an emotional connection with your readers. You want it to attract the people with whom you’d most like to work. Your bio is not the place to be conservative and cautious. “A branded bio is about guts,” Deb Dib says. “It’s the guts to be yourself, the guts to break a mold, and the guts to know that your bio may raise some eyebrows. It’s the courage to say, ‘Here’s who I am. Here’s what makes me, me. I can’t and won’t be all things to all people. But I am the right person for this job.’ ”

As you work on your bio, get input from others who know you. Ask them, “Does this make you think of me?” Also consider seeking help from a professional writer and testing your bio with hiring managers and executive recruiters. Once you’re satisfied with your bio, create versions in different lengths that will work for your Web portfolio, blog, online networking profile (at sites such as LinkedIn or ZoomInfo), and at the end of articles you’ve written. (We discuss these communications tools in greater detail in Chapter 11.)

Crafting the Right Resume

For many human resources departments and hiring managers, the resume is still the standard screening tool. Thus, you’ll need an up-to-date version of this career-marketing tool at all times—whether you’re actively job hunting or happily employed. Most resumes now in circulation present work histories and highlight responsibilities rather than achievements. Therefore, they don’t differentiate one candidate from the next. And many resumes are deliberately general: A focused resume, people assume, could exclude them from opportunities they hadn’t thought of previously. Yet, this kind of “be all things to all people” thinking isn’t congruent with personal branding.

The key to a great resume is positioning yourself for a specific kind of opportunity and communicating only the information that will be relevant to the people who can give you access to that opportunity—your target audience. Think of your resume as an advertisement for you. You want it to grab readers’ attention immediately so they can then digest the rest of the information more thoughtfully. You can use formatting to control where readers’ eyes go first when they begin reviewing the document. For example, through the strategic use of bold type, you can emphasize impressive phrases from your achievements, your advanced degrees, and relevant client or company names. Think of your resume as playing a role in the “ACT B” customer-decision process—by which your “customer” (reader) decides whether to eventually “buy” you. Your resume and cover letter serve as tools for increasing readers’ awareness of you and consideration of whether you merit a trial (job interview). If the interviews go well, readers will buy (hire) you.

Examine the current version of your resume. Ask yourself:

  • Is it up to date?
  • Is it compelling?
  • Is it written in my unique voice?
  • Does it communicate my brand message?
  • Would others in my field be unable to use it?

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, your resume is on the right track.

As with your bio, you want your resume to net you meetings with members of your target audience. Most hiring managers or recruiters take only 10 to 30 seconds to scan a resume. For this reason, you’ll need to write yours in a way that communicates your brand within that short amount of time—and that compels your reader to put you on his or her short list of potential interviewees. You should also craft the resume using relevant keywords so that readers using a database search can easily retrieve it.

To identify the right keywords, search job descriptions and online job postings that are particularly interesting to you. Phrases that are common to all these descriptions and postings are the important ones. If the job titles on your resume aren’t the same as the one you desire, add your target title at the beginning of your Summary of Qualifications. Or, create a keywords section at the end of your resume for the ASCII text version that you’ll post or submit through an online form.

The best way to communicate your brand quickly is to begin your resume with a Summary of Qualifications (sometimes also called a Profile or Executive Summary). To write your summary, review your brand profile and your bio, picking out the main points. Make sure the summary articulates what you do, for whom you do it, and what your strengths are. Weave your primary brand attributes into the copy to convey your work style. In the experience section, include only those jobs and achievements that support your brand and are relevant to your career objective. Even though the summary appears first on your resume, you’ll want to write it last. That way, you can start with the easiest parts of the document and work up to the summary to tie everything together and position yourself correctly for your target audience.

According to Wendy Enelow, the author of more than 20 books on executive job searching:

The single most important consideration in resume writing is to create an accurate picture of how you want to be perceived now (not in the past). Using your objective as the overall framework for your resume, how can you integrate your experiences to support that objective? You’ll find that the answer may not be the traditional chronological resume format, but perhaps a more unique strategy. For example, if you’re an EVP of Sales looking for another sales management position, the resume writing process is reasonably straightforward. However, if you’re that same EVP of Sales who is now looking to transition into a general management role, your resume will be entirely different. Although you’ll continue to highlight your strong revenue performance, you’ll want equal emphasis on your management achievements, roles, and responsibilities.

To develop your summary of qualifications, refer to the exercise in the Career Distinction Workbook (www.careerdistinction.com/workbook).

In writing the rest of your resume, there are no hard and fast rules—except, of course, perfect spelling and grammar. For example, despite the old adage that a resume should only be one or two pages long, you may go beyond two pages if your content is relevant and interesting. Here are some additional tips for creating a powerfully branded resume:

People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

—Matthew Arnold, major Victorian poet

Applying these practices takes time, but the results are worthwhile. Take a look at this client success story from Kim Batson of careermanagementcoaching.com. It illustrates how a powerful personal brand can significantly accelerate your job search, attract the right employers, advance you quickly from the interviewing process to the offer stage, and raise your value (for higher compensation) in the eyes of a potential employer:

To further stand out, consider using appropriate creative approaches to getting your resume in the right hands. If out-of-the-box thinking is a requirement for the type of position you’re seeking, “walk your talk” with a nontraditional approach to delivering your resume. For example, suppose you’re an event planner. In this case, you might send a beautifully formatted invitation to view your Web portfolio. Since your contacts will likely also need your traditional resume, you can offer the downloadable file in various formats there. You could even have balloons printed with your resume. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Figure

Figure 8.1 Daniel’s Summary of Qualifications

Conveying Your Brand through Your Cover Letters

Cover letters—which accompany your resume—are another opportunity to differentiate yourself. In a cover letter, you can make a connection with your reader—explaining why you are contacting them and how you can benefit them. Since resumes focus more on hard skills, use your cover letter to showcase your soft (people) skills and personality. As with your resume and bio, refer to your brand profile when crafting your cover letters.

Effective cover letters are written for the specific intended reader—whether that person is a new networking contact, the human resources director of a company, a hiring manager whose advertisement you’re responding to, or a recruiter. In fact, you’ll want to create four different versions of your letter for each of these reader types. Then you can simply customize the opening and closing paragraphs for the specific situation.

In addition to your cover letter, resume, and bio, the following career-management tools can further help you communicate your brand:

A Few Words about Job Interviews

When your branded communications have landed you interviews, be prepared to deliver on your promise of value during these face-to-face encounters. Recall those primary messages that appear consistently in your resume, cover letter, and bio. During each interview, reiterate those messages and tell stories to illustrate your key points. Do your homework by researching the company and your interviewers online and reviewing your resume and brand profile. Practice with others so you can express your personal brand regardless of what questions come up during the interview, and so you can follow up to get offers.

Your investment in consistent and distinctive communications will pay off in the form of hiring managers eager to recruit you. It will also help you determine whether a particular job opportunity is right for you. We’ve included an exercise in the Career Distinction Workbook to help you make on-brand career decisions.

The standard career marketing tools that we discussed in this chapter should be familiar to you; but the way you develop and use them is different in the brand-you world of work. By using the techniques that we described, you will be able to stand out from your peers and attract the attention of hiring managers. In the past, these tools alone were sufficient, but no more. As you will learn in Chapters 9 through 11, savvy careerists need to augment traditional career marketing tools with other communications that will increase your visibility and credibility. In Chapter 9, we discuss physical communications tools and in Chapters 10 and 11, we share the secrets of becoming virtually visible.