Jane Harding, a top medical pharmaceutical sales representative, says that investing more in her personal brand could have gotten her hired faster. Here’s her story…

She interacted daily with regional medical health centers, gave educational presentations and felt strongly that her portfolio of drugs helped patients recover more quickly from surgery. She made $100K+. One drug she represented was recalled and lawsuits piled up. The company she worked for abruptly laid off even top performers like Jane. After a successful career, Jane now found herself unemployed. Weeks turned into months during her job search. It began to take a toll on her financially and emotionally. The job search dragged on. A topsy-turvy pharmaceutical market caused competitor companies to brace for uncertainty in the industry and thus slowed their hiring during this time. The future for Jane looked bleak.Previously, when she was at the height of her career, she found that her passionate involvement in volunteerism waned. She was too busy to support events for organizations that meant a great deal to her like the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Autism Speaks, and the United Way. Her commitment to children and adults through volunteerism, however, never waned in the slightest. “In my mind I was really committed to my company and my passions,” Ms. Harding expressed. “But that’s the problem – it was in my mind. I really feel that had I made more of my natural abilities in reaching out at a time when I was comfortable, I may have had an easier road in my new job search.” 

Although Jane Harding’s career path may differ from yours, her dilemma probably does not. She became so focused on work that she ignored an important part of her life. She neglected the volunteerism that gave her great personal satisfaction. When you have a great job most people focus on that work. Most of your time and creative energy tend to be invested where you will get the most monetary return. Accolades and awards may result –and they did for Jane. But, like Jane, you may have lost the focus of your personal brand.

What is your personal brand and why is it important to your career?

Simply put, personal branding can be defined as the initial and authentic lasting impression you want to give people.

True career entrepreneurs understand that personal brands should be built during times of career comfort. Pushing yourself to build your personal brand when your career is soaring can be inconvenient. But, success is often built on inconvenience. “I recommend inconveniencing yourself,” says Jane Harding. “That would have made my job search much easier. I could have made this voltage happen earlier, though I finally did.”

Whether you are job searching or you are at the, height of your career, it’s now time to develop your personal brand. We will go over the five steps that you may consider in developing your brand. First ask yourself, what matters to you volunteer wise and what do you support that could help you revitalize your career path?

Read the Five Steps.

Associations Work, So Work Them. Immediately after noticing her lack of participation in groups supporting her volunteering efforts, she jumped back into those groups and took on leadership roles. “My network probably increased directly by 200 professionals overnight,” says Ms. Harding. “I put the causes and organizations first in my efforts, but also utilized this time to professionally let people know what I was looking for inside and outside of healthcare.”

Use Your Expertise to Contribute. “With some coaching,” says Ms. Harding, “I developed and delivered three speeches, filmed them and posted them on YouTube and to my online web portfolio. I started my own blog and wrote book reviews on Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. Additionally, I authored four articles and published them in a volunteer magazine, on an online blog and in a regional sales magazine. It’s really stuff I could have and should have done while I was working; I learned that looking for a job is about branding yourself, not just pumping resumes out. The funny thing was that by doing this I got more responses from TheLadders and other postings too!” Join groups like Toastmasters and industry-related associations. Network and find ways to contribute productively first then ask for advice. Build relationships first and focus on what you can do for others. Then find subtle ways to introduce your needs. 

Stop Making Excuses about Building Your Brand. Ms. Harding states, “On the surface I was successful and busy, but when I visited some young cancer patients during my job search I realized how lazy I was. I always had time, no matter how busy I was, to give back. I will never make excuses like that again.” For example, Ms. Harding hated writing, but she did it anyway because publishing helped her personal brand. She always seemed to be too busy to do the fundraiser, put in an hour at the hospital for volunteer stuff or to capture and edit video during her educational and other appearances. “So many opportunities are available to you to build your personal brand while you are deeply focused on your work. Even my former boss asked me why I hadn’t thought of it while I worked with him.” Ms. Harding also states, “I did things during my job search to take my own excuses away and it worked.”

Define Personal Branding for You. “What I found out is that personal branding is not a phony line made up by an advertising person,” says Ms. Harding. “For me it was about reinventing myself to be more like myself, if that makes sense. I decided to start by committing to things that mattered most to me – kids, volunteer activities, causes – and this inspired me to push myself way out of my comfort zone. I developed new, strong and enduring relationships. I became more like myself.” This advice can work for you. It simply does not matter if you find yourself in a high-flying sales position or in a low-profile operations position; you need to light a fire under your career and the core values of your personal brand. In today’s world of intense competition for the best jobs, becoming and staying proactive in developing your personal brand alongside your career is a must. Don’t wait until a layoff like Jane Harding. Staying proactive about your personal brand while employed is mandatory. Lightning can hit any global or highly-exposed industry at any time. For Jane Harding, the skies didn’t seem to be gray. It may take a forward-thinking friend or career coach to push you to work on your personal brand when you’re comfortable. So, what should you do now? Stay proactive about personal branding and it will drive current and future career opportunities. 

Here is an example of a good plan…

• Get a calendar and journal, and start to document your daily activity. If you don’t track your activity, there is no way for you to make a good decision if you need to change something.
• Make contact with AT LEAST 5 new people a day that have influence on the hiring process. Not through a job ad, but on the phone or in person. This can be done by using services like Jigsaw, Linkedin, Zoominfo, and ResumeSpider. Each has a unique system for building a network.
• Setup job alerts on SimplyHired, Indeed, and Jobster. These services aggregate jobs from multiple boards, which saves you time from scouring hundreds of job boards.
• Go to at least one networking event a week AND meet people. You can find a listing of networking events in your local paper.
• Read one book a week that has a positive influence on your attitude.
• Subscribe to blogs and newsletters that are in your targeted industry or discipline. This is another way to stay connected and know what is going on in your field.

Are you doing these tasks? If not, get out of your rut and start a plan today.

All these activities take work and time, and WILL yield results.

Don’t expect to get lucky like this guy…

• Text resumes have a higher chance of passing through a spam filter when embedded into an email and not used as an attachment.
• Many employers use automated software to receive and parse resumes into their database.  Text resumes are easily converted and no important keywords in your resume are lost.
• Job board databases are sold to employers so they can search resumes.  A text resume has a higher chance of being found because the data is cleaner versus a Word or PDF document that needs to be electronically translated into searchable data by the job board’s software.

If you simply try to copy & paste the information from a Word document into the text field of a job application, your resume format and spacing will drastically change.  In addition, special formatting symbols, like bullets, will be replaced with unrecognizable symbols.

Here is an easy procedure you can use to create a formatted ASCII text resume from a Microsoft Word resume.

1. Open your resume in MS Word
2. Click on ‘File’ and select ‘Save As’
3. In the ‘Save As’ window, change file type to ‘Plain Text’, and then click the Save button
4. After the File Conversion window appears, change the text encoding to ‘Other encoding’ and ‘US-ASCII’, check-off ‘Allow character substitution’, and then click the OK button

This produces an ASCII text document with proper formatting that you can email or copy & paste into any text field.

In today’s market, why would an employer want to pay recruiter fees with the supply of skilled people being so high?

Here was our answer…

Employers may be experts in their niche, but many are not experts at recruiting or finding great employees. Unemployment nationwide is around 5.5%, so it is still difficult for employers to find great employees.

Recruiting requires dedicated people, software, processes, unique tools, and constant training. Most employers are not sophisticated or forward thinking when it comes to recruiting. Therefore, they hire outside or third party recruiters.

While you are searching for great employers, find out if they use outside recruiters or have a dedicated recruiting staff as outlined above. If they do, I would consider them a progressive employer that is strategic thinking and prepared to compete. Otherwise, they will have limited capabilities to recruit and screen-out under-performers. This is important because you will not want to work for an employer with bad leadership and under-performing peers. The result for you will be looking for another job in a year or two.

Read it again. Understanding an employers recruiting methods should be used as a screening mechanism for you to find great employers. It is very important for you to know that you will be working with great people.

Here are more reasons employers use recruiters in ANY economy.

• Employers lack the dedicated resources to have an ongoing recruiting campaign (candidate pipeline), whether they are hiring or not.

• Recruiters provide unbiased third-party input.

• Some employers want confidentiality because they are replacing an employee.

• Most of the time recruiters can find great candidates faster because they are tapped into the marketplace.

• Recruiters may consult with an employer to help them fine-tune a job opening.

• Many employers like a recruiter to help with negotiating compensation.

• The investment may seem costly for an employer, but it is even more costly for an employer to settle for average performers.

Is you resume in the hands of hundreds of recruiters? Read this blog post on why you NEED to get your resume in front of as many recruiters as possible: http://www.resumespiderblog.com/2008/07/09/i-dont-want-to-use-recruiters-in-my-job-search/

My question to you, the job seeker, is why?

It is like you are telling me, “I want to get to the finish line first, as long as I don’t have to run!”

I am not a recruiter, so here is my unbiased response towards this statement…

Get people to work for you for free. Duplicate your time and effort by using MANY recruiters that specialize in your discipline and have connections to decision makers. Furthermore, if you get your resume into the hands of enough recruiters, you will find the ones that have opportunities right now.

Here are more reasons not to eliminate recruiters from your job search…

• Many employers only work with recruiters, which means you will never get access to those jobs unless a recruiter has your resume.
• Executive Search/Recruiting Firms maintain the largest network of un-advertised jobs. This is an obvious reason to get connected to this network and work it aggressively.
• Recruiters are hired by the employer to find the best person for the job and are rewarded financially when this happens. As a result, recruiters are always interviewing great candidates. A common misconception for many job seekers is they believe that recruiters work for them. Knowing this, you need to get yourself in front of hundreds of recruiting professionals. Take advantage of ResumeSpider’s economy-of-scale to make the numbers game work for in your favor. We have thousands of active Executive Search/Recruiting Firms in our network waiting for your resume.
• Recruiting is done nationally, so do not limit yourself to the recruiters in your area. Jobs in your town are constantly filled by recruiters from other cities. But do not worry. Our technology will connect you to any recruiter that has jobs in your area.
• If you have special skills in high demand or have a remarkable work history, some recruiters will proactively market you to potential employers. Remember, recruiters are only paid if a successful hire is made. ResumeSpider’s targeted distribution allows you to get your credentials to the right group of recruiters.
• If you are employed and confidentiality is a concern, recruiters will discretely provide access to opportunities.

I hope this makes sense!

Working with recruiters often feels like a guessing game. It is nerve-wracking for job seekers to learn the process as they go. They wonder how to make time to scout, screen and interview recruiters during the workday. Perhaps you can relate. Sometimes it seems like your search is at a stand still - even with so many moving pieces. Maybe you have other roadblocks that freeze your progress - trying to sell yourself, remembering ‘everything’ you have ever done in your career, explaining a bad situation and why you left, or writing a simple thank you note that hits the right points.

Well, it is time to take a deep breath. While we cannot change the time required for an effective job search, there are some tips for working with recruiters to get the most out of your time. This article will provide some insights from recruiters points of view. How they look at the whole process, what they really think when you ask for a 7 a.m. interview and what you can do to make your partnership successful.

Taking the Screening Call

When actively searching, the first rule of thumb is to avoid answering your cell phone unless you are in the perfect position to talk. As many job seekers have figured out, answering your phone while walking past your manager’s desk does not work well. You end up sounding disorganized and unprepared to the recruiter - and your manager.

Take advantage of caller ID and let calls from unknown people go to voice mail. Only return calls to recruiters when you are in a position to speak freely. Lynn Diegel, Executive Vice President of a market research firm and former hiring manager, says, “Don’t go to Starbucks. That constantly running blender in the background is a distraction.” She suggests calling from your car (your parked car!) or finding another quiet place to return her call. And, don’t worry about calling back within five minutes - simply getting back to the recruiter by the end of the next business day is perfectly acceptable.

Scheduling the Interview

Every recruiter interviewed for this story gave the same piece of advice: give the recruiter blocks of time when you will be available to interview. John Ferrel, a recruiter at The Heiden Group, advises “My job is to drive the interview process. The candidate needs to give me windows of time that work for them to schedule these meetings. When someone can offer consistent blocks of available time from week to week, it makes my job easier.” And those early morning hours? No problem - recruiters agree that whenever possible they will work with your availability, whether it be 7 a.m. or 6 p.m.

What if you have a lot of freedom and can interview anytime? “Don’t be too available - it doesn’t give me any structure in trying to set up an interview,” says Ferrel. “Stick to offering blocks.”

Travel a lot? Not to worry. “I’ll wait for someone to return from a business trip without an issue, especially if their resume is interesting,” says Bernie Siegel, a former recruiter and current President of the International Coach Federation of New York City. Lynn Diegel agrees wholeheartedly, but on the flip-side advises that candidates should not claim to be in €˜all-day meetings’ constantly. She wants the potential employee to be low-maintenance. Scheduling multiple managers and candidates is already difficult enough without having to battle the unavailable job seeker.

Whatever your entry point, you need to be realistic and respectful of employers’ and recruiters’ time. Knowing the demand level for your particular skill set and expertise can also help you. Professionals in mid-level positions with widely-available skills can expect less flexibility, but those coming from senior-level positions and specialty fields may experience a bit more freedom. Based on that, you can gauge employers’ potential flexibility and willingness to accommodate your needs in the interview process.

Selling Yourself

Just because a recruiter has contacted you does not mean you should stop marketing yourself. “Help me sell you to the employer; help me build a best-case scenario for your candidacy,” requests Ferrel. “Articulate why the position is a good fit for you. Pull out a story about your sales experience, your best engineering qualifications, or the projects you have managed.”

Tony Shea of The Heiden Group advises, “Sales candidates should be able to discuss their statistical achievements. Performance, quotas, numbers, commissions.” In general, candidates need to be ready and willing to discuss their resumes in a succinct, concise manner.

Putting together several pertinent S.T.A.R. stories will help you communicate your accomplishments and selling points to a recruiter. S.T.A.R. is a story-telling strategy which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. The strategy helps you stay on track when describing an accomplishment and drives you from the beginning to end of a story. For example: “[Situation] At XYZ Company we had a line of widgets to market in a new territory. [Task] These same widgets were very well received in other territories, so our job was to educate buyers in the market and show the value of placing these widgets on their store shelves. [Action] I went store-to-store with samples of the widgets and requested meetings with the store buyers. Since my product was easy to demonstrate, I was often able to meet with the buyer right away. [Result] Results were impressive. Buyers liked the product and would place orders immediately. Ultimately, I achieved 85% integration into the market and reached $650,000 in sales in just three months.”

Take time to re-familiarize yourself with your career. Put together S.T.A.R. stories for each position and be able to talk about your value and your takeaways from each job over the years. If you have maintained a strong network, you can reach out to your former co-workers and managers to discuss past projects and company successes.

Discussing Personal Roadblocks

Some candidates feel very open when working with recruiting firms - as if they can divulge things to the recruiter that they would not in an employer-candidate interview scenario. There is some flexibility and openness in the recruiter-candidate relationship, but do not assume you can discuss anything.

Shea and Ferrel have been told about candidates’ divorce struggles, potential cross-country moves, and other deeply personal issues. “It’s an interview process, not a personal declaration. Keep the information you present pertinent to the job - focus on the job skills.” Shea says. However, divulging something personal that affects a job requirement is essential. For example, if driving is a requirement of a position (like outside sales in a suburban market) and you do not have a drivers’ license, you need to tell the recruiter upfront. This said, you do not have to go into the reasons behind that fact.

Sending Thank You Notes and Email Etiquette

“Yes, thank you notes are required,” expresses Diegel. “Simply make a few connections between your experience and my needs. And, don’t assume I’ll remember you - a quick reminder of when you interviewed and something we discussed is great to jog my memory.”

Thank you notes should be sent within 24 hours of the interview. Remember to collect business cards from each person you meet so you can send individual notes to everyone. Your note does not have to be long - just acknowledge your appreciation of their time and point out a skill, talent, or experience that makes you the ideal candidate for the position. While recruiters and employers will always have their personal preferences, both email and regular mail are widely accepted for thank you notes.

One thing that does not waiver from the employer’s point of view is your professional presentation, especially with email. Follow appropriate grammar rules and do not get creative with spelling or punctuation. It is not a text message - make a good impression in every note you send throughout the job search process. And, always include your phone number with your full name on your signature line.

Following each of the above tips can help you in the interview process. Recruiters and employers actually want you to be right candidate for a job - it means they can stop their search - but you need to do your part to get in front of them and market yourself. Good luck!

**This was written by Kimberly Schneiderman of City Career Services.  Read more of her job search tips at www.citycareerservices.com.

• You hire the mortuary to help with the death of a family member
• You hire a real estate agent, movers and sometimes a home builder to get that house
• You have a doctor (or sometimes a mid-wife) to birth your child
• BUT … you find a job all by yourself, using two free resources (applying to job ads and uploading your resume to online databases) 

One of the biggest events in your life and you invest no money and hire no resources to help with your job search!  What’s the matter with you???

There are many premium services available for job seekers, but to keep this series in context here are many reasons to hire a professional resume writer. A resume writer will…

• Know how to take your experience and create content that is appealing to today’s hiring managers
• Use keywords, phrases and formats that will allow the automated screening technology to score your resume very high
• Build multiple formats (Word, PDF, ASCII, etc.) of your resume for different application systems
• Make your resume Internet ready so it can easily be found in the resume databases
• Use proper grammar and make sure everything is spelled correctly
• Allow you to choose from many design samples
• Use their experience from writing hundreds of resumes of professionals in similar job functions and understand what works (and doesn’t work too).
• Probably have some kind of guarantee to rewrite your resume
• Save you hours of time from making mistakes and the need to research writing tips

If you think you can still do it better than a professional than maybe you should start writing resumes as a new profession. It’s a growing segment of the career industry and a great way to help people. Otherwise, take action today. The longer you procrastinate, the less chance you have to make the right decision and a positive impact on your job search.

Happy job hunting!

Part 1 & Part 2 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer

Manual Screening process and the challenges for you: 

The manual screening process requires somebody to look at a resume. The resume is either received from a job advertisement or found by searching a job board database. Regardless this is a difficult task and usually requires hours of reading through resumes. If a resume doesn’t stand-out with good career progression, keywords, and accomplishments, it will be looked over or rejected by the screener.

It’s important to understand job ads may result in hundreds of applications from candidates. The screener will find the first 5 to 10 candidates to interview without even going through all the resumes. You can’t fault them since most HR departments are understaffed, poorly trained, and overworked. They are constantly tasked with trying to fill multiple positions with few resources and hiring managers that will not take risks decent candidates.

Job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder have hundreds of thousands (100,000+) of resumes posted on their sites everyday. You cannot effectively compete with those numbers or even have much of a chance of being found. Furthermore, these resume databases are very costly and do not guarrantee a candidate. Therefore, most companies do not have access and will never see your resume anyway. The small percent of companies that purchase database access may not find your resume if you are not using appropriate keywords and phrases.

Wow! What are you going to do? Keep reading…

Automated Screening process and the challenges for you: 

Human Resource departments and large recruiting firms are using software that seamlessly automates the recruiting process - job posting to pre-screening. This means when you apply to a job, the software receives, scans, and rates your resume in a matter of seconds. It may even tell you that you are not qualified and automatically remove you from the process. All this is done without any human interaction. To even further your frustration with this process, you may even have to register with each company you apply. 

Oh well, get used to it. That’s where the job search process is going.

In part 3 I will discuss how a professional resume writer will make your resume stand-out in the manual screening process and receive a passing grade with the automated screening technology.

Part 1 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer.

Don’t answer that question yet.  Read on…

Resume Spider has a large community of companies that have joined our network to be part of our resume distribution service. A recent poll, which we ran for two months, asked “What are the top three reasons a job seeker doesn’t get an interview or is screened out of the process?”  The responses were…

1. Misspellings and bad grammar in the resume.
2. The resume has little or no career progression.
3. They wrote their position description in their resume rather than accomplishments.

No mention of lacking certain skills or wrong background. The top three were about the resume - the first impression. How could this happen with spell checkers and lots of free information on how to write a resume? Obviously there is TOO MUCH information on the Internet, it is difficult to organize and few people have the expertise to use it. 

The Internet can be a great tool for finding employment, IF you use other tools that help you along the way. 

This 3 part series will cover the methods used by Employers and Recruiting Firms for screening resumes, and why you (the job seeker) should re-think your approach in creating your own resume.

Part 2 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer