Tips For Branding Your Resume
Q. How are resumes different now than in the past? If you had one piece of advice to bring my resume up to current standards, what would it be?A. There are actually many differences because styles and trends for resumes are changing all the time. However, I would say that the most fundamental difference has come about with the increasing importance of personal branding. While it is much more complex than this, at its essence, personal branding is about the authentic and unique promise of value you offer. In relation to your career, it is about the promise of value you offer that differentiates you from your peers and competitors in the workplace and job market.
On your resume, this personal brand needs to be communicated in a way that will differentiate you from the vast pool of candidates. This demand–this need to communicate on your resume exactly what it is that distinguishes you and sets you apart from the competition in the job market–has really transformed what used to be viewed as a simple chronological listing of employment into a dynamic and compelling self-marketing document. And, of course, it isn’t enough to just tell the reader of your resume that you have certain abilities.
You must illustrate these abilities and your value proposition through past accomplishments presented as concise “success studies” complete with challenge faced, action taken, immediate result, and strategic importance. To see examples of branded resumes, look at the many documents in our project portfolio.
Resume Help: How-To Write a Resume That Gets Results, Part 1
As an expert in the employment services field, every day I speak to job seekers who are frustrated with the results of their job search and are seeking professional resume help. Virtually all of these job seekers have written a resume themselves and have been using it in the job market. But when their phone doesn’t ring and they get passed over for what they believed were the perfect jobs for them, they begin to worry that their presentation is at fault. By the time these job seekers contact us, they know they need resume help, but they are often skeptical about whether or not a rewrite would truly make that much of a difference in their job search results.
While your resume is a tool, and like any tool it must be used in effective ways to produce the results you are looking for, the truth is that a powerful, branded, accomplishment-focused resume will almost always produce a remarkably positive difference in your job search. Your resume isn’t just a piece of paper. It is an essential marketing document that has the power to propel your career forward (if well-written and compelling) or bring it to a standstill (if it is poorly written and boring).
If you were launching a new product with multimillion-dollar potential, would you “wing it” with questionable marketing materials? Sadly, that is what many people do with their own careers, needlessly struggling through long, costly, stressful job searches. Then, when they do finally land jobs, they are often below their true potential, all because they didn’t market themselves effectively.
This isn’t just marketing hype, either. This is reality! We’ve talked to countless prospective clients who have wasted ridiculous amounts of time and money using less-than-effective resumes in the job market. On the other hand, we hear almost daily from past clients with stories about how the new, highly professional and standout resume we wrote for them propelled their job searches to success, helping them to land the jobs that they most desired.
In this new series of “Resume Help” blog posts, we’ll help you to understand how to transform your own less-than-effective resume into a highly competitive marketing piece that will get you noticed and win you interviews. Using before and after examples, we’ll break down exactly what makes a resume compelling and effective and illustrate to you exactly how an investment in professional resume help could produce extraordinary returns for you.
In this first before resume example that our client wrote himself, you’ll notice a few good components. When this client came to us for resume help, we explained that while he was on the right track with this resume, including what appeared to be a fairly well focused summary/profile section and an employment section that included accomplishments, there were still many opportunities for improvement. Consulting with him, we realized that his resume wasn’t as well-focused as we originally thought, and employers may be passing him over because they didn’t realize he was actually the perfect candidate for the executive positions he was pursuing. More crucially, this executive candidate had produced significant value and results in his past positions, and these contributions were only being superficially mentioned in his resume. His value proposition simply was NOT being conveyed.
