Self-Google! Don’t Jeopardize Your Executive Job Search is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

Do you know what the people who have a hand in hiring you are finding when they Google “your name”?

Trust me, you’re being Googled by recruiters, employers and hiring decision makers if they come upon you when they’re sourcing talent, or if they’re considering whether to interview you.

In fact, I do the same thing right before I speak with potential clients of mine for the first time.

Typically, they’ll have a minimal online footprint on the most important first few pages of results:

• Usually a LinkedIn profile, but it’s often not complete, branded or compelling.
• Little, if any, social media presence beyond LinkedIn.
• Sometimes a brief boring bio on their employer’s website.
• A mixed bag of anemic results that they haven’t posted on aggregator sites (Manta, Pipl, White Pages, etc.).

I generally only search the first page of results for my initial chat. What I’m looking for is more information about the person to assess whether they’re a good fit to work with me, to see whether they’ve done any work to build their brand online, and to see if they have any digital dirt that could cripple their search.

If they’ve done some research on the current executive job search landscape, they have an idea of how important it is for them to have a strong, branded online presence.

Given the same set of qualifications, skills and expertise, those who have a diverse and higher-volume of search results are more likely to be noticed, sought out, and hired.

According to Talent Management Magazine’s article about a recent survey from CareerBuilder, nearly 37 percent of firms use social networking sites to research job candidates. What are they looking for?

• To see if the candidate presents himself/herself professionally — 65 percent
• To see if the candidate is a good fit for the company culture — 51 percent
• To learn more about the candidate’s qualifications — 45 percent
• To see if the candidate is well-rounded — 35 percent
• To look for reasons not to hire the candidate — 12 percent

Nearly 34 percent found information that caused them NOT to hire a candidate.

That issue can pose major problems for some job seekers. In today’s highly competitive job market, hiring professional have their pick of the absolute best. If they find dirt or even a flimsy reason to rule you out, they will. There are plenty of others to slide in place.

One of the major problems I find when Googling people’s names is not within content these people posted themselves online (if they’ve even done so). It’s not inappropriate behavior that found its way online, or that they posted somewhere.

I’m finding content on the first page of results that the person DIDN’T post themselves, so they may have little control over it.

• Sometimes the person knows about it.
• Sometimes the person had an unfortunate blip in their career or personal life that made news. They’ve since made amends, but the bad news lingers forever online.
• Sometimes the content is associated with some dastardly person who has the same name.

Whatever the reason, those search results could seriously damage their job search.

My searches on two recent client prospects revealed problematic online identities:

1. A 65 year old mid-level sales and marketing executive, who was very concerned about ageism in his search.

LinkedIn was the #1 search result. About half way down the first page was a link to his high school yearbook and the year he graduated. Instantly, his age was revealed.

2. The second search result for a CMO in medical devices (let’s call him “Joe Smith”) jumped out with the hyperlink “Can anyone share their real thoughts on Joe Smith?” Who wouldn’t be drawn to that headline?

The link led to a snarky industry-related chat site where several anonymous people on his team trashed his leadership abilities . . . in detail.

In both instances above, the job seekers probably can’t get those pages taken down. Their only recourse is to work on outdistancing those bad search results with good ones, pushing the bad ones down and onto the second, or hopefully, third or fourth pages of results, where they’re less likely to be found.

Your takeaway?

Follow the steps that hiring professionals do when they’re sourcing and assessing talent by what they find online. Know what the people who have a hand in hiring you will find when they search you.

Do a quick Google search on “your name” right now, and then once a week or so, and see what’s out there.

If you find digital dirt, here are three things to do:

• Try to push it down beyond the first page or two by building up branded, relevant search results on high-ranking sites.
• See if you can get the page taken down.
• See if you can rewrite the content to position yourself in a more positive light.

Related posts:

Does Your Online Presence Scream “DON’T Hire Me”?

Executive Job Search: 6 Ways to Get Good With Google

Executive Branding Online: Write Book Reviews on Amazon

photo by SallyB2

LinkedIn’s New Criteria For a Complete Profile is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

If you’ve spent some time on LinkedIn building your branded profile, you know that LinkedIn measures your profile for completeness, based on various criteria.

What does “100% complete” mean and why is it so important to get there?

Your profile is more likely to land higher in search results. Your visibility as a good-fit candidate increases dramatically.

Executive recruiters and hiring decision makers at your target companies are more likely to land on your profile when they’re sourcing and assessing good-fit candidates.

In mid-February, LinkedIn changed the completeness criteria and the way they calculate profile completeness:

“The new calculation gives you more control of your score by emphasizing things you have direct control over, like Skills, and putting less weight on areas you may have less control over, like Recommendations. The score also takes profile freshness into consideration, so frequent profile updates can now help with profile completeness.”

Here’s what you now need for a complete profile:

• Your industry and location
• An up-to-date current position (with a description)
• Two past positions
• Your education
• Your skills (minimum of 3)
• A profile photo
• At least 50 connections

LinkedIn says that adding a profile photo makes your profile 7x more likely to be found in searches. Having your 2 most recent positions makes your profile 12x more likely to be found.

Looks like it’s time for you and all of us who rely on LinkedIn to attract business and job opportunities, to spend a little time working on our profiles.

Related posts:

My free ebook, Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search

Does My LinkedIn Profile Really Need a Photo?

Best LinkedIn Tips: Find LinkedIn Groups to Join

photo by nan palmero

Twitter Newbies’ Biggest Mistake is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

You’ve been swept up in the Twitter frenzy. You heard that it can help you in executive job search, so you jumped in and set up an account.

Beyond that, you don’t really know what to do with Twitter.

Oh sure, you didn’t have too much trouble providing the information they required. Selecting your Twitter name was easy. You chose @yourname, or a variation. You used the same photo you put in your LinkedIn profile and used your LinkedIn profile URL for the “Web” prompt. And you inserted your location. All easy, right?

Then you got to the “Bio” and you were stumped, so you skipped over it. You figured that, once you got a feel for Twitter, you’d come back and fill that in.

That’s it. That’s the biggest mistake you can make as a newbie . . . neglecting the bio or having an anemic bio.

Read more about that biggest newbie Twitter mistake at my Executive Career Brand blog.

Related posts:

Twitter Turbocharges Executive Job Search and Personal Brand Visibility

How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand

Twitter Executive Branding Strategy: The Beauty of a Retweet

55 Top Job Search Experts To Follow On Twitter

photo by josh semans

Is Yours a Lazy or Proactive Executive Job Search? is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

Maybe you’ve suddenly been laid off and weren’t prepared with a job search plan. It happens to many executives. They didn’t see it coming.

Now they find themselves scrambling to pull everything together and get to work on finding work.

Maybe you’ve been in a job search for a while and very little is happening, although you’re on the job boards several hours a day. That’s how you find a job in the digital age, right? Then how come you’re not getting interviews?

Could be that you’re lazy or just misinformed, and going about your search all wrong.

If all you’re doing is putting out a few feelers to recruiters and your network, and getting your updated resume onto plenty of job boards, that makes you a passive or REACTIVE job seeker, instead of the PROACTIVE one you need to be, to keep pace in this highly competitive job market.

You’re a lazy, or misinformed, job seeker if you:

1. Skip over step one – identifying the kind of job you want, targeting the companies that will be a mutual good fit, and researching their current challenges to find out how you can help them solve their problems.

2. Run straight for your old resume (if you can find it) and update it – without first defining your executive brand, and creating content designed to market your ROI and resonate with your target employers.

3. Focus most of your time on job boards – the “monsters” and smaller niche boards. You think that job search in the digital age means hitting the job boards hard because that’s where all the job are. You don’t understand that most jobs are found by penetrating the “hidden” job market.

4. Fear having an online presence and putting yourself “out there” with social networking and social media. You don’t understand that executive recruiters and the hiring decision makers at your target companies are on LinkedIn and other social networks. If they’re hanging out there looking for candidates like you, you should be, too.

Get started with LinkedIn. If you do nothing else with social media, you need to be there, leveraging all that this social network has to offer, just to keep pace with your job-seeking competitors. See my LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search.

5. Neglected your network while you had a job because you didn’t think you needed them any more. Now that you’re looking again, you don’t have the time or inclination to re-connect. It’s too much work! You don’t understand that the way to get at those hidden jobs – where most opportunities lie – is through purposeful networking.

6. Haven’t researched what executive job search is all about today, so you can prepare and do all the back end work, before jumping in.

Are you a lazy or misinformed job seeker?

To get all the inside skinny on landing an executive job in today’s job market, see my post Today’s Executive Job Search Toolkit.

Related posts:

Bullet-Proof Your Executive Career in the New World of Work

5 Key Elements of a Strong Online Personal Brand

Social Media ROI: Is It Worth the Time?

photo by suvodeb

FREE Personal Branding and Job Search Ebook by Tim Tyrell-Smith is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

One of my favorite job search and employment portals, Job-Hunt.org, has just released a new FREE ebook, adding to the list of 11 others already available for free download, with no sign-up required.

The ebooks range in topics from personal branding, interviewing, and career reinvention, to salary negotiations, working with recruiters and more.

The newest Job-Hunt ebook, “How To Create A Personal Marketing Plan: The 5 Powerful Steps To Bringing Your Brand To Life“, was written by Tim Tyrell-Smith, creator of the Tim’s Strategy approach to job search and Job-Hunt’s Personal Marketing Expert.

Tim explains just what “personal marketing” is:

“It is the work you do once you’ve created a personal brand. You know who you are and, importantly, know how you are different from others wanting to play the same role in the world.

You have to expose your brand and ideas to people in a way that gets them leaning in. Not turning away. So you have to be smart.”

He points out two universal truths:

1. “Marketing is hard. To do it right, anyway.

2. Marketing takes time. Only in rare cases will your brand become viral overnight (or even over a few months). People who ‘rush in’ are making mistakes. And those mistakes can be costly. Giving you a reputation that’s hard to shake.”

Tim is a wonderfully engaging writer. The ebook is quick to read (only 12 pages) and will give you actionable advice and resources, along with the tools you need to make your promise of value known to the world.

The ebook takes you through 5 steps to create and execute your personal marketing plan:

1. Build a Personal Marketing Hub
2. Learn to Engage with People
3. Start Building Social Credibility
4. Inspire Sharing of Your Ideas and Successes
5. Take a Few Calculated Risks

Download the free e-book now. Tim and Job-Hunt welcome you to share it freely with your friends or networks.

Related resources:

My ebook:  23 Ways You Sabotage Your Executive Job Search and How Your Brand Will Help You Land . . . A practical guide to executive branding, marketing your ROI value and navigating the new world of job search

My free Job-Hunt ebook:  Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

Online Personal Branding: 5 Key Elements is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

The following is my latest Job-Hunt.org article as the site’s resident Personal Branding Expert.

Do you want to increase your chances to be found by executive recruiters and your target employers?

What job seeker doesn’t?

Most recruiters and hiring authorities source talent by searching relevant keywords on LinkedIn, Google, and other search engines, and then assessing the people those searches reveal by what they find about them online.

If you’re in a job search and have no “online footprint” – that is, a good number of positive, solid search results when your name is Googled – you may be invisible to the very people you need to be positioned in front of.

The better your online reputation, the better you position yourself online, and the stronger your presence online, the more appealing you’ll be to these people.

Take a look at your own online footprint right now. Type your name into a Google search, and see what you find.

• Do you “own” the first several search results?
• Or does it take several pages of results before you get to anything related to you?
• What information will people find about you when they click on those search results?
• Is it what you need them to know about you and your potential value to the companies or organizations you want to work for?

[Note: If you are logged into your Gmail, Google, or Google+ account, Google usually "personalizes" your search results specifically for you, so log out first to see what the rest of the world sees.]

Here are the 5 components necessary to build a strong online brand for your job search:

1. Relevance

You should know, before starting your job search, which companies or which kind of companies you’re targeting, and what information about you is relevant to them and will resonate with them.

Without a clear target, how can you possibly differentiate your personal brand, ROI value and best-fit qualities, and create career marketing communications (online and offline) that will hit home, attract them and clearly distinguish you as a good hiring choice?

Keep your brand messaging relevant to your target, detailing how you can help them solve their current problems, and position yourself on sites that are relevant to and frequented by them.

2. Quality

Be careful what you post on social networks, or anywhere online. Continuously monitor your online presence. Get used to self-Googling regularly (about once a week) to see what exists on the first several pages of search results.

If someone has posted something nasty about you, see about getting it taken down. Adjust what people will find, whenever possible.

Are you finding any “digital dirt” that may disqualify you? Do you have the same name as others who have an online footprint? If so, you may easily be confused with them. That’s bad news for you, if any of them have a sordid reputation. You’ll have to work on building more positive search results to outdistance those of the bad guys.

3. Diversity

You need a good mix of static profiles/web pages and vibrant real-time content. A few online profiles that all contain the same content won’t cut it – change up the information in each one.

• Express your opinions, showcase your expertise and add value by blogging on your own site, commenting on other sites and/or guest blogging on other sites.
• Get busy on social networks like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc.
• Contribute to online forums that are open to the public, LinkedIn Group discussions, LinkedIn Answers.
• Publish white papers on relevant sites.
• Put up a profile and post book reviews on Amazon and other online booksellers.

4. Volume

Keep working on building more and more search results for your name and increase your number of diverse and accurate results on the first few pages.

To build up your volume of search results, focus on sites with strong “Google juice” (meaning, sites that Google and other search engines deem authorities because they’re content-rich, have been existence for a long time, and have a strong following, among other things), such as – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google itself (Google Profile).

Any activity on strong sites will likely result in those web pages (with your name on them) landing towards the top of your list of search results.

5. Consistency

You should already have done the back-end work of defining your personal brand, built around what will resonate with your target companies. (See my 10-Step Personal Branding Worksheet).

Express that same personal brand message, across all communications channels and social media you decide to use. I don’t mean that you should use the same information over and over. As I mentioned above, mix it up.

Put yourself in the place of people assessing you through your online identity and deciding whether to hire you or do business with you. If your brand message and focus varies from one real-life setting to the next or from one social network to the next or from one website to the next, your target audience won’t clearly see your promise of value to them. You’ll confuse them.

Use the same name or handle across all channels online, so that you’re easy to find and distinguish from others.

Bottom line:

Building your brand online takes planning and effort. It will take time for your hard work to gain traction and give you the kind of online presence that will appeal to your target companies. Get started now, and work on outdistancing your competition!

Related posts:

Does Your Online Presence Scream “DON’T Hire Me”?

Get Personal With Your Executive Brand Statement

How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand

photo by Vince Alongi

Executive Job Search and LinkedIn: Do I Need a Photo on My Profile? is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

Whether or not to include a photo on LinkedIn and other online profiles continues to be debated among career professionals.

My c-suite executive clients are typically over 50. They’re understandably concerned about ageism. A photo could indicate age and leave them open to discrimination.

Often, posting a fully completed LinkedIn profile is their first foray into online job search and career marketing . . . the first time they have considered putting a photo of themselves “out there” and exposing their image to the world.

If you’re like many of them, you worry that your LinkedIn photo may red-flag you for discrimination – age, weight, ethnic background, etc.

But think about this. NOT having a photo can be a red flag, too.

You may have reasons not to include a photo, but I encourage you to include one. The benefits far outweigh the pitfalls.

Find out why HAVING a photo on LinkedIn is important, in the post on my Executive Career Brand site, Does My LinkedIn Profile Really Need a Photo?

Related posts:

LinkedIn Guide for Executive Branding and Job Search

My free e-book: Executive Branding and Your LinkedIn Profile: How to Transform Your Executive Brand, Resume, and Career Biography Into a Winning LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn: Best Tactic for Undercover Executive Job Search

29 Biggest LinkedIn Mistakes

photo by nan palmero

Blogging for Executive Jobs: Overcoming Writer’s Block is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

I encourage my c-level executive clients to blog as part of their online brand communications plan.

Blogging is one of the most important marketing strategies I use to build my brand, market my business and attract potential clients. Potential clients find me through my blogging efforts.

Because job search is much like running a business, blogging greatly benefits job seekers, too. Those who blog purposefully are found by executive recruiters and hiring decision makers who are searching for and assessing candidates.

But maintaining a blogsite that gets action takes effort and commitment. What are you going to write about in all those blog posts?

I don’t have too much trouble coming up with ideas, but when I do, I fall back on a favorite strategy — getting inspiration from other bloggers’ posts or other bloggers themselves.

I like to showcase or link to their work, and I do it often. Over the past year, I designated separate posts to some of my favorite job search bloggers. You can see the list in my post about blogger Jason Alba of Jibber Jobber.

Read about why I love this strategy so much in the post at my Executive Career Brand site, One of My Favorite Blogging Strategies.

Related posts:

You’re a C-level Executive Job Seeker and You’re NOT Blogging?

C-level Job Search: Blogging? What Am I Going To Write About?

Blogging and Twitter: How Tweet It Is!

photo by Sean MacEntee

Twitter and My Personal Brand Communications Plan is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

I’ve been actively on Twitter for a few years now and it’s become an important piece in my personal and business branding efforts.

Although Twitter is wildly popular and much has been written about its value, many of my c-suite executive clients and potential clients are still surprised when I promote Twitter to them as a valuable executive job search tool.

Without taking the time to find out more about it, they still think most people are on Twitter for chit chat, tweeting about what they had for lunch, or other trivial matters.

I explain to them that mounting a job search campaign is very much like running a business. I tell them to think of themselves as a company of one — BRAND YOU — and market themselves in the same way. Twitter and other social media need to be in their brand marketing plan.

For me, as an entrepreneur, Twitter is all about getting my brand and promise of value noticed by potential clients and those who can lead me to more clients, and getting recognized as an industry thought leader and expert.

The idea is to get on their radar and stay top of mind with them so that, when they have a need for my services or know someone who may, they’ll reach out to me.

Sounds just like job search networking, doesn’t it?

Read more about my Twitter strategy, which works for job search too, in my Executive Career Brand post, How Twitter Helped Me Build My Personal Brand.

Related posts:

Twitter Turbocharges Executive Job Search and Personal Brand Visibility

Twitter Executive Branding Strategy: The Beauty of a Retweet

14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter

Twin Twitter Executive Job Search Tips

photo by josh semans

My Job Search Email Is Missing! is a post from: Executive Resume Branding

Have you ever sent an email in your job search, or at any time, and never heard back from the addressee?

Did you assume they received it, and didn’t have time to respond, or didn’t want to, or just decided to ignore you? Did you find yourself getting angry that they didn’t have the courtesy to respond?

Maybe your email never reached its destination. Maybe the addressee never even knew you tried to reach them.

It happens more than you may think. It’s happened to me many times, when I’ve been the sender and the receiver. Nothing was in anyone’s spam filter. The email was just gone.

Read about how to use missing emails to your advantage in job search from Susan P. Joyce, an online job search expert, in my Executive Career Brand post, When Job Search Email Goes Missing.

Related posts:

Get Your Executive Brand Into Your Email Signature

How To Land an Executive Job in 2011

Executive Job Search: The Old Way (Networking) Still Works Best

photo by Sean MacEntee