69. Before your resume: seven branding steps to get noticed

PATRICIA:
Hi friends, welcome back to The Uncommon Career. Today I'm going to share with you the seven principles behind branding strategy that are going to help you to be a career expert that is sought out as opposed to being a commodity where you click that apply button and you never hear back. So I'm going to go straight into this. I don't know how long or how short this episode is going to be, but it is going to be jam-packed start to finish. So let's get started. Let's say that you are applying for a position or you're thinking about a career change and the first thing that comes to mind is your resume. Here's what I would do if I were you. I would actually not even touch my resume. To begin with, I would think reflect and strategize about how to reposition myself as a career expert. So I want to move from being a commodity, meaning that when I tell people what I do, if I say I am a business analyst, immediately everyone who hears that is going to put me in the box with a thousand other business analysts and now I'm a commodity, which means I'm no different than anybody else. But if you reposition yourself from a generalist or a commodity, just someone that's defined by their function, to a specialist in your field, meaning someone who provides a very specific value, and who solves a very specific problem, now you're a career expert. And if you can identify the junction at which a company is going to need your services, that is even better. Think of that as a bonus that's going to differentiate you even more. So when you look at your resume and your LinkedIn profile, emphasize those specialized skills and that junction at which you are most valuable to a company. And that will help to bring out that career expert positioning that you need in order to be more sought after. Now, the second thing you can do is use your strategy as your edge. So you want to develop a really clear strategy that highlights your specific value proposition and your career goals. So your strategy is basically, what do I have that are my strengths? And if you think that there is a part of your career history that is not a strength, that it's a weakness or an area of development, that's OK. You sometimes want to lean into that. So depending on what that is, you can decide, OK, I don't have the Maybe it's data-heavy skills, but I do have the vision and the strategy. And so how can you leverage what you do have to mitigate in areas you maybe don't necessarily have? Or what organizations, at what point, in what projects, in what initiatives might your strengths be more important than your weaknesses? In which case, it won't matter that you don't have as much maybe data-heavy decision-making skills. So use your strategy as your edge. What you can do here is you can craft a personal brand statement that very briefly describes who you are and what you do and what you bring to the table. So your focus is on what you have, not on what you don't have. You have to stop saying, oh, I don't have experience in this, but. Instead, you have to say, I am the queen of XYZ. I am the go-to person for XYZ. What can you bring to the table? Focus on that and then make that a part of your statement in your summary. So that top part of your resume. If there's a very short, it should be very short. But in that very short summary, you can give a big picture overview of what you do, how many years of experience you have, some of your biggest or most cumulative accomplishments. And then of course, don't forget to mention that strategy, that part that is your competitive edge. Alright, number three. The third thing you want to do is lay your foundation with substance behind it. So what I mean by that is oftentimes we go to our resume and start changing words on our resume to try and you know, align with a career that we're interested or a job that we want to pick up. But before you pick up that resume, I would really encourage you to step back and spend some time reflecting on things like, what are your core values? What really fuels you? What drives you to do your best work? And while you're at it, you might want to ask yourself, what is my best work? What kind of work do I get lost in? What kind of work do people come to me for when they can't figure out a problem? You're the person we go to when we can't figure out how to change team dynamics because something's just not quite working. But when you join the conversation, things just shift, right? What are the compliments that you tend to get? What do people come to you for? More importantly than anything else, what types of duties or what environment or what kind of work setting tends to fuel you? What mission drives you? If you can figure out before you ever touch the resume, If you can figure out what drives you to your best work, that's going to give you energy not only to get a job that you really enjoy, but also to endure the process of career searching. Because I know it's tough right now, but it is going to help you to endure that process because you have a mission behind what you're doing. It's not simply a chore. It's not simply a let me apply over and over again. and get rejected and ghosted over and over and over again. It's instead a process of looking for that diamond in the rough, that perfect position that's going to continue to fuel your life. It is an investment of time and energy as you go through the job search that you are now going to land in a position that when you get there, you're going to think, It was well worth all the time and effort I took to sit down and figure out what was truly important to me and what drives me forward. Once you have that, then you can start going into your resume and making sure that the resume and the cover letter and your LinkedIn profile all reflect your values and your career aspirations. And a lot of times what I notice happens, and you might want to take a mental assessment to see if this is happening to you, but sometimes I see that when we start writing our resumes, we write our resumes to what we think people want to hear. as opposed to writing our resumes to reflect who we truly are. If we do not like working with a certain facet, be it data, be it, maybe we don't like working with artificial intelligence, but that's the popular thing right now. And so we try to jam pack our resume with mentions of machine learning and artificial intelligence and how we've used it. But if you're not truly interested in that type of work, whatever job you get with that resume is likely to be a bad fit. So instead, lean into who you are and find, it takes time but it's so worth it, to find the high value proposition that reflects who you are so that a company who gets really excited to hire you is getting really excited to hire you. not this caricature or this person who you felt like you had to fit into in order to be attractive, a candidate to that that company. All right. So that is that. As you're creating your resume, one thing that you can do here is you can make sure to highlight achievements that align specifically with your values and goals. Oftentimes, this may mean that your biggest achievement maybe is not on your resume because you happen to have stumbled onto that really big achievement or you worked really hard for it, but it's really not the direction that you want to go now. And so instead, we want to replace those with achievements that reflect where you want to go in the future. All right, moving on. Number four, influence, influence, influence. So before you pick up that resume, it's really important that you look at how employers perceive candidates. You put yourself in the mind of an employer and you really kind of What sort? Empathy, right? You really harness as much empathy as you can for how are they seeing the world? What do they want in a candidate? What, you know, everything from how you carry yourself to what you wear, to what you say, to when you smile, to how you respond to questions, how you respond to maybe some negative or some, you know, situations that are unexpected in the hiring process. How does the manager perceive these things? And so if you can understand that, you can then shift sort of your response in a way that's still authentically you, but also in a way that is much more influential. So what do I mean by that? Let's say, for example, you are absolutely yourself. This entire time you're authentically yourself. But as you know, I can be, well, I don't know if you know, but I'm going to tell you, I can be authentically myself and be just the most stubborn person in the world. But another part of me that's still authentically me can be incredibly flexible. So it's still me. And if I am not good at maybe, you know, talking to people in a professional setting or I feel like I'm not good at it, but I spend time improving that skill, I can still be authentically me, but at an elevated level. So this is me with more skill. And so that's one thing that's really important is, you know, we often put ourselves in these boxes based off what an assessment once told us. Right. So, for example, If an assessment ever told you you're an introvert, I encourage you to consider that doesn't mean that you can no longer go and network or that you can't build these great relationships with a lot of people. What it means is that you might just want to spend a little bit more time learning that skill and I promise you, you will get better at it. So all this to say, you can still be authentically yourself But in a way, that gives a better impression from the standpoint of the managers. So if you understand how they perceive candidates, they want to see someone who is adaptable and flexible and has positive energy, whether that's a calm, cool and collected positive energy and a smile that helps you to feel relaxed or maybe you're a high energy person that's just joyful about the world no matter what's going on. Either way, it's positive and this is going to make a good impression. So consider how the way that you feel about the career transition process, the way you feel about the job search is probably going to make a bigger difference, not only in the impression that you make with the manager, but also in the behaviors that you exhibit week to week, the actions that you take. If you're excited about something and you feel confident like I can do this, you're probably going to submit more applications, talk to more people, have more networking conversations. You probably have more energy to work on these job search tasks. But on the flip side, if you feel absolutely defeated because no one responds to you or because you're throwing your application at this applicant tracking system that everyone's mad at and that no one ever gets back to you, you're going to feel less confident and that's going to impact the conversations you have, the action you choose to take, the amount of motivation you have, and because negative emotion is draining, it's also going to really tire you out. And the worst thing is going through this process when you are just exhausted and feeling less than confident. So that was a big one. Influence, influence, influence, and it starts with empathy. All right, number five. The fifth thing when it comes to branding, before you pick up your resume, you want to, like a brand will develop a human personality. meaning they will develop a language that they use, right? So a highly professional personality might use a very corporate language and a very informal personality might use more relatable and human, you know, language with human attributes. That's what a brand does. But guess what, my friend, you are already human. So you already have a personality. And the work that we're doing here before we touch our resume is allowing that personality to shine through. And so you might take a second to jot down a few things on just any old piece of paper. And you want to jot things down like, what kind of personality do I have? Am I the cool, calm and collected or am I the high energy, always joyful person? Am I a little bit eclectic? Do I have some quirks and what are those quirks? What might be a few words that are very specific that people that know me really well might use to describe me? What's the difference that I made at my prior work environments? What are the compliments that I got? How did I improve the workplace? So you can start to develop your personality and come up with a few statements that you can internalize as you go through the career process. Some statements could be something like, I'm always the go-to person when we have a conflict we can't seem to resolve. Or maybe it's, I'm the person who's going to make sure that we have at least three future employees because I'm so well-connected that I always am able to bring in good talent. or maybe you are the Excel queen, the one who is always the go-to person to find a sneaky way to get things done really, really fast by adding a macro to Excel. Whatever the case might be, you wanna come up with these statements to define who you are as a person in terms of your personality and the way you interact with people, but then also who you are in terms of the value that you bring. All right, so that was number five. And know, before I move on to number six, that you can showcase your personality and your soft skills on your LinkedIn profile and during interviews, because your LinkedIn profile allows for a little bit more informality. And so you can use first person, you know, to people, hi, how are you? My name is, and you can add this text to the about section. So you can be a little bit more personal there. And of course, you can share that during your interviews and during some networking conversations, which I know can feel a little bit scary to kind of put yourself out there and experiment. Sometimes it feels like experimenting with your personality a little bit. But when you get into those conversations, And the manager is deciding whether or not they should interview you. They're not actually looking for a right or wrong answer when they're in conversation with you. Let's say it's a networking conversation. What really makes the biggest difference? Of course, there's minimum requirements, right? Do you have a skill set they need? But let's go beyond that. Many of you, most of you, I'm pretty sure that you and I know that you have the experience that you need. The problem is connecting with the people who need your experience at their organization. So when you get into these networking conversations, you want to be absolutely yourself because in theory, what you want the manager to think is, I could totally get along with this person. And if they think that they would enjoy working with you, then they go into the, okay, let's justify my emotional decision because this is how we make decisions. Let's justify my emotional decision of me wanting to be around this person. I want to work with this person. I want, you know, their energy to be a part of my day and to lift me up too. Well, now let me go. And in some cases you might say, yes, let me go justify my decision that I would like to work with this person, which is how we all operate. But now they go into the resume, the cover letter, the interview, and now you get to show them all the great things that you did. And oftentimes what we start with is we start showing how we're so qualified, but we do so at the expense of expressing our personality. So that balance is really important. Okay. So that was number five. So developing your human personality and really you have one already. That's more of a brand term, but showcasing your human personality. All right, let's move on to number six, and we only have seven, so we're about to wrap up. So number six, before you pick up your resume, craft a compelling message that includes emotion. Any time you start telling somebody why you're so qualified, what it feels like on the other end, even though this is not your intention, what it feels like on the other end when someone tells me I'm qualified because I have this, this, this and this. That's when it begins to feel a little braggy. And I know none of us want to come off that way. So we're in this weird situation where we either don't say anything about what we do or we say it because we're like, I got to get this out. So we just say it. But then we fear that we sounded salesy and braggy and all the things. Well, this is how you can do it in a completely different way. When someone speaks to me and says, here's what I have. Boom, boom, boom. And it's a list. My brain, all of our brains, actually, as humans, our brains go into evaluation mode. Is this what I need? Is this not what I need? Basically, it's our opportunity to critique and to raise red flags. But instead, when you start storytelling, what you're doing is you're letting the person relax. Going into a classroom and being taught or being informed is a place where you need to be really alert. going into story time, it's movie time, it's story time. Our brains relax and just sit and listen to the story. And in fact, we become a part of the story. We experience a story as the protagonist experiences a story that is like in our brains. That's actually what is happening. And so it builds a much more personal connection and it doesn't sound salesy or braggy at all. How would this happen? Okay, so here's what you're gonna do. You would develop a personal brand story, which is basically, it's either your career narrative or a story around a particular project that showcases your skills. And as you're sharing this, you want to make sure and include the name of a boss or a manager or a VP and share how they felt. And you want to bring in the emotion at different parts of your story. So you want to include emotion like, that moment where you're provided this challenge and your supervisor had a worry that if this challenge didn't go through well, then X, Y, Z would happen. And there's so much on the line. So the tension was higher. Right. But then you're eventually going to release that tension when you share how you uniquely, keyword, uniquely solve the problem and why you can do it in a different way than other people would do it. Then at the end, you release that tension and you say, well, in the end, my manager, and you wouldn't say my manager, you would say Bob or Lisa. So you would say something like, in the end, Lisa didn't have to worry about hiring three other personnel because we took care of that problem within our project. And Lisa could go home and spend time with her children because we no longer had to work on a project after hours because it went so smoothly. So now you're bringing in these pieces of emotion that allow the manager listening to your story to feel like this could be me. I could be a part of this story. It would be wonderful if I could have Lisa's life, if I could go home and spend time with my kids and if I could stop worrying about having to hire new personnel. So you want to develop a story that evokes emotion and connects with your audience as you're telling them how good you are and how you do things differently and why that is valuable to their organization. So here's what I would do if I were you. I'd identify the stories that are the most compelling and then focus on those stories and highlight those stories in your resume and in your LinkedIn profile so that you're giving the same message when you network, in your resume, in your LinkedIn profile. And when you interview, inevitably questions will come up that you can answer from that same story. And so now your interview prep is easier and they're going to want to know more information. Of course, you've got a lot more detail. So it's not the exact same story they're hearing every time. They're actually hearing pieces of a similar or the same story that in the end, at the end of the interview, they have a much better understanding of that one story instead of having a lot of compartmentalized pieces and examples that they can't quite put a big picture together. All right, so that was number six, craft a compelling message with emotion. All right, friends, the last one, so important. Number seven, build a career presence that engages. Create a strong and engaging professional presence across all your touch points. So before you start creating your branding, what you want to do is look at what are the big components that you want to include across each of these areas. So whether it's your resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, portfolio, and your networking conversations. So before you get into the weeds on each of these items, I would take a step back and consider, okay, likely an employer is first going to see my resume. And likely, I may even have a conversation with the employer before they even see my resume if I'm networking, which is how we should job search nowadays, right? So as you're having these conversations, consider what conversation, what career story makes the most sense to share with, you know, the person, the decision maker at the organization. Okay, I'm gonna share XYZ story. Perfect. So now that they've heard a piece of my story, how should I reflect that in the resume so that it resonates with them? So they remember the story and they think, oh, this great accomplishment is referring to this story they were sharing about. And then when you look at your LinkedIn profile, maybe that's a big enough accomplishment that it's really a defining accomplishment. So then you might consider, well, do I want to change my banner image to reflect and call attention to that specific accomplishment? Do I want to incorporate or consider that particular accomplishment as I develop my headline? Do I want to change or consider a different industry because my accomplishment and my future goals lend themselves to a different industry in my portfolio? Am I going to have part of that story or the product that I mentioned in that story as a part of my portfolio? So that as they go through the entire hiring process, an employer or a recruiter or an entire committee can look at all your materials and feel as if they're being walked through a very cohesive experience. Okay, so all together we've got first repositioning yourself as a career expert. So change your mind frame as far as who you are. You're not a generalist. You're not a commodity. You are a unique career professional with special skills that are made perfect for a particular organization at a particular junction in their business life. Second, use your strategy as your edge. If you have an area where you think, oh, I have a gap, then look to your strengths and emphasize your strengths or identify ways in which your seemingly, you know, the thing that seems like a gap, right, in which that area is actually a strength. There's always two sides to each coin. Number three, lay the career foundations with some substance, meaning get to the core of what fuels you so that as you go through the process and even after you get hired, you continue getting more and more energy and now you thrive and are more likely to move up in your career. Fourth, influence with psychology and just your communication style, right? Influence with storytelling techniques, influence with how confident you feel and by using a lot of empathy to understand how you're being perceived by managers. Showcase your human personality and your unique traits. Be 100% of who you are so that they can see your personality and decide that, yeah, they want to work with you. Number six, craft a compelling message with emotion and use storytelling to bring them in and share a story that depicts the type of employee and the type of professional that you are instead of giving them a bulleted list of why you're qualified. And number seven, build a career presence that engages, meaning create a holistic experience where you can see your big accomplishments from start to finish. All right, friends, we have gone on for about 27 minutes now. So I hope this has been helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to chat with you. I've got a link to a coaching consult if you want to just kind of share your experience and where you're trying to go and we can strategize on the call. And if it turns out that we might be a good fit for coaching, well then we'll move forward. But in either case, my goal here is to help you getting to where you want to go. It's been great chatting with you today and know that we love you. We're praying for you and we'll see you on the next one. Hey, thanks for listening. I really appreciate you spending time with me today. If you found this episode helpful, please tap the five-star review on the show's homepage in your podcast app. It would absolutely make my day and it helps others discover the Uncommon Career podcast. Now, to download your free career resources and learn how I help seasoned professionals land amazing offers in as little as 90 days, click on the link in the description or go to theuncommoncareer.com. Thanks again, and I'll see you on the next one.

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