Here are 5 tips for incorporating your brand throughout your resume, your cover letters, and your entire career marketing portfolio.
Tips - 1
Branding provides your resume and other career marketing
documents with instant, precision-like focus that positions you as the ideal
candidate for the specific type of opportunity that interests you. An unfocused
resume is boring and ineffective. An unfocused resume wastes your readers' time
and will land in the circular file. A properly branded resume is, by
definition, focused, and addresses not only your unique value proposition, but
it does so in a way that addresses the concerns of your target audience.
Tip - 2
Use your personal brand profile and personal brand statement
to project a cohesive brand image and value proposition across your resume,
cover letters, and all your documents. In my work, I have the opportunity to
review a lot of resumes, letters, biographies and other documents that my
clients and prospective clients have tried to write for themselves. This tip
relates to one of the most common mistakes that I see. Too many people try to
be too many things to too many people. Their career marketing portfolios
(resumes, cover letters, biographies, etc.) are a hodge-podge of documents
written over a number of years and added onto randomly whenever the need arises
for an updated resume. Certainly across the portfolio, and sometimes even
within the same document, I find multiple design and content styles, as well as
disconnected and outdated messages. When you brand your job search documents
you immediately correct this problem.
Tip - 3
During the first review, resumes are scanned for mere
seconds in a process that is meant to do nothing more than filter out
unqualified candidates. Clearly and succinctly incorporating your personal
brand statement into the profile or summary section of your resume is a way to
ensure that your resume will stand out and get attention. One way to accomplish
this is with a headline statement followed by a sub-headline that promotes your
value proposition. If you aren't familiar with this style, take a look at the
many sample resumes on the Distinctive Documents website.
Tip - 4
Personal branding gives you a way to truly let your
personality shine through and to establish an emotional connection with your
audience. It can be tough to make this connection in your resume, but your
cover letters and your narrative biography are great opportunities to promote
soft skills and weave in examples of key brand attributes. In a very real
sense, personal branding requires that you be courageous about really "owning"
yourself and acknowledging yourself for the strengths and value you bring to
the table. Let your personality come across in your letters and in your
biography. Don't be afraid to make a connection by accentuating your strengths
and value proposition as they relate to your audience. This is a great way to
establish rapport and trust with your reader even before you have the chance to
speak by phone.
Tip - 5
Keep in mind that one of your primary goals in branding your
job search documents is to paint a compelling portrait of your unique value
proposition. To do this, you will need to structure your resume so that it
promotes your key skills, qualifications, experiences, and achievements in a
way that is both convincing and compelling and clearly illustrates to the
reader that you can meet their needs and help them to achieve their goals, all
the while adding value to their organization and delivering a strong return on
their investment in hiring you. This is a lot to accomplish in a single resume!
One of the most effective ways to do this is to focus the chronology of your
work history on achievements and results.
Write your achievements so that they tell a succinct story
of the challenges and problems you have faced, the actions you took to meet
those challenges, and then the results and benefits of those actions - the
actual return on investment of your actions. Writing your professional
chronology in this way will engage the reader, supporting your brand and
helping them to envision how you will add value in the future to their
organization.
Nationally certified resume writer, career marketing expert,
and personal branding strategist, Michelle Dumas is the founder and executive
director of Distinctive Career Services LLC. Through Distinctive Documents
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