Keppie Careers

Social media speaker, social media consultant, job search coach

Personal branding helps you manufacture your own opportunities

By

I tell clients they “drive their own career bus.” This issue of Personal Branding Magazine (I am co-editor along with Jessica Lewis) highlights how you can manufacture your own opportunities. Dan Schawbel explains:

“Volume 5, Issue 1 is focused on how to use your established brand to unlock new opportunities and beat your competition. Brooke Burke, featured in our cover story, is a great example of someone who’s successfully leveraged her brand. Brooke has taken the success of her TV and modeling career and used it to start her own company called Baboosh Baby. Since she is a well-known brand, she’s able to open doors and create new monetization opportunities. Whether you’re famous or just starting out, this issue will give you the tools and advice you need to create brand leverage in your industry.”

In my introduction for the magazine, I highlight the concept of using personal branding to create your own success. Social networking and brand building offers so much potential; I wanted my new book, Social Networking for Career Success, to include a bullet on the front saying, “Learn how to job search in your sleep,” because you can use your profiles and online networking to attract business prospects and jobs. In this issue, Nikolas Allen reminds readers, “One of the best results of creating a strong, coherent and positive personal brand is that, in time, opportunities start seeking you.” So true.

We all need to remember how much control we have over our career paths. In this issue, Howard Sholkin quotes Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, saying, “Opportunity can be manufactured. Yes, you can wait around for the right set of circumstances to fall into place and then leap into action, but you can also create those sets of circumstances on your own. In doing so, you manufacture your opportunities.”

I think that’s a great way to think about “personal branding” – an opportunity to manufacture your own opportunities.

Features

  • Full paid issue (August 1st):  22 articles
  • Sample issue (July 25th): 10 articles
  • Interviews with: Brooke Burke, Justin Haplern (Shit My DadSays), Jim Craig (Olympic Gold Medalist), Barbara Corcoran (ABC’s Shark Tank), Ali Brown, Adam Bryant (NY Times Columnist), and Peter Shankman (HARO).

Take a look!

How having your own website helps you

By

I always think one of the most frustrating aspects of job search is believing you’ve “done everything,” but aren’t finding an opportunity. I’ve never met a job seeker who actually has “done everything,” though, which I think is good news! Most people are very focused on out-dated tools and spend a disproportionate percentage of their time doing the same thing, over and over, without different results.

This month, the Career Collective (a community I co-coordinate with my colleague Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter) addresses the question of how to use social media in a job search. (Please click through to the links I’ll add soon at the bottom of this post to the other responses to this question.)

There are so many great ways to use social media in your search, most of which I address in my book, Social Networking for Career Success.

There’s no doubt social media tools offer an underutilized opportunity to:

  • Help you connect with new people and keep track of contacts.
  • Easily learn new things.
  • Share your expertise and expand your brand.

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all provide easy-to-use, free tools to get-in-touch (and keep-in-touch) with people who may be interested in learning more about you and what you have to offer. However, I think the best, and most important tool the majority of job seekers do not have is a personal website, or social resume.

Why have your own website?

  • Hiring managers will Google you. What will she find?
  • A personal site is a way to control how your name appears online.
  • Statistics show your online presence matters, and that employers are looking for personal and professional data about you.
  • NOT putting up your own site only gives people an incentive to look deeper in the web for information about you. Take a look at these sites to learn what the “deep web” knows about you: pipl.com, Polymeta.com.
  • Managing a site is important for career insurance and professional development. Showcasing your expertise online (even if it is in a new field) helps demonstrate what you have to offer, even when you aren’t looking for a job. An online presence can grow and change along with your career and help attract people to learn more about you. This could result in opportunities to speak at conferences or events, or even invitations to apply for jobs down the road.
  • Having a website suggests you have some technical savvy and understand how to use online tools to communicate. That, in and of itself, is an important skill many employers value. It’s known as “social proof.” You may say you know about technology on your resume, but actually using it to showcase your own information goes a long way to prove you have what employers want.

Especially if you are transitioning to a new job or an experienced job seeker who needs to overcome age discrimination, having an up-to-date online presence and maybe even a viable blog helps show prospective employers you’re willing to learn and are perfectly capable of keeping up with technology.

In my book, I suggest starting out using WordPress.com to try out an online presence. It’s a great resource, and it’s free. However, there are limitations to free tools — not the least of which is you don’t really “own” that online real estate. With some know-how, or an investment in someone who does know how, you can have your own site. If you’re lucky, you can even have “YourName.com,” which will help you rank high for your name in search and help direct people to find the information you want them to find about you.

I hope you’ll visit my site, GetASocialResume.com, to learn more about what you’ll want to include in your social resume. If you don’t want to figure out how to do this yourself, I can help. With a relatively small investment, I can offer you an online presence you’ll be proud to use as a hub for your social media activity, and help you create a site to tell a compelling story describing your background and experiences.

The following are posts from other Career Collective members answering this question

Make Your Career More Social: Show Up and Engage, @WalterAkana

You 2.0: The Brave New World of Social Media and Online Job Searches, @dawnrasmussen

How to Get a New Job Using Social Media, @DebraWheatman

Social Media: Choosing, Using, and Confusing, @ErinKennedyCPRW

How to Use Social Media in Your Job Search, @heatherhuhman

Updating: A Social Media Strategy For Job Search, @TimsStrategy

Your Career Needs Social Media – Get Started, @EliteResumes @MartinBuckland

We Get By With a Little Recs from Our Friends, @chandlee

Expat Careers & Social Media: Social Media is Potentially 6 Times more Influential than a CV or Resume, @expatcoachmegan

Social-Media Tools and Resources to Maximize Your Personalized Job Search, @KatCareerGal

Job Search and Social Media: A Collective Approach, @careersherpa

Social Media: So what’s the point?, @DawnBugni

Tools that change your world, @WorkWithIllness

HOW TO: Meet People IRL via LinkedIn, @AvidCareerist

Effective Web 2.0 Job Search: Top 5 Secrets, @resumeservice

Jumping Into the Social Media Sea @ValueIntoWords

Sink or Swim in Social Media, @KCCareerCoach

Social Media Primer for Job Seekers, @LaurieBerenson

 

 

How to show multiple career goals on LinkedIn

By

Today, my friend Hannah Morgan, @careersherpa, shared a link to a Quora question about LinkedIn. It asks, “How do you show multiple career objectives on LinkedIn?”

This is my reply…What do you think?

This is a difficult proposition, since LinkedIn forces you to select one industry and it isn’t set up to highlight multiple career objectives. Additionally, if your target jobs are too diverse, you risk confusing the reader about your goals. If the job types are similar enough, it makes sense to share your flexibility in the summary section, using a story illustrating your abilities in more than one area. Be sure to highlight how your skills and accomplishments quality you for each type of job.

Other suggestions:

  • Have recommendations covering all of your career goals, from people who know your abilities in different areas and can address your skills in each.
  • Manage your own website, which gives you a lot more flexibility to highlight and showcase your various areas of expertise than LinkedIn provides! (Take a look at www.getasocialresume.com for one option to create your own “social resume.”)

Learn more about Quora and how you may use it as a way to help propel your career!

Answer the question on Quora and please add your ideas to the comments below!

For more about how to use social media tools to propel your career goals, please consider pre-ordering my book, Social Networking for Career Success.

photo by Horia Varlan

How to make it easier to find you online

By

Job seekers often hear how important it is to make it easy to find information about you online. Why? A Cross-Tab research study, Online Reputation in a Connected World, points out:

  • 75 percent of HR departments are expected to research candidates online
  • 89 percent of hiring managers and recruiters review candidates’ professional online data
  • 86 percent of employers believe a positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions—and nearly 50 percent say the influence is “to a great extent” and they expect it to increase

Further proving how important it is to be discoverable online is an ExecuNet Inc. research study, 2010 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report:

  • 90 percent of search-firm recruiters regularly Google candidates to help draw a complete picture of that individual—up from 75 percent in 2005

If you have a common name, it may be difficult to distinguish yourself online. About 2,000 people on LinkedIn share their name with someone on the FBI’s most wanted list, says James Alexander, founder of Vizibility.com, a company that creates tools to help professionals and companies stand out on the Web.

Read the rest of the post on my U.S. News blog….

photo by dunkr

How to Re-think your job search

By

If you’ve been looking for a job unsuccessfully for a long time, you are not alone. However, just because you haven’t landed yet doesn’t mean a job isn’t just around the corner. One adage that is true for job seekers? If you’ve been doing the same thing, over and over again without achieving the results you want — it’s time to try some new things!

This month, the Career Collective (a community I co-coordinate with my colleague Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter) looks at how to re-tool, re-focus and generally re-organize your job hunt. It’s almost spring (at least on the calendar), so it’s as good a time as any to review your plans.

1. First thing to evaluate: does your target job exist?

Maybe this sounds obvious, but many jobs are not going to come back. Certain industries may never recover from the downturn, some positions are being replaced with automated systems or being sent overseas, and other jobs are going to contractors and short-term workers instead of permanent employees. (Temp to perm has become a reality for a lot of people.)

Even if you’re doing everything “right,” if you are looking for a job that doesn’t exist, you’re likely going to continue to be very frustrated. Your choice? Either a) hang a shingle (maybe a virtual shingle) and think about going into business for yourself as an independent contractor or b) read on!

2. Have you considered that it may be time to change career paths or directions altogether?

Even if your job “exists,” maybe things have changed and it doesn’t “exist for you.” It’s possible companies no longer want to pay for your experience and prefer to hire less skilled people to do the work. No matter the reason, maybe it’s time to think about a new career path.

Identify growth fields and careers and start researching to learn if you may be a good candidate for opportunities in the new industry. Make sure to target your resume and other materials to your new goal employer. (This is very important, as transitioning between fields is not an easy thing to do, especially when there is a lot of competition for jobs.)

One thing that may help is to have a strong online presence supporting your skills in your new targeted industry. A social resume (website), where you highlight your expertise and skills (maybe via a blog) can help attract interest in your abilities as they apply to a new field. Consider creating your social resume (YourName.com) I can help!

3. Have you been too picky?

Do you have a certain vision of the type of job you’re willing to do? Maybe you don’t even LIKE the work you did in the past, but you have your mind set on doing it again. Have you been too particular about the type of people or places where you want to work? (A 20-minute commute — absolutely not! Work for him – are you kidding? When pigs fly!) I am not suggesting you take just “any” job, but it may be a good time to take a good, long, hard look at what you want and decide if you need to change your goals.

Maybe a longer commute is worth it if you can land a job at X company or in Y field or industry. Decide what parameters you can change and refocus your search with new vigor. You never know how opening up a few new windows may result in an open door.

Take a look at how my colleagues responded to this month’s question below and follow our posts on Twitter via the hashtag #CareerCollective.

Personal Branding to Fire Up Your Job Search, @DebraWheatman

Succeeding in a “Final Jeopardy!” World, @WalterAkana

5 Steps to Retool & Jumpstart Your Job Search, @erinkennedycprw

Your Job Search: Let’s Just Start Again Shall We? @GayleHoward

Checklist for Spring Cleaning Your Job Search, @careersherpa

5 Ways to Spring Clean Your Job Search, @heatherhuhman

Ten Surefire Ways to Organize Your Job Search, @KatCareerGal

Put Spring Into Your Job Search, @EliteResumes @MartinBuckland

Toes in the Water, @ValueIntoWords

How to Revitalize a Stale Job Search, @KCCareerCoach

How to re-think your job search, @Keppie_Careers

Wake Up and Smell the Flowers: Spring Cleaning Your Resume, @barbarasafani

Spring Cleaning and Your Personal Brand, @resumeservice

Spring clean your mind clutter first, @DawnBugni

Managing Your Career 2.0: On Giving Something Up To Get It Right, @Chandlee

photo by Werner Kunz (werkunz1)