Career Goddess

Revamp Your Job Search with Expert Tips

Want speedy, quick-to-digest job-search tips by some of the leading resume writers, personal branding strategists, and career coaches in the world?

Check out Supercharge Your Job Search: Short, Sweet & Tweet (Expert Job Search Advice in Digestible Bytes) by Career Directors International on Twitter. 

Search for the hashtag #cdisst on Twitter. Or follow @careerhero (Laura DeCarlo, the fearless leader of CDI) at http://www.twitter.com/careerhero for 8 tips each weekday on topics including:

- Career and Job Search Focus
- Career Assessments
- Personal Branding
- Online Identity
- Reputation Management
- Digital Dirt
- Social Media Profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc.)
- Job Search Research
- Informational Interviewing
- Networking and Social Networking
- Job Boards and Company Job Centers/Job Postings
- Social Job Search
- Employment Agencies
- Career Fairs
- Making Contact with Recruiters and Employers
- Job Postings via Print Advertising
- Recruiter Relations and
- Savvy Follow-up Strategies.

I am proud to serve on CDI’s Innovation Committee which spearheaded this job-seeker initiative, crowd-sourced expert content from CDI members, categorized and refined the content, and produced this viral campaign on Twitter.

Our goal: to provide job-seekers with the absolute best practices for job search in today’s highly competitive market. Thanks to Laura DeCarlo for her inspiration, leadership, and sheer determination in making this happen!

The Supercharge Your Job Search campaign began on May 23, 2012 and will continue each weekday through the end of October 2012. Here is a sampling of some of the tweets that have appeared to date:

#Jobseekers: Follow @careerhero for 8 expert #jobsearch tips, weekdays. All tips by #Career Directors International members. #cdisst

@careerhero Ur welcome! -> Special thx 2 Judy Gillespie @susanguarneri @ResumeSolutions 4 efforts w/CDI Supercharge Your Job Search. #cdisst

Plan before you post! Clarify your key job strengths and career interests before sending resume to employers. #jobplan #cdisst @hr4change

Call #recruiters who specialize in your industry and field. @CRPLACEMENT #cdisst #jobsearch

Stand out from the crowd: set Google Alerts to research participating employers in advance. @resumekarma #cdisst #jobfairs #cdisst

In a confidential #jobsearch, respond to #blindads with care. Handle it anonymously. What if it's 4 ur job? #cdisst @kristinsjohnson

Make sure dates of employment on your #LI profile match your #resume! Hiring managers check these things for accuracy. #cdisst

Search #LinkedIn for potential contacts / hiring managers in your target #companyresearch? @laurieberenson #cdisst MRT @careerhero

http://Manta.com 4 gr8 research! ID companies by state, industry, size, stage, public / private. @JeanCummings #cdisst #companyresearch

Build relationships on #Twitter via tweets, RTs and DMs that offer resources, support and thx. @susanguarneri #cdisst #networking

Follow-up after #ftfjobsearch walk-in crucial: Many hiring managers dismiss applicants who don't send TY notes. @Resume_Resource #cdisst

Consider #jobboards research tool vs #jobsearch activity, use leads w/network to get in back door RT @SharonWilliams @FredCoonSCC #cdisst

Salary Raises - More than Wishing and Hoping

Job Scenario: You are a top-ranked sales performer in a lucrative, financial industry. In fact, in your first 6 months on the job in 2011, you ranked #5 among your 37 regional colleagues in sales for the entire 12 months of the year! This year has been even stronger - you have risen to the number-one spot in sales production for the first quarter.

So, with your performance review coming up in June, you may feel you are due for a raise. Are you inclined to wait, perhaps even past June, wishing and hoping that your employer will see it the same way?

Or do you want to be more proactive?

Before you plunge ahead, review the following Should You Ask for a Raise? flowchart to see if your timing is right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you decide to ask, you may need to get some professional coaching to be sure you are communicating your measurable Brand Value to your employer AND are articulating that Brand Value Proposition in a non-threatening manner. You want to make it easy for your boss to give you a resounding “Yes!” to your salary request.

One last thought: check out the following Payscale infographic for Best and Worst Jobs for Salary Growth. See any salary information and trends that might impact you?

 

Get Organized to Get Ahead in Your Job Search

Job search nightmare: A company recruiter calls you about a specific job opening to which you have applied…and you cannot recall anything about it! Furthermore, you have NO IDEA what you said in your customized cover letter or which person you mentioned as the employee who referred you for the job. In other words, you come across as a complete dunce because you are not prepared and organized.

Sound familiar? Keeping track of the details of a job search spiraling out of control is a common problem for job seekers. But you do not have to struggle with Excel spreadsheets or “tickler” files to try to stay on top of each facet of your job search.

My favorite online organization system for job search has been JibberJobber – Jason Alba came up with this extremely valuable tool several years ago, and has been updating it regularly. The basic level has no charge; for advanced functions, there is a modest fee.

Now there is a new player. The newest organization tool online for job search, Huntsy, has launched. It includes some interesting features:

• A tool similar to Pinterest to “clip” job postings and input them into your account to easily track them.
• Social networking integration so you will be notified of any your friends or connections who have worked, or currently work, at a company where you are going to apply. This allows you to leverage your network for employee referrals.
• Reminders about following up after applying, after interviews, or after other communications with people important to each job opening. Using your social network is the key to getting “warm referrals”, which will be more likely to generate interest in your candidacy by each company.

In January 2012 I wrote about Huntsy’s free ebook “Handbook for the Recently Unemployed”, which contained job-hunt advice from 15 blogger authors (myself included). With your signup for Huntsy (complimentary), you will receive a link to download that entire ebook.

These two websites (JibberJobber and Huntsy) are worth checking out if being naturally organized is not one of your strengths....or even if it is! You will be amazed how much an online organization tool – one that is available at your fingertips via your mobile phone – can enhance your ability to respond intelligently to “surprise” phone calls from recruiters.

What Does Passion Have To Do with Careers?

What is “the highest expression of YOUR talent?” Can you identify your dream job? Or is your job search about settling for whatever comes along?

This TEDxUW talk by University of Waterloo professor and economist Larry Smith is on a subject you may think surprising for an economist: passion, dreams, and having a great career.

One of Prof. Smith’s former students did just that. With his passion and dreams in mind, he founded and developed the company Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the groundbreaking BlackBerry wireless mobile smartphone.

This serious topic is presented with a tongue-in-cheek delivery and probing questions. In fact, it is a bit in-your-face and definitely funny...in other words, a must-see career video!

In my private practice as a career coach to executives and professionals, I hear many of the “excuses” Prof. Smith cites.

But here’s the bottom-line: if you talk yourself out of having a dream job, then you surely will succeed!

 

 

READABILITY: Craft a User-Friendly Resume

Have you ever copied and pasted your Word doc resume into the body of an email message and sent it off to a hiring manager or recruiter? You may have thought this was a good idea, since an attachment from an unknown sender (you) may be suspected to contain viruses and not to be opened.

But try this: send that same email to yourself and open it up. You may be surprised to see broken text, strange symbols, and garbled text placement; in fact, nothing much that resembles your original resume.

What this demonstration illustrates is the last key to creating a resume with FLAVOR: readability.

The resume you likely spent hours agonizing over, polishing and fine-tuning, can instantly become gobblygook to the end-user (the recruiter or hiring manager) if you are unaware of the readability issues for electronically sent resumes.

This is especially true for email, because it is always in an HTML environment. It may also be true for online applications, unless the job posting specifies that a Word doc resume can be uploaded and submitted.

So, think of it this way. There are two different sets of users that potentially can view your resume: computers and humans. The resume format you submit for each must be structured to optimize readability. If not, you may be spending hours of fruitless effort in your job search.

For computers, an ASCII-text resume (otherwise known as a plain-text resume) is best. Human eyes, on the other hand, are not attracted to plain-text because, well, it’s plain and boring! Instead, a Word doc or PDF resume with visually pleasing components and plenty of white space is preferable.

The most common challenges to readability for humans is jam-packed text, miniscule margins, assorted fonts, multiple (three or more) font sizes, and inconsistent structure.

For example, aim for short blocks of text (no more than four lines) followed by one empty line. This creates white space surrounding one “nugget” of information, which is more easily read, assimilated, and understood by the reader.

Similarly, the use of bullets and boldface can draw the human eye to easily find the most important information in all the text contained in the resume. Do not use bullets for every line of text. Limit the use of bullets to your achievements and accomplishments for maximum impact.

By the way, accomplishments are not simply your job duties listed in bullet fashion, but rather the results of your job duties. In addition, not all job duties culminate in exceptional results that make you stand out from your competition.

Understand that all the information on your resume is not equally compelling. Review your resume and ask yourself: could the most important (most persuasive) information be found and read by a hiring manager within 10 seconds?

If not, consider ditching irrelevant information, cutting down the verbiage describing your job duties and responsibilities, and highlighting the differentiating must-have elements. Those essential components include accomplishments, value, and leverage via personal branding and unique qualifications.

For more on writing a resume with FLAVOR, see my previous posts:

FOCUS – The Starting Point for Resume Success

LEVERAGE – Showcase Your Best Assets for Your Resume

ACCOMPLISHMENTS – The Backbone of Your Resume

VALUE – What the Employer Really Wants to See in a Resume

OPTIMIZATION – SEO for Resumes

Personal Branding - Be Yourself!

It’s no wonder Chris Brogan makes it to the top of the top 50 social media power influencers’ heap! He has great stuff to say. And he willingly shares his wisdom with the rest of us via his blog and social media outlets such as Twitter (where I follow him and am an unabashed fan!)

In his recent blog post 97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform, Chris reveals how to;
Start Somewhere. Embrace Brevity. Video, Video, Video. Ideas Drive Platform. Be Yourself. Humble Is Better Marketing. Your Three Roles. Overnight Success. What to Talk/Write About. What to Avoid.

The section of tips (41-50) on Be Yourself directly relates to personal branding, my passion. So of course I have to share these with you. Follow these tips when you want to express and live your personal brand every day. And you want to, of course, don’t you?

Be Yourself
41. The more I act like myself, instead of like what I thought the world wanted, the more successful I become.

42. Realize that there’s a “hot mess” line, meaning that you have to filter the “you” that you put out there a little bit. People don’t want to hear every woe and misery in your life. (Most times. Dooce not withstanding.)

43. Realize that being yourself means you won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Embrace that.

44. The “yourself” that most people want you to be is the one that they can learn something from. And yet, if that’s not what you want to be, disregard me and be yourself.

45. Part of being yourself is untangling from other people’s expectations. This is a very difficult matter, and yet important to building your platform.

46. “Be yourself” doesn’t mean be only about yourself. Connecting with and caring about others is always a trait that earns more attention.

47. It’s great to have a lot of passions. When displaying this via your platform, try to tie them to a larger storyline so that people understand how they connect.

48. Never let your shortcomings become your reasons why not. Richard Branson is dyslexic. Ryan Blair went from gang member to millionaire success story. Excuses are Band-Aids on wounds that don’t exist.

49. Marsha Collier said it best: “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

50. Start where you are. Lots of people worry that everyone’s so far ahead. Those people? They started somewhere.

Design a Career You Can Love

Having changed careers myself several times before discovering my dream career as a career counselor/career coach, I know how daunting and frustrating it can be to figure out what to do next. Many times all we know is what we don’t want to do job-wise, but not what we actually do want to do.

So Nicholas Lore’s book, The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success (updated, revised edition of the original), is a gem! Jam-packed with hundreds of pages of career guidance information, informal assessment inventories and exercises, and motivating stories, it describes a career design system that has worked for many individuals. A top 10 national bestseller, this book has been endorsed by Jack Canfield and Marianne Williamson among others.

Here’s the caveat: you must be disciplined to get through the book and exercises (it is detailed and long). If accountability to yourself is not your strong suit, then you may want to partner with someone else going through the same career-exploration and decision-making process. Or, for professional guidance and accountability, use the services of a certified career counselor or certified career coach.

While Mr. Lore feels most career counseling and career coaching is well-intentioned but ineffective, he does admit that the do-it-yourself method, even with the use of a good book such as this one, could be “insufficient to make the best career decision”. He goes on to say that the most effective programs include a “complete career design process that coaches you through the complex process of making the best choice”. An expert career coach can provide the structure, support, insight, and feedback you would never get in a DIY approach.

My recommendation: read this witty, smart book. Do the exercises (however many interest you). Then think about partnering with a careers professional to fully flesh out your best-fit career options. Otherwise, the flood of information your brain will generate after reading this book might overwhelm you and sabotage your efforts.

Let’s face it: you likely spend more hours researching and planning your vacations, where to eat out, and where to live than determining a career you could really love. Does that even seem reasonable to you?

Land the Job You Need with Expert Advice

Whether the unemployment rate in your state was 3.4% for November 2011, as it was in North Dakota, or 13% in Nevada (according to the Local Area Unemployment Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics), your individual rate is 100% if you are unemployed. This means that every unemployed person has started 2012 with a daunting goal: landing a job in the face of stiff competition.

You can ramp up your job-search success by staying up-to-date with advice offered by professionals in the know. To that end, QLab’s Huntsy searched the Web for the best-of-the-best blogger articles to include in their free ebook “Handbook for the Recently Unemployed”. My Career Goddess blog post “Does Your Resume Have FLAVOR?” was chosen for the chapter on resume writing. I was honored to be chosen as one of 15 blogger authors for the ebook.

With witty and highly useful introductory content for each chapter, the five chapters include:

1. It’s All About Who You (Virtually) Know – LinkedIn, Twitter, and QR Codes
2. Goodbye, Cookie-Cutter Resumes!
3. Scanning Job Sites Is NOT a Game Plan
4. 9-to-5, Just One Way to Make a Living
5. MIRROR, MIRROR On the Wall, Who Interviews Best of All?

Download the Handbook for the Recently Unemployed. Whether you are unemployed or employed and looking for your next great career move, check out the entire ebook. It’s a quick and enjoyable read, and you will be glad you spent the time. It could just make all the difference for your career in 2012!

Optimization - SEO for Resumes

Is your resume sitting in a “black hole?” If you have ever submitted resumes via online application or email and never heard back from the employer, this may be why. The employer’s applicant database can be a “black hole” for your resume.

There are three converging forces that have changed forever how resumes are processed and evaluated, and how applicants are chosen for interviews. Those three include:

1. Competition – there are more people applying for jobs than ever before. Whether unemployed or employed, located in the U.S. or globally, student or retiree, blue collar or white collar (some other color in between!), more of us have gotten into the job-search pool. In addition, what we search for are not only jobs in our current field, but also jobs in other fields (whether related or not). Consequently, one job posting online by an employer can generate tens of thousands of applicants...and more.

2. Time – with lean resources and staffing, employers are doing more with less. Human resources staff, which used to look at and evaluate all resumes submitted, has less time to devote to that task. They now have many other HR duties to perform as well, and often with pared-down staff.
 
3. Technology – Resume-screening software has evolved to be the most cost-efficient method of determining resumes to be further evaluated for consideration. Rather than having human beings plowing through vast numbers of resumes manually (which could take days and even weeks), resume-screening software enables employer to quickly make their selections.

The consequences of these three converging forces for you, the job-seeker, are critical. Unless your resume is found via an employer’s resume-screening software and scores enough points to make it into the cut-off number of applicants to be interviewed, it will not see the light of day*. Languishing in the employer’s applicant database, unseen by human eyes, is akin to the “black hole”.

* Note: there are other work-around methods for job search that are much more effective in landing interviews than simply focusing all your energies on online applications.

So, what can you do? First, be aware that your existing resume likely does not contain the right keywords (some call these buzzwords), and likely not in the optimum position, for the job you are targeting. Second, take action to improve your resume via keyword optimization.

Optimization means researching to discover the current required and desired keywords for your target job function and industry. As job functions and industries change over time, so do the keywords, which are nouns and noun phrases. The best place to research keywords is in relevant, up-to-date job postings.

Then you have to incorporate those keywords in ways where they can have the most impact in your resume. For example, first-page positioning (especially the top half of the first page) will often score more points for the same keyword than if it were located on the second page.

But keywords also have to make sense in the context of your resume. You cannot simply include a list of required and desired keywords; that is called keyword stuffing and will actually work against you. Employers are wise to that tactic.

Instead, you have to show how the required and desired keywords are relevant to your experience, training, and accomplishments. Well-written accomplishment bullets are the ideal place to showcase keywords and gain maximum impact.

Optimization is the fifth key to a resume with FLAVOR. See previous posts, listed below, for more tips:

FOCUS - The Starting Point for Resume Success

LEVERAGE –Showcase Your Best Assets for Your Resume

ACCOMPLISHMENTS – The Backbone of Your Resume

VALUE – What the Employer Really Wants to See in a Resume

VALUE: What the Employer Really Wants to See in a Resume

Question: What do employers absolutely need to see in your resume to persuade them to consider interviewing you?

Answer: Bottom-line ROI value you can bring to the organization. Then it becomes much easier to determine the payoff in investing in you versus other job-seekers (your competition).

For employers, bottom-line ROI value revolves around making money or saving money.

Making money (revenue generation) can be shown in many ways, such as:

• Producing direct sales of products and/or services
• Improving customer service, which leads to increased customer retention (sales) and referrals (sales)
• Enhancing market position by “owning” a niche or geographic territory, creating compelling marketing copy online and offline, strategically leveraging social media to reach new target markets, and more
• Engineering and rolling out a unique, competitive new product or service.

Saving money (cost reductions and cost savings) can be attained via methods such as:

• Streamlining and/or automating processes to capture money-saving efficiencies
• Reducing overhead via new approaches including online member / customer newsletters versus printing (and mailing) newsletters
• Training team members in cost-saving best practices
• Negotiating favorable vendor and supplier contracts

Demonstrating your value to the potential employer in your resume is essential. The proof of that value is most easily conveyed via quantified accomplishments and a prominent Brand Value Proposition (personal brand statement) located in the top quarter of the first page of your resume. Here’s an example:

Operations Director - Transportation and Logistics
~ Champion of Cost Savings Without Sacrificing Quality ~

• Cost Reductions: Cut costs by $10M+ over most recent 10 years via continuous process improvements, while delivering high-quality business solutions.

Showing Value is the fourth key to an interview-winning resume. Value takes you out of the category of a potential risky job applicant to a must-have employee on any hiring manager’s team!

Previous posts have discussed the first three keys for a resume with FLAVOR.