Tweet: Rsum, LinkedIn Profile, Bio, and Cover letter each has a purpose in your campaign and branding. Learn how to approach each with a purpose.
Clients often approach me to help them with their marketing. Often, too, they come with the idea that once their rsum is done it can be used to broadcast their message through the different channels and means to get them the attention and the action they need to make their transition successful.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
To launch a successful campaign each of the available channelsrsum submittal, LinkedIn response, cover letter with a rsum through an inside contact, or a prospect lettermust be used differently and appropriately to exploit their full potential and to get the most impact. Although the foundational rsum provides the basic branding and the message required to establish your value proposition in the job market, other avenues complement this message to provide the dispositive insight to the reader about you on why your message deserves attention and further action. The purpose of this blog is to disabuse the notion that rsum is all that is required to properly launch your marketing campaign and that every other message in a campaign is a copy and paste version of this rsum!
So, let us take a closer look at each of the elements of your marketing collateral and how to design and fashion it for most impact.
Rsum: Your rsum is a statement of your value proposition stemming from your chronological accomplishments and how you translate those accomplishments into a compelling message that a hiring manager can get excited about. Contrary to common apprehension a rsum is not about you; it is more about the job you want. Also, it is not about yesterday, but it is about what you want to be doing tomorrow.
Almost every rsum I see initially when clients first come to me are opposite to what I just stated. They start with a Summary (which anchors them to yesterday; are full of bulleted statements that read much like the job descriptions written in the past tense, which are not accomplishments; and fail to provide any differentiated value that makes it stand out).
So, to make a forward-looking rsum based on your accomplishments (not just your experience) requires a different mindset, design, and effort. In such a rsum your leadership story (narrative) must jump out as a coherent and compelling statement of what separates you from all the others in the same area of work. This is what makes this part of the rsum design so hard and challenging. Merely populating your bullets with results and numbers is nearly not enough, as such an approach does not tell a story, raising more questions in a readers mind. (For example a rsum bullet: As a Regional Sales Manager increased sales 15% in Y-1, can be an impressive bullet, but it does beg the question, why not 20%?)
Despite the need to salt your rsum with story-telling bullets its length must be contained to make it concise and compelling. Here, more is not better. Typically, a two-page rsum with a strong leadership narrative, a compelling story line, and a highly differentiated portfolio of accomplishment is a tour de force for anyone who wants to flaunt their strong leadership salt.
Although rsums are usually submitted in electronic formats and are scanned by Applicant Tracking system (ATS), often surrendering their graphical and esthetic designs to machine-digestible text, the original must be carefully designed, laid-out, and presented for great visual appeal with clean, clutter-free look, easy-reading font (San Serif is preferred) and error-free presentation. Often, rsums are seen for the first time by hiring managers and interviewers when you bring them to the interview. This is where a sharp-looking rsum, printed on an impressive stock, presented without folds, does make an impact.
LinkedIn Profile: A LinkedIn Profile provides the following elements to make your case to its reader:
1.Your Headshot
2.Headline
3.Summary
4.Experience
5.Posts
6.Publications
7.Projects
8.Languages
9.Skills and Endorsements, and
10.Recommendations
I have not listed your Education, Interests, and Personal Details in this list, but they have their place in the overall picture you want to present. In this discussion I am going to mostly focus on the Headline and Summary parts and then, briefly discuss others.
It is best to start with the Summary, which provides 2000 characters of narrative that tells your story in a personal, somewhat intimate, way to its reader. Unlike a rsum, which does not use personal or collective pronouns (I, We, Us, etc.) your narrative in the Summary part reads much better when you use personal pronouns throughout. This changes the tone of the narrative and makes it more personal and intimate in its read.
It is best to tell your most compelling accomplishments with actual stories as exemplars of your leadership. Small paragraphs (3-5 lines each) make it for an easy read with active tense and short sentences. It should read very differently from how a rsum typically reads (more formal, staid, and factual) even though it may tell a story in each stint or bullet.
Once the Summary is finalized the Headline should flow from it. Do not make your headline read like a job title; make it read more like newspaper headline that intrigues the reader to buy it. So, instead of casting your Headline as Senior Marketing Manager at Salesforce, consider, The Marketing Genius that Proposed Dreamforce as its name for the Salesforces Premier Industry Event! You have 120ch. for your headline. Use it wisely!
The Experience part provides much greater detail to tell your story at each stint (2000ch.), which helps you with choosing the right words for good search results.
LinkedIn search result is based on the weight it assigns for the words appearing in decreasing importance, starting with the Headline. So, make sure that your Headline has the most important search word you choose so that others can find you on LinkedIn. As you go down the list of items I have enumerated the search weight progressively decreases. So, in the Experience section it is a good idea to have some repeated key words for a better search result.
Your Headshot is visually the most important element you can present. Make sure it is a clean headshot (of ONLY you), professionally taken (no selfies), and presented well (no passport or drivers-license photos).
Bio: A bio is usually a good collateral to have for senior professionals (above VPs) that provide a one-page narrative of your career in a easy-to-read format with highlights of your career, without much detail (unlike your rsum). A bio is useful when someone at a high level quickly wants to take a look at your past and decide if they want to take the next step. A bio is effective when you send a prospect letter to a senior executive at a company, where a job opening does not exist, but you are sending a letter with an idea for them to look at you to pursue this idea further.
If you enclose your rsum with such a prospect letter the likelihood of someone intercepting that letter, and, seeing the rsum attached to it, promptly sending it to the HR for action, sabotaging your original objective is quite high. A bio attached to such a letter is less likely to have such an outcome.
Cover Letter: In todays job market ethos, cover letters are disparaged. The main reason for this stance is that they often do not provide any new insight or value to the recruiter or the hiring manager. Most submittals of cover letters are banausic, with a copy-and-paste from the job description and parts of your rsum. For this reason alone companies such as Amazon expressly forbid cover letter submittals with rsums. Because with such an approach you are telegraphing that youre too lazy to have any original idea on how to make your company better in your new role, so youre just taking this easy way out to impress them.
Instead, a meaningful cover letter must immediately grab its reader with some insight about the company, its market, competitor, or changes that are around the corner and how you are going to address these challenges head-on in your new role. Such a letter requires thoughtful research, a well articulated point-of-view (PoV) and a compelling argument as to why you are the ONLY candidate that can do this for them. This is why such letters are not easy to write. You may also want to view your cover letter as your closing argument that forces the hiring manager to look at you differently from other candidates.
So, now that you understand the role of each of these elements in your marketing collateral you may want to plan your effort to create each of these elements to suit your strategy and how you want to execute it to land your dream job.
Good luck!
| About Author | |
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Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
Website: http://dilipsaraf.com/?p=2671
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