Yesterday, I was invited to participate in a Six-Figure Hotline event with Dave Opton, ExecuNet founder and author of Six-Figure Learnings.
During this lively, 1-hour chat with 40 ExecuNet members, a plethora of career management related questions percolated.
Our overall goal, help ease the members’ job search process through clarifying best practices as well as helping alleviate the fear, frustration and feeling of being stuck, overwhelmed, confused and alone by the unfamiliar process of executive job search.
My role, primarily, was helping field resume strategy-related questions or concerns. Though page length was touched upon, happily, the resume discussions did not get bogged down in the tactical concerns of page length, font style, listing years versus months/years and so forth.
Mostly, the ‘Hotline’ conversation centered on the more relevant and strategic aspects of a high-performing resume: how to best target and present one’s unique value benefits to a specific audience and type of company and how to resonate with their needs. As Dave so aptly said (paraphrasing here), job seekers need to be “the aspirin for a company’s headache.”
This type of solutions- and forward-focused resume is critical cutting edge career positioning. Unfortunately, careerists often get distracted by the end result of their search goals, treating the resume process as a career transition band-aid instead of an introspective process that must painstakingly involve research, research and then more research. Akin to consumer marketing initiatives such as pitching a perfume or the latest computer or Smartphone technology, career resume strategy involves deep customer research to understand THEIR needs before shaping your message.
It also requires a very large investment in career brain dump, followed by selecting those needle in the haystack career stories that map to your target audience’s needs (how you, similarly, will create such outstanding solutions stories for their company). A resume, therefore, is not about your past, but about your FUTURE.
After ferreting out which stories to apply in your career positioning documents, the foundation of which is your resume, you must shine these stories to a brilliant sheen, and enhance them with gem-like sub-plots that describe the ‘story behind the story.’ These nuances differentiate you from the pack. Instead of a set of lean, metric-only-focused bulleted achievements, you now have meaty, story-rich sales messages that influence emotion and buy-in.
Though I agree, in part, with a recent Wall Street Journal article that asserts that in the era of social media, “A Resume Is Not Enough,” I would enhance this message by asserting that a resume is the foundation, and the online marketing initiatives comprise the fortress that houses all or components of the career resume. In other words, social media is an extension of your thoughtful, highly targeted and meaty story-board resume. This story-board, then, fuels the LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, ZoomInfo, Google, Fast Company or other profiles.
So, before you go splashing your career profile all over these social networking venues, before you start plugging into the 24/7 Internet highway and engaging in career conversations via LinkedIn professional groups or Twitter streams, shine your resume “in the rough” into a brilliant illumination of your future.
Jacqui,
Many thanks for taking the time to share your experience with those on the call.
I know our members appreciated it as did I.
Having someone who is dealing with these things on a day to day basis is, among other things, very reassuring to people who are anxious to get answers on issues with which they have not had to deal for many years.
Dave,
I appreciated being invited!
You’re so right about the value of career support to people in job search mode. It can be an intimidating and circuitous maze to navigate, otherwise.
Thanks for commenting!
~Jacqui
Nice job, honey. I liked that part about “aspirin for a company’s headache.” So true.
Thanks babe! I loved that ‘line,’ too – Dave’s words really resonate!
Jac
Jacqui –
The timing of this post is uncanny. I had a caller just this past week a bit indignant that I needed to spend time with her to uncover those rich, accomplishment-driven success stories before I could craft a compelling career document. Her words, “Oh. I thought I could just drop my stuff off and come back and pick it up later …”
The digging, the poking, the prodding, the cajoling and the telling of career wonderfulness during the initial information gathering process not only provides the foundation, as you said, for all other social media platforms and career presentations. It’s tremendous interview practice.
Time and time again clients tell me the finished product (the resume) bolstered their confidence, but what really helped was my guidance as we peeled back the layers of their contributions and uncovered those differentiating stories.
Gone are the days of flopping job duties down on a sheet of paper and hoping a potential employer will extrapolate excellence from those duties. The payoff in the initial heavy lifting and introspection comes in being able to articulate greatness during the interview, convey the ability to be the company’s “aspirin” and finally in figuring out which job offer to accept because of the time invested in shining.
Excellent, excellent information. (But I ALWAYS find that here!)
PS — I wasn’t able to convince that caller it was necessary to spend some time polishing her presentation. Sadly, I’m willing to bet she spent more time loading contacts into her cell phone than she was willing to invest in preparing for her job search (her future, her life.)
Dawn,
“The digging, the poking, the prodding, the cajoling” (I love and use the words, too!). Yes, there’s a bit of brain stretching and achy intellectual muscles that occur during the resume introspection process, but the return on roll-up-the-sleeves investment is tenfold! Conversations (aka, interviews) ARE generated.
I really like the “gone are the days of flopping job duties on a piece of paper and hoping a potential employer will extrapolate excellence …” Spot on!
Thanks so much for your pithy comment, Dawn!
Jacqui
Hi Jacqui, Dawn and I have had this conversation before. She tends to be my go-to person when some clients seem to see us as magicians. We can be. But not without “ferreting out which stories to apply in your career positioning documents, the foundation of which is your resume, you must shine these stories to a brilliant sheen, and enhance them with gem-like sub-plots that describe the ‘story behind the story.’
Finding the stories is critical! Then we can be magicians!
Julie,
Yes, yes to “finding the stories” – and I know, from conversing with you over these past months, you take the initiative to unearth those story nuggets of gold from your clients.
Always great to receive your comments!
Jacqui