“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” -Mark Twain
As we covered in the previous post in this series, personal branding is a real opportunity to identify what is important to you and to clearly communicate your unique differences and qualities to guide your career by using your strengths, skills, passions and values to separate yourself from your competitors.
But how do you communicate all that with career marketing documents that reflect the new approach to job seeking?
Resumes in the New World of Work
With technology driving much of the way we go about finding a job, there have been numerous articles and reports trumpeting the impending end of the resume—which is premature at best and, at worst, has proven to be an exaggeration.
However, when you consider some of the following statistics, you can understand why many hiring managers, HR professionals and recruiters don’t take the resume as a document of truth:
“23% of 7,000 resumes had misrepresentation.” -Christian & Timbers
“44% work history inaccuracies – 41% false education credentials.” -ADP Screening & Selection of 2.6 million resumes
“61% of HR professionals found inaccuracies after background checks.” -Society of Human Resource Management
And it’s not just the resume that has employers concerned and wanting more concrete evidence of a candidate’s success. Insights from other surveys include:
“Employee fraud costs companies $120 billion a year.”
“Employers lose 72% of negligent hiring suits.”
“7% of all job applicants have a criminal record.”
The resume as a career marketing document certainly has its place. And while the death of the resume keeps being predicted with the advent of more technology, it will likely be a long time before we see it disappearing or being replaced completely.
However, the traditional job search is changing, and with that, the approach and the documents used in the job search need to change as well.
The Power of Personal Branding
It has been quoted for many years that the vast majority of positions are now being filled through referrals and networking. Certainly in the current world of work, employee referrals are a rapidly growing source of new hires for many companies—in some cases, representing 50% or higher. The added use of social media to tap into personal networks and contacts will only see this number rise.
But for the job seeker, these forms of job searching (referrals or networking) may not be the best way to secure an employer’s interest in your unique skills and experience. This is especially relevant if you or your referrer have little or no understanding of job opportunities available or how you might fit in.
Job seekers, grateful for the introduction, blindly hand over their resumes to be passed on down the line, immediately losing much of the control over how they position themselves to be perceived. They might not even have the name of the hiring manager or the contact who will be handling their application, and now they’ve diminished their chances of having much influence in the process.
Anyone in mid-career (with at least 10 years of professional experience) is easily capable of supplying enough information to write a 3-6 page resume (not the accepted length!) rather than a 1-2 page targeted resume. The trouble is that if a company is hiring for a number of positions and is accepting referrals, you might be suitable for more than one role based on your experience, but your generic resume is a potential barrier to your being considered.
It should also be remembered that there will be many instances where a job hasn’t been posted or advertised. Companies are much more willing and likely to be on the lookout for good talent, then create a position for them, or to have been running “light” until they come across the right candidate.
That’s where personal branding can come in to create different career marketing documents as door openers, giving a job seeker time and, hopefully, greater knowledge to follow up with a targeted resume once specifics of a position or openings are known.
Discovering Your Personal Brand
Some of the key elements of personal branding are to understand yourself from both an internal and external perspective. Being able to identify and communicate your key strengths and differentiating attributes can be used to your advantage in creating powerful career documents that make people take notice, yet don’t give away all your information in one go.
Unique documents that give people who don’t know you a real sense of who you are and what you’re capable of make so much more sense than a dry, 1-2 page resume. In order to create these documents, though, you first need to identify your personal brand.
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 often do you take time to reflect on your strengths?
Many professionals are very poor at spending enough time on their own personal development in the form of a regular review of their skills and abilities. In fact, it might only be in their annual reviews that they do this, and those experiences are not always very positive ones.
If you’ve ever had to endure a performance appraisal, the typical catalogue of events can run like this:
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Fill in very lengthy self-analysis form looking at all areas of your performance over the last year.
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Seek the input of peers, colleagues and managers.
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Sit down with supervisor for an hour to review all of the above.
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Spend the first 5 minutes reflecting on your strengths.
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Spend the remaining 55 minutes identifying, dissecting, analyzing and navel-gazing at your weaknesses.
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Create an action plan around how you are going to bring your weaknesses up to an (at best) average level of performance.
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Feel like you’re treading water and not progressing as fast as you would like.
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Repeat annually to the point of absolute frustration.
Some may view this as a little simplistic or harsh, but the truth is that only 42% of Americans believe that working mostly on their strengths will make them more successful. (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 highly recommended read for anyone interested in building their personal brand through understanding their key strengths. Very often, it’s difficult for us to articulate our top strengths and how they might be reflected in our careers to date. This book gives you an opportunity to take the “Strengths Finder” assessment online and have your top 5 strengths identified with explanations.
You can then take this information and create your examples, or stories, of how you have used each strength in a work situation. So in interviews, you won’t only be listing what you consider your strengths to be, but also giving reference and context with a concrete example—very powerful and memorable when the interviewer is doing a review at the end of the day.
There are many assessments and tests that can be taken to understand more about yourself, but 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 that are more likely to confuse than confirm.
Another good marketing exercise to conduct is a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). In each area, ask yourself these questions:
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Strengths – What are my strengths? What do I have that is positive that can help me achieve my goals?
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Weaknesses – What are my weaknesses? Where am I challenged the most?
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Opportunities – If I were able to overcome those weaknesses and utilize my strengths, what will result for me? What is the upside?
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Threats – What is the downside if I do not address those challenges?
It’s not enough just to be aware of your strengths. Take the time to discover if you have other hidden talents, either through your own analysis or from the feedback of others (ideally both). The foundation of strong personal brands is built in part on maximizing strengths.
Okay, we now have a good sense of what we think, but what about others’ perceptions? In the next post, we look at “What Others Would Say About You.”
Image: photobucket
