How do you increase the odds the market will see your value and make a bid (in the form of an interview and eventual job offer)? In some ways, your job in getting a job is to force the company to see its own self in a product advertisement (that being you). Is my twisted logic making sense? Put in another way, once the company makes a connection, you will find yourself in the right position for the next step.
Let's break it down a bit by comparing common commodities to this concept and how the average consumer/company defines a need to possess. If we were to find living room furniture and feel certain it would fit our current décor, and, most importantly fit through the door, we probably would purchase the piece. If not, we would walk on by. Likewise with a suit of clothes; if we can see ourselves in the suit and if it matches the style we are looking for, chances are, we would buy it.
So how do the above examples apply to selling yourself to complete strangers during the worst job market in 60 years? How do you get the market to see itself in you?
Warning: Attitude realignment may be required.
If you are selling, (and you most assuredly are) your presentation must be about the buyer (company) and his/her needs. With this as a mindset, your skills, education, contributions, and potential must be presented in terms of company need. Thus leading to the next question: how do you figure that one out?
Your résumé needs to present the value package as a solution to the present (and potential) problems challenging the market today and more specifically the company you are targeting. Rather bluntly, your value proposition is the foundation to open doors of communication and resolution.
Time for an exercise: Call ten industry leaders and ask them, point blank, what are the top three priorities or challenges affecting their labor force and what is it they value most in an employee. After about five calls you will see a common thread.
Next, look at YOUR career history and see where you have addressed these areas and how you are marketing those sought after qualities. Take note of what you hear (great knowledge during interview sessions) and know the buyer will ONLY be interested in the product (you) if what you bring can be internalized within the overall goal of the company.
Surely you are not a piece of furniture or made of fabric, but the lessons learned can be used to your advantage. Make sure your resume takes advantage of the top third of the page by highlighting VALUE. These first few lines of information (Problem, Action, and Result) are the basis hiring executives use when evaluating candidates.
Keep a pulse on the industry you are pursuing and mirror company needs to what you bring to the table. In today's labor saturated market, packaging is almost as important as the product itself.
Thanks Steve, your 20+ years experience in career management is much appreciated.
Once you click on a job posting, more info is provided and you can click to view the company's profile, view it on a map, or go to the actual job posting where you can apply for the job. Users can also browse by company.
Users can multiple upload files to develop a professional portfolio, showcasing your past projects. Zumeo also creates an online resume automatically with a brief description, your objective, experience, skills and education. Although this functional approach is not recommended, it may give you the basic information and inspiration to create a dynamic and compelling resume.
If you're looking to network, Zumeo allows you to connect with other users, join company communities, and submit endorsements of other users.
Sign up for Zumeo.com with your email or through Facebook Connect. Proceed to fill out a survey and on-line assessment to determine your strengths, talents, interests, and jobs matching your personality, goals, and skills.
Blog about whatever interests you – music, books, politics, sports, food, whatever it may be. In the perspective of social media networking for your career search, the content is not as important as revealing that you are opinionated and confident enough in your writing to share it with a community of online readers. You definitely garner bonus points too if you're able to create a blog that has a substantial following, as this demonstrates an entrepreneurial side that most employers love.
Write a list of ideas, topics, and issues you feel passionate about. Our of your lists of interests, passions, and even obsessions, choose one you can confidentially write about on a weekly (or even daily) basis. Then, set up a blog in just a few key strokes by utilizing services such as Blogger or WordPress. You shall definitely get bonus points if you're able to create a blog that has a substantial following, since this shows an entrepreneurial side most employers appreciate.
For those of you that don't know, LinkedIn is essentially a Facebook for professionals. You're able to provide a skeleton version of your resume and you can also connect to any professional or work-related relationships you have developed throughout the years. Employers are able to see this version of your resume, interests you have, and also the people that you're connected with. By creating this profile, employers are able to see how you interact and communicate with other professionals like yourself.
Launch your own LinkedIn profile! Even if you feel you have miniscule professional/corporate experience as a recent graduate, take inventory of your achievements in internships, volunteer work, and classroom projects producing quantifiable results. Having a profile will demonstrate a level of professionalism, ambition, and sophistication over and above typical college graduates.
Twitter is an excellent way to get yourself involved in the community, show your thought process, and your opinions on many different subjects. Yes, you can tweet that you're going to eat a sandwich or that you're dressed in a red boa for Gay Pride, but we would recommend tweeting more on your thoughts, opinions, revelations, and discoveries on the job search quest. Employers will thus see that you're an intelligent individual and that you're able to communicate effectively, even if it's only in the form of 140 characters.
Create your own Twitter account and resist the temptation to tweet about trivial, everyday life experiences. Push yourself to a new level and tweet only about your career interests and job search. Demonstrating such discipline and restraint will set you apart from the crowd and reveal a higher level of sophistication than others your age.
Fine-tune your list of potential network contacts and set a goal to contact a certain number each week or month. Arrange to meet with as many contacts as possible, and always ask each one for more referrals. Send thank you notes, and update your contacts regularly on your progress.
Ultimately, job seekers should aspire to take advantage of any extra edge that they can get. Capitalizing social media is an excellent way to get your name out there, to brand yourself, and also to potentially network with future employers or references. By taking the fullest advantage of social media, the world shall be your oyster.
At its foundation, social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate. IT tools supporting collaboration have existed for decades. Yet, social-media technologies, such as social networking, wikis and blogs, enable collaboration on a much grander scale and support tapping the power of the collective in ways previously unachievable.
Social media can include text, audio, video, images, podcasts, and other multimedia communications. Ultimately, it can be an effective tool to help with your job search. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn enhance and expedite your hunt for a new job.
For Generation X/Y, social media networking serves as the most potent catalyst to forming the vital partnerships, visibility, and opportunities needed to penetrate the job market for the first time.
Thinking about applying for an internship? Wondering what kind of experience you're going to get out of that internship? Internships are the most important thing students can do to prepare for their career, especially if you choose the ones which will grant you the important transferable skills needed for your future career. InternshipRatings offers you reviews from students that have already been through internships and know how valuable they are.
Log on and create a free account with www.internshipratings.com. Complete a quick and easy survey to rate different aspects of your current and previous internships, including the level of "real life" experience, compensation, and networking opportunities you have garnered so far in your education and early career. Then, add a comment to describe a specific experience from your internship in more detail.
Ultimately, this site is a quintessential way to weed out the internships that will be a waste of your time and shall catapult you into the ones that will actually benefit you personally and professionally.
Next post we will go over four more sites and activities for each. So, if I were you, I'd make sure and check out this location in the next few days as we skyrocket the social networking scene all the while propelling your success.
Social Media Intoxication: enough all ready!
There are benefits of networking but where is the point of diminishing return? Or is there such a concept in this arena?
Add daily interruptions and now I must ask, how does any real work get done? Running several publishing, writing, and human capital firms is a full-time (70 hour week) job—heck, no wonder my hair is sprouting more salt and less pepper! Maybe it's time to kick back and rethink what we do during the day?
Is the social/media craze worth the sacrifice? At what point is enough too much and at what point are we walking around with our eyes glued to a networking device—never looking up to see if the sky is falling or if there even was a sky?
So what if I miss a Tweet or am not the first to see a photo on Face Book… does it really matter?
Finally… it took months to get one and nothing is going to stop me from making the right impression and landing a job offer (or at least making it to the next interview round). Securing an interview appointment is only half the battle – actually, getting the interview is only the beginning.
From the surface, it is a neck to neck rating.
Getting that initial interview is only the beginning. Prove your value AND reinforce your contributions and interest. I have five good candidates treading, all I want now is a reason to believe one of them wants the job as much as I want to hire him/her… what else can I do?
Mix at your own risk!
Today's job seekers are advised that social media sites and on-line networking are valuable tools for professional advancement. But much like a poorly written cover letter or résumé can do more harm than good, a badly managed on-line presence can hurt you professionally. How do you optimize your chances at success in the new virtual business world?
First of all, blend the social you and the professional you with great caution. LinkedIn now features sections where you can link your Facebook and Twitter account to your profile. While many seem to think this is a great way to show your personality to a potential employer, I would advice against connecting your LinkedIn profile to a site you use to express yourself freely.
Even if you don't have drunken debauchery filled weekends where pictures of you could arise, there are plenty of thoughts, comments, and interests your boss does not need to know about you. If you want to keep these spaces free for your personal expression, do not connect them to a professional site.
You should also be aware that even if you do not connect your Facebook or MySpace account to your LinkedIn profile, your employer could still search for you. Therefore, you should check your privacy settings. While your LinkedIn settings should be set for the most open access, your personal websites should not. Make sure whatever an employer can access when they search for your name will depict you in a professional, positive light.
One suggestion to mitigate these concerns might be to create a second Facebook or MySpace account for professional, semi-casual contacts. If that is the case, manage your friends list well and make sure no one on it would tag you in a Spring Break photo from 1988 that you swore you burned the negatives of years ago.
When it comes to connecting a Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, make sure your tweets are professional and well, very non-confrontational. If it isn't proper to discuss a topic at your office, it probably isn't a good idea to tweet about it.
You probably already realize it's a bad idea to tweet about the hot waitress serving you lunch. But also know you might want to avoid tweeting about strong dislike of people who belong to certain religious or political affiliations or your opinion about controversial subjects. Yes, this is the land of free speech but that doesn't mean speech is consequence free. While your employer can't really fire you for having an opinion he or she disagrees with, there are many grey areas of employment and promotions where revealing your belief that marijuana and prostitution should be legalized might not favor you.
Finally, realize that any tweeting, blogging, or general commenting you do about your company on-line could violate company policies. Make sure you are not giving your employer legitimate grounds for dismissing you by reviewing your company handbook. When in doubt, leave out numbers, specifics, or any other information which could be considered confidential.
While the digital age is fantastic, one thing old fashion forms of communication afforded you was the chance to think twice. You might write the letter – but you had the chance to throw it away before you mailed it! Remember that what you put on-line in an instant can be accessed by the wrong person before you have the opportunity to remove it.
By constantly considering what you put on the Internet from the point of view of a hiring authority, you can make your on-line presence a boost to your career rather than a stumbling block.
Although the rules of grammar, such as parallel sentence structure, consistency, and punctuation, do apply, the statements we create for resumes are somewhat fragments in bullet or paragraph form simply because we eliminate the pronouns (he/she, you, we). However, this doesn't mean correct grammar in any other sense of the word should be absent. Above all things (along with accuracy), grammar adds to the professionalism of any document.
What would you be more inclined to read—a document filled with glaring errors or a document that reads smoothly? Keep in mind that people who read resumes on a daily basis, such as human resources professionals, hiring managers, and executives, probably see a whirlwind of poorly-written documents one right after the other. And although applicants may not be writers by profession, they are expected to know and apply basic rules. Otherwise, that resume is at risk of automatically going into the "no" pile.
* Responsible for the automation department and a $100M budget; led 45 personnel in system testing and verification; managed relationships with vendors.
* Oversaw automation department, controlling $100M budget, leading 45-person team in system testing and verification, and managing vendor relationships.
They both say the exact same thing, but Option 2 lets the reader flow with the sentence as opposed to stopping at every semicolon and also connects ideas/responsibilities in one sentence. The use of the comma after "department" and before "controlling" connects the second part of the sentence to the main idea, which is overseeing the automation department.
First-person: [I am a]Senior Executive offering world-class experience in sales, business development, partnership building, and operations leadership. [I] Create strategies to reach target consumers while expanding profitability through product development improvements.
Third-person: [He is a] Senior Executive offering world-class experience in sales, business development, partnership building, and operations leadership. [He] Creates strategies to reach target consumers while expanding profitability though product development improvements.
Generally, the third-person approach is more commonly used and has its advantages in terms of easier readability for your target audience. Consistency in all areas of your resume is vital, including spelling, capitalization, punctuation, spacing, and font, because you don't want to confuse readers. The only questions you want them to ask are, Could you provide me with more information? or When are you available for an interview?