The Homa Files

Excerpted from: EditorialEmergency.com, Resume as Personal Branding

TakeAway: Your resume needs to do more than rehash old job descriptions; it needs to get the attention of overburdened employers. 

“If they don’t ‘get’ you after reading your resume — skimming it, if you want the truth — you haven’t effectively differentiated, or branded, yourself.”

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Do you really think the folks doing the hiring will find you memorable because you’re a “self-starter?”

Will you separate yourself from the pack by claiming to be a “results-oriented professional?”

Here are “Ten Boilerplate Phrases That Kill Resumes“:

• Cross-functional teams
• More than [x] years of progressively responsible experience
• Superior (or excellent) communication skills
• Strong work ethic
• Met or exceeded expectations
• Proven track record of success
• Works well with all levels of staff
• Team player
• Bottom-line orientation

While we’re at it, let’s add the strangely ubiquitous jargon “thought leader” .

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So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Forget about listing every job you’ve ever had in strict reverse-chronological order. Do indicate the years you were with each employer, but make sure the “experience” entries most aligned with your current career goals come first. This is sometimes called a “functional” resume. It’s arranged by order of importance. Sacrificing strategy to chronology is so 20th century.

Don’t make them Google it. Unless your prior employers, clients and partners are so well known that clarifying what they do would be ridiculous, provide a pithy description: Fortress of Solitude, a boutique entertainment-marketing firm. Lithwick, Stahl and Osterman, a financial consultancy. Green’s Greens, the Upper Midwest’s leading distributor of frozen vegetables. If the HR manager has to search for info because you didn’t provide it, consider yourself deleted.

Use vocabulary cherry-picked from the listing for the job you want. Large firms frequently depend on computers to sift resume submissions; the software sorts for keywords that match the listing. Include those keywords in your resume to penetrate the machines’ defenses so you can work your magic on some HUMAN eyeballs.

Rely on compelling stories, not old clichés about your “strong work ethic.“  Use (brief) anecdotes to illustrate your productivity, your efficiency, your indispensability. Give life to the tale of your 11th-hour campaign pitch (illustrated by nothing more than stick-figure sketches), which won your outfit a $12 million contract with ActiVision.

Remember that personal branding extends to file names. When submitting your resume electronically, don’t name the file ‘resume,’ or even ‘resume 2009,’– you might as well title it ‘I don’t really want this job.’  File name equals full name (yours).”

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Source articles:
http://www.editorialemergency.com/content/view/325/76
http://www.marketingprofs.com/news/marketing-inspiration/index.asp?nlid=1339&cd=dmo121&adref=NmiF1A9The

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This entry was posted on November 5, 2009 at 7:46 am and is filed under Careers & Interviewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.