Resume Personal Branding Best Practices Part 1 - Crystal Clear - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Resume Personal Branding Best Practices Part 1 - Crystal Clear - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Your resume makes an immediate first impression on your audience. If your resume gets past automated pre-screening, your human audience reacts to your personal brand in two immediate ways. In the first 6 seconds of a visual review, your reader decides if youre qualified or not based on gut feel (based on TheLadders recent heat mapping study). How could they have time for anything else in 6 seconds? Next, in the first 15 seconds, your audience decides if youll get an interview or not by a quick scan of whats on your readers screen. Because both decisions are made so quickly, they arent made on fact. These decisions are completely based on your readers perception, developed in less time than youve spent reading this short paragraph. So managing your resumes personal brand is critical to passing both hurdles. Unfortunately, our backgrounds, traditions, rules of thumb and intuitions about writing a resume were developed around paper resumes, not resumes read on screen (yes, even today, for you recent grads). This is why most candidates have a rough time communicating a personal brand. In the past, your personal brand was the entire first page of your resume and thats still pretty much whats taught today. However, in todays job market, recruiters, HR reps and hiring managers review resumes on screen, limiting the portion of your resume thats seen in 15 seconds. Most candidates try to communicate their personal brand in a way that ends up being clear as mud. Its not intentional, but its difficult to brand yourself in 6 or even 15 seconds, when youve been taught that youve got the whole first page to do it? The result most candidates use is to write summary sections, core skills tables, selected accomplishments that take up much of the first page. Most candidates try to stuff so much into their personal brand, trying to be all things to all people. This creates an extremely confusing personal brand, often resulting in the appearance of a jack-of-all-trades/master of none with shallow knowledge in many different areas, but deep knowledge in none. Why would an employer hire you for many shallow areas of thin knowledge thats what Google is for and its free. This type of confusion often makes it difficult for your audience to tell which job youre applying for. How can they judge that youll be a superior candidate when they cant see which job you want? Whats a better way to have your resume brand you? Be crystal clear. One good way to get past the 6 second and 15 second pre-screen is to make an easy decision for your reader. By making it easier for them to see youre qualified and superior you increase the odds that youll win the interview. What Job? First, youll want your audience to clearly see which job youre applying for. For example, listing a resume title (or objective) of Manufacturing Executive is so broad that no one can tell what job youre applying for or what level you think is a fit. Instead, list the actual title of the specific job from the specific company that youre applying for. Why make your readers guess? What makes you superior? you need to explain exactly why youre a superior candidate. Most candidates bury the reason they are a superior candidate for a specific job in the middle of many other skills, because they dont know whats truly important to the hiring manager. If you dont know whats important to a specific hiring manager before you send a resume, you guess (odds are youre guessing wrong) or you scattershot (trying to hit the hiring managers needs somewhere within 50 or more key skills). Even if youve included the hiring managers needs within this list, how do you think it will be found in a 15 second scan? Hiring managers priorities: If you first understand the hiring managers top 1 or 2 problems and priorities, you can brand yourself as having already solved similar problems a very clear way to brand yourself as a superior candidate. So if a hiring manager is trying to cut costs, you might brand yourself as being an expert in cost cutting (if youre in purchasing or finance) or process improvement (if youre in manufacturing or IT). Go take a cold, hard look at your own resume. Is your resume like most of the others out there? Is it a deluge of information, hoping the reader picks up whats important in a quick scan? Are you branding yourself through a mass of information, using a shotgun approach, assuming the reader will make interview decisions by reading every word of an entire page in detail? Are you guessing whats important to your reader? Or is your personal brand crystal clear to your reader? Can they see (in an instant) the exact job youre applying for, that youre a superior candidate and that you can help the hiring manager with his/her priorities? Author: Phil Rosenberg  is President of  http://www.reCareered.com, a leading job search information website and gives complimentary job search webinars at  http://ResumeWebinar.com. Phil also runs the Career Central group, one of Linkedin’s largest groups for job seekers and has built one of the 20 largest personal networks on Linkedin globally.