Job Search for Executives
For C-level executives especially, a traditional resume might not be the ticket to the next rung up in the corporate world. Many executives are harnessing technology and using more direct methods to showcase themselves. Methods include developing a personal marketing website and using sophisticated direct mail campaigns that put their best foot forward and directly in front of decision-makers.
There are online companies that allow one to develop a personalized site using templates to add narrative, photos, work samples, video and audio content. Some, like www.visualcv.com, are free. Others cost thousands of dollars, but offer coaching and consulting to perfect your value proposition (What’s that? It’s critical. See my next post), identify a target market, develop the campaign and produce a perfectly crafted and quality-printed direct mail letter. But when you are worth a salary in the 6 or 7 digit backet, a few thousand dollars would, of course, be seen as a wise investment.
Do you want to find a consultant of this type? Contact me for referral to one I can highly recommend.
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Do You Really Even Need a Resume?
For years career specialists like myself have been emphatic that a resume is a must have for any respectable job search. And I still stand by the fact that every career-minded professional should have one ready, polished and updated at all times to be ready for the next opportunity that might present itself (whether actively searching or not).
HOWEVER, in some cases a resume may only be a part of the packaging of You, Inc. In the more rarified job search atmosphere, where executives are a high end commodity and over 46,000 C-level (CEO, CFO…) jobs are available but not publicized every single month, you just may not get there from two pages laser printed on ivory, 32 lb, 100% cotton.
In those upper echelons of job search there are more sophisticated protocols to follow. What are they? Watch for my next post.
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Prime Resume´ Real Estate
A resume is an outline, not a detailed narrative. It’s purpose is to persuade the reader that you should be invited to an interview. There are a number of resume formats that are acceptable and sometimes a nontraditional approach may work, although most hiring managers don’t have time or patience for over-the-top attempts to gain attention. You should aim for a direct and easy to read document that will get to the point quickly. Remember you may only have a few seconds to pique the interest of the reader. 
Critical information should be laid out clearly and in a format that will give the big picture of who you are as succinctly as possibly. The optimal place to do this is right under your name and contact information header. You might consider that area as prime property that can be developed into the Boardwalk.
Unfortunately many resume writers treat that space more like Baltic Avenue and then wonder why they aren’t getting much income from it. You’re on Baltic Avenue if you have a Job Objective section occupying that corner. What a waste of prime real estate that is! Who cares what your job objective is but you? Obviously, you are applying for a specific job in a specific company. Hopefully your employment objective and that position opening are a potential match or you wouldn’t even be applying, so why waste valuable space and the hiring manager’s valuable time with that useless information?
You want to put your hotel on the Boardwalk! That is what you will be doing if you insert a Profile Summary as the first section of your resume. This lead-in statement serves as an executive summary and should be designed to capture the reader’s immediate attention. This section will tell the reader about your key qualifications without the need to abstract them from your resume.
The advantages of using a well-honed profile paragraph are that it provides the reader with a quick overview of your unique assets and that it allows you to bring key elements from your past to the top of the resume.
There are four elements you can include in the Profile Summary:
- Who you are as a professional
- Your key areas of competence
- Your greatest strengths
- General statement of your accomplishments
OK. This all sounds good, but how do you get it on paper? Some of us just draw a blank when it comes to describing ourselves. That’s where you may need to do a little introspection or even get help pulling those words out. If you get stuck contact us. We can help you develop a Profile Summary or an entire resume so that you can PASS GO AND COLLECT YOUR $200.
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Happy Resume´ Month!
You won’t find a special section of greeting cards in your local Hallmark Store to commemorate the occasion; nonetheless, September is recognized as National Resume Month. Now I don’t know how they come up with these “tributes”, but I will take the nudge and remind you to get out your resume and check to see if it is worthy of the honor.
You might wonder why you should bother since you are content with your present employer. But you must admit that you don’t know what the future holds and it’s possible to be out on the street faster than you can say “downsizing”. Or almost as sad, your real dream job could be posted and filled before you can locate and elongate your one-pager. If those scenarios aren’t reason enough to go immediately to the file cabinet and start searching, why not take a more strategic view for having a polished and ready resume?
Every worker is like a company, You, Inc., if you will. A resume then is a sales brochure for the product you are offering. It should be honest and forthright, but it should also highlight your best features and, along with the collateral cover letter, offer the potential “buyer” (hiring manager) a tailored solution to his problem. It won’t tell the whole story; but it must be enough to convince the buyer that this is a brand worth examining more closely.
So how effective is your current sales brochure? Looking at it from the “buyer’s” perspective, would you want to take a closer look at the product it promotes? If not, stay tuned for future posts in honor of National Resume Month and have better marketing material by the end of September.
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Mr. Mom Goes to School
There may be a trend in the making. Some young men are staying home with the children while the wife goes heigh ho, heigh ho each weekday morning. An interesting twist, this seems to be a workable solution for families in which the husband is in a non-traditional career like creative writing, has a technology job that can be performed on a flexible schedule from a home office, or is in career transition. A number of young men need to back out of their careers and start all over to become who they might have been. Online and evening educational programs make the Mr. Mom role especially attractive.
In my experience men seem particularly prone to bad career choices on the first round. Many young men just don’t give much thought to their future while in high school, or worse yet, harbor the unrealistic idea that they can become a pro athlete (you wouldn’t believe how many 12-17 year olds cling to that dream!) and then scramble quickly to land on a major in college. Often the major is one they think will bring monetary success without their having bothered to determine whether or not it fits their temperament and talents. Capability has been considered without regard for suitability. How often have I seen unhappy accountants, lawyers and engineers! Some suffer throughout an entire career.
Recently I became acquainted with a retired accountant, whom I could see was very knowledgable in his field and who had owned a very successful CPA firm a few years back until health problems arose. I marvelled that this man had remained so long in the field, because he has a personality and temperament that seem “out of character” for this profession. His mind races ahead with ideas that his speech can hardly keep up with (something I measure when clients work with me, because idea productivity is a real asset in some careers and a real drag in others). Howard’s a very gregarious fellow who enjoys enteracting with people and I imagine if he’d been an employee he would have been what I call an office prairie dog. You know, the worker who keeps popping up over his cubicle, much like a prairie dog pops up from his hole to look around. Some people just can’t work in isolation and I was incredulous that this guy had been able to focus to do the detailed, accurate work that accountants must be able to do throughout his professional life. Then I heard the rest of his story…..
Howard had married a woman, also an accountant, who said when he opened his business, “Just put me in a back room, send the work in and close the door.” Howard said she was such a highly productive worker, that allowed him to go out and do what he loved to do which was to bring in new business. Eventually he brought in so much he had to find more wives, er, clones of his wife, who were just as happy in the back office. Howard was really a salesman who spoke fluent accounting. It enabled him to use his education, but tailor it to his personality. And everyone lived happily ever after when he sold his business for a healthy profit.
Not every apparent career mismatch turns out this well. Some men can’t reinvent themselves and find a niche in the same industry. If that has happened to you, it might be time to admit that the career’s not working and go home to play with the children (a very worthwhile vocation in itself) while pursuing a more realistic path, one that fits you “just right” (you think as you read that fairy tale for the umpteenth time to little Brenton and Kaitlyn). The important thing is to be sure that you discover your true talents before taking making a hefty investment in time and money, because, hey, you’re the one paying for that degree this time!
What? You still aren’t sure what those talents are? Then your’re not very different from most everyone else, according to Peter Drucker. So get on the fast track and contact me to find out! We can set a time to work together by phone while the children are napping.
Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at—and even then more people are wrong than right.
~Peter F. Drucker
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Are You Tending Your Career Garden?
We’ve had a very hot summer this year in these parts with many days over 100. People lose their motivations in the heat and barely want to move out of air conditioned comfort. My friend, who’s entire yard is planted in beautiful perennial gardens that she has always lovingly tended, has let her plants just burn in the hot sun. “Not doin’ it, ” she says. “It’s just way too hot to get out there and water and weed in this heat! They’ll just have to fend for themselves. ” Well they didn’t. Plants that have thrived in her loving care for years are suddenly dried up to nothingness, somehow allowing me to feel smugly virtuous about not having ever started such foolishness. I’ve never planted or nurtured the earth (hey, I don’t even mow), but I’m not a plant killer, either! Perceived vindication sometimes takes strange forms.
Being the person I am, however, I soon began thinking about this in terms of our careers, and how they are really like gardens. There are a variety of plants within them, some native to the soil (talents)and other imported varieties (skill sets). Whatever we have in our career garden, it must be tended or it will wither and dry up. Talents are perennials but they will never take us anywhere if we don’t make the effort to identify, develop and employ them. Skill sets are annuals and only as good as the training we get to keep them updated.
What does your career garden look like? Are you planting it (getting education and training)? Are you taking time to identify all the varieties (natural talents) within it? Are you weeding and pruning, i.e. negotiating to trade job duties that aren’t your style for those where you can shine and produce more of a harvest for your employer?
There’s an old saying, ‘Bloom where you are planted.’ But plants don’t bloom without tender loving care.
If you want to get on track to become a master career gardener, contact me to begin today. There’s fertile soil awaiting.
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More About Strengths-Free Sessions With Marcus Buckingham
Hilda Carroll, a life coach and fellow blogger, has done a wonderful job of summarizing and commenting on Marcus Buckingham’s, Go Put Your Strengths to Work. Check out her post if you want to know more about this great book.
Better yet, join Buckingham’s Summer of Development teleclasses, six free sessions in which the author himself will take you through the step-by-step process to growing your strengths. The 30 minute weekly July 12 through August 16 telephone conferences will walk you through a different core concept of the book until, as he says ”you are ready to unleash your strengths on the world!” Registrants who can’t attend will still be able to download the free recordings of the class. What better way to learn about your strengths! Hope to “see” you there!
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The Only Way to Build Your Career
While I continue on th subject of finding your strengths, I would like to say that your strengths are the only thing you can really build on when trying to enhance your career assets. Common wisdom dictatesthat the way to improve professionally is by shoring up personal weaknesses. That is so wrong!
You cannot improve a weakness.
Why can I say this with such conviction? There is a whole ’strengths movement’ out there, initiated by venerable experts who say you can’t. As I pointed out in the previous post Peter F. Drucker can be considered the father of this movement. He probably ignited the whole thing with his 1966 book, The Effective Executive, in which he wrote: “The effective executive builds on strengths-their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates…”. In 1987 David Cooperrider fanned the flickering flame with his premise that we must “build organizations around what works rather than fix what doesn’t.”
Marcus Buckingham made it personal in 2001, however, with his book, Now Discover Your Strengths and has furthered this thinking with his latest directive, Go Put Your Strengths to Work, in which he calls for a “personal strengths revolution” where we shed our societal preoccupation with improving through studying failure. He challenges us to investigate the unique and intricate patterns of our strengths, becoming an expert at ”finding, describing, applying, practicing and refining your strengths.”
Having helped many find greater career and life satisfaction by doing this very thing, I wholeheartedly agree! So don’t spend time trying to gain imperceptible improvement in your shortcomings when that same time applied to your natural strengths can pay off exponentially.
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The Dollars and Sense of Getting Career Help
Few people would deny the benefit of a good financial advisor to manage their monetary assets. Many of us would agree that our nest egg is best left in the hands of a qualified professional. At the very least we want to consult with one periodically to insure that we are on the right path.
People don’t always value their careers to the same degree. And yet your career is probably your biggest financial asset and can surely benefit from the insight of a professional to help you strategically manage and “grow” it. Getting on a career path that capitalizes on all of your assets can make you a valuable commodity in the workforce.
Unfortunately not many people have a good handle on what their strengths really are. The great business guru Peter F. Drucker noted (Managing Oneself, 1999 HBS Publishing), that history’s great achievers were just that because they managed themselves well, but that most of us really don’t know what we are good at even when we think we do. He insisted that “feedback analysis” is the only way that we can really discover our unique assets.
Now, we can certainly embark on this analytic journey solo, but most of us don’t have the patience, commitment or tools to delve that deep into our own psyche and pull those strengths out with confidence. That is where consulting a career professional can be invaluable and in the end become an investment that pays off in dollars and cents.
This blog will address and invite dialogue on issues that can mean the difference between enduring work that is tolerable and having a spectacular career that brings much satisfaction to one’s life.
And what I want for you is a spectacular career!
For more career help visit my web site
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