Motivated Resumes & Linked In Profiles: Insight, Advice, and Resume Samples Provided by Some of the Most Credentialed, Experienced, and Award-Winning Resume Writers in the Industry

By Brian E. Howard

Resumes are the cornerstone to any successful job search, and this resource gives you unprecedented insight and advice from more than a dozen of the most experienced and award-winning resume and LinkedIn profile writers in the industry.

Get inside the minds of these writers to learn how to create impactful materials that get you interviews and job offers. Learn how they think about keywords, titling, branding, accomplishments, format, color, design, and a host of other resume writing and LinkedIn profile considerations.

Become an "insider" and learn the secrets from some of the very best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WriteLife Publishing
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608081844

Book preview

Part I

Some Things to Know about Your Job Search

There isn’t a ruler, a yard stick or a measuring tape in the entire world long enough to compute the strength and capabilities inside you.

— Paul Meyer¹

As you begin to think about your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, and other job-search marketing materials, it is important to have a solid grasp of some fundamental elements of your job search and how they will affect the writing and creation of these important materials. This part of the book will help you understand and leverage the power of branding, understanding the employer’s mindset, transferable skills, and professional qualities. Understanding these concepts and weaving them into your resume, a LinkedIn profile, and your other job-search marketing materials will increase their persuasiveness and lead to more interviews and job offers. Let’s start with branding.

Branding

Always remember: a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world; a corner of someone’s mind.

— John Hegarty²

For a job search, your brand is a statement of who you are as a professional. It identifies you and works to differentiate you from other job seekers. It is imperative that you craft a professional brand for use on your resume and LinkedIn profile. A professional brand announces your distinct talents and what you represent to the marketplace. In essence, what do you want to be known for or found for (especially on LinkedIn)?

The process of branding is discovering who you are, what you are, what your unique abilities are, and communicating them through your resume, LinkedIn profile, and other job search marketing materials.

There are numerous benefits of creating an impactful brand, including:

1. You will differentiate yourself from other job seekers, and gain a huge advantage.

2. You create the initial impression the employer has of you.

3. You can convey your value to the employer more quickly.

4. You can match your skills and value proposition to the employer’s needs more easily.

5. You can better determine which opportunities to pursue.³

The drawback of not having a professional brand is simple: You become a commodity. There is no perceived differentiation from other job seekers. You cannot command a premium and you have reduced leverage when it comes to compensation. Perhaps worse, employers will determine for themselves what they want to see in you. They will cast you in a light based on their own conclusions, which may not be the message you want to communicate.⁴ This situation can be hazardous during a job search. Having a succinct brand immediately directs the hiring executive’s thinking toward what you can do for them.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of creating a professional brand is the self-awareness of your unique skills and experience, and recognition of how they work together to create an impact. You will project the value of your abilities more clearly, resulting in a job that’s a good match for your skill set. Branding can also help you set your sights on what you want your future career to be.

Additionally, when your networking contacts know your brand, they are much more likely to advance it for you through referrals, recommendations, and so on. When the right opportunities come along, you become top of mind (because of your brand).

The professional branding process requires introspection and thoughtful reflection. In some cases, thinking through your branding can be both an emotional and a professionally enlightening event.

Think of it this way: Your goal is to connect with employers both intellectually (you can do the job) and emotionally (you’re a good fit). Having a well-crafted, professional brand helps on both levels. You must be perceived as the right candidate; and through branding, you are better able to align yourself to an open job position.

Keep in mind that the effectiveness of your brand is determined by the connection that exists between what the brand claims and what it can actually deliver. In other words, you must be able to prove and quantify your professional brand (through experience and accomplishments). Failing to do so will have disastrous results. Don’t oversell your brand and capabilities.

Create a succinct brand. Think of it, in analogous terms, as a tagline or a theme that will be the foundation of your job search.

To help determine your brand, ask yourself some questions:

1. What am I good at or an expert in?

2. What have I been recognized for?

3. What is my reputation with others (subordinates, peers, senior management)?

4. What have been my strong points in past job reviews, including notable and consistent comments (if applicable)?

5. What differentiates me from others with the same job?

6. What professional qualities do I have that make me good at my job?

7. What are the professional achievements I am most proud of?⁵

The answers to these questions and the thoughts they provoke are essential to forming your brand. Now, synthesize the answers and thoughts into single words or short phrases that capture the concept of your responses. A convenient formula that seems to work for many job seekers is this:

[Job function or title] + [A bridge phrase, e.g., with experience in, or specializing in. Or, use of an action verb e.g., applying, focusing, etc.] + [reference to products, services, skills, industry, professional qualities, etc.]

For example:

Sales

Award-winning Sales Executive with Experience in Workers’ Compensation, Pain Management, Consistently Exceeding Sales Goals.

Operations Management

Operations executive dedicated to improving operational efficiency through effective leadership.

Account Management

Client-focused account manager focused on client satisfaction and retention.

ERISA

⁶ Lawyer

Experienced Attorney Protecting ERISA fiduciaries from the Department of Labor.

A branding statement could also be a few separate descriptive words or phrases:

Process Improvement • Lean Six Sigma⁷ • Turnaround Specialist

Marketing • Advertising • Public Relations

Your branding statement or branding keywords must appear with prominence on your resume, LinkedIn profile, and other job search marketing materials. It announces to the market what you want to be known for or found for.

What the Pros Say:

In your opinion, is it important to have a brand (either a branding statement or branding words) on a resume?

I think it’s essential to have a branding statement. To me, it’s your personal selling proposition. It is what will capture the attention of the hiring manager or recruiter in those six to ten seconds they read your resume. Every person is unique, and in order to stand out from others with similar qualifications, you must have your personal brand embedded in the document.

Michelle Robin, NCRW, CPRW

A strong, brief branding statement is crucial for an effective resume: it highlights the job seeker’s unique value proposition, and gives the reader an immediate understanding of who the candidate is and what he/she can accomplish.

Nelly Grinfeld, MBA, NCRW, CEIC

Understanding the Employer’s Mindset

There are a variety of motivations that prompt an employer in the commercial market to hire. However, the true essence underlying each motivation comes down to two reasons: to make or save the company money.⁸

Your career experience tells you that the sole reason a job exists in a company is to contribute to the profitability of the company.⁹ The level of your performance in your job must add value. Depending upon the job, you can help an employer’s bottom line by:

1. Making the company money (generating new revenue)—This can be achieved through sales, client retention, product development, and so on. You make money for the company by generating new revenue and keeping the revenue the company has.

2. Saving the company money (productivity improvements)—This is achieved by increasing productivity, increasing or creating operational efficiency, saving time, making others’ jobs easier (more efficient or effective), and so on.

Having these concepts in mind when you write a resume, create a LinkedIn profile, and a cover letter (all of your marketing materials) is very important. When your marketing materials speak to these motivations, you will be getting and holding the hiring executive’s attention.

There are many ways to generate revenue or save money for a company. Revealing them to an employer establishes or increases your value (ROI—Return on Investment) for hiring you. Here is a short list to get you thinking:

• Your duties and responsibilities from previous positions and how they translate to this position’s ROI.

• Implement an improvement that saves time, improves efficiency, and/or streamlines workflow.

• Improve company image and branding.

• Open new sales-distribution channels.

• Improve a current product, or develop a new one.

• Expand business/sales through existing accounts.

• Enhance competitiveness through best practices, innovation, and so on.

• Improve client retention.

• Improve company culture, morale, and/or employee retention.

Whatever value you bring to the table will be directly related to your professional brand, skillset, and value proposition. These must be apparent in all of your job search marketing materials.

What the Pros Say:

What do you have your client think about to give you information to formulate the brand?

Their history of impacts, the things they do differently than their peers, the things they have been applauded for or complimented on. Their influence on sales, profits, efficiency, productivity, and cost-cutting. Their unique experiences, credentials, and pedigree elements.

Cheryl Lynch Simpson, CMRW, ACRW, COPNS

Knowing What an Employer Wants in an Open Position

Since an employer’s purpose when hiring is to make or save money, how can you get inside an employer’s mind and determine what he or she is looking for in the position (or position types) you want? The answer is simple, but you’ll need to do a little research, as follows:

1. Gather Job Postings. Go online and collect some well-written job postings for a job you are qualified for and would enjoy. Websites such as http://www.indeed.com and http://www.simplyhired.com are rich resources.

2. Create Your Own Master Job Description. Call the document your Master Job Description (or anything else creative you want, i.e., My Dream Job). The purpose of your Master Job Description is to give you a road map inside the thinking of employers so you can better determine what they are looking for in filling a position (or position types).

a. Title. What words do employers use? These titles will likely reflect jobs you target when you search. The key is to use these same words—or very similar—on your resume, business cards, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, in your elevator speech, and so on.

b. Skills, Duties, and Responsibilities. Examine the job postings for skills, duties, and responsibilities that are common or frequently mentioned and note how often they are used.

c. Match. Tie these skills to your experience. The more you use the keywords from the skills and titles in your written and verbal communications (including your resume), the higher your chances are of getting noticed because you make yourself directly relevant to an open job position.¹⁰

Once it’s done, familiarize yourself with your Master Job Description. Think about it. What would you look for to fill this position if you were the hiring executive? Think both technical skills and transferable and soft skills (more on that in a moment). Congratulations—you are thinking like an employer!

With the understanding of how an employer thinks about an opening, relate or match how you have generated or saved money with former employers, while keeping your Master Job Description in mind. This is a crucial step, because you’ll be tying an executive’s hiring needs to your own experience and accomplishments. As you go along, refer to these insights you’ve discovered as you create your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, emails, and so on.

Matching Experience and Word Clouds

There is a very clever way to match your experience with what an employer is looking for in a position(s). Word clouds are images made out of large words interspersed with smaller ones (you may have seen them). Some websites that can create them include www.wordle.net, www.tagcrowd.com, and www.worditout.com. Here’s how you use this concept to your advantage:

Take the cursor on your computer and copy the job description electronically, go on one of these sites, and put the copied description into the space provided. Give it a second and Voila, you have a word cloud. Pay particular attention to the larger words. Those are the words that are mentioned most frequently or the programming has selected as more important. List those words and make sure they appear in your resume, LinkedIn profile, and other communications. For example, let’s say you see terms like customer experience, or client success in the word cloud. You read the full description and conclude that these terms mean account management (to you). Therefore, you need to change your terminology on your resume perhaps to match the language employers are using (at least for that employer).

This technique works especially well when you have an actual job description for a position you are pursuing so you can alter your resume to use the terminology of the employer.

Transferable Job Skills and Professional Qualities

Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

— St. Francis of Assisi¹¹

Transferable job skills come in two forms. First are the technical skills (expertise or ability) of your profession. If you are an engineer, you know engineering concepts. An accountant has skills related to accounting, and so on. These are your hard skills.

Hard skills can be transferable by convincing an employer that your skills can be easily repurposed and still be valuable to the employer. An oversimplified example is an accountant using math skills in a new role.

The second type of transferable job skills used in most professional level positions is soft skills. They are in addition to your technical expertise.

Here is a list of some sought-after, soft transferable job skills (not listed in any order of preference):

• Communication Skills