Are you getting nowhere fast in your executive job search? You know you must be doing something wrong, but you can’t figure out what it is?

Maybe it’s because you haven’t actively searched in a long time. Today’s search doesn’t look or work like it did even a year or two ago. Maybe you just don’t know what you need to do to accelerate your search and land your next great gig.

I’ve compiled a list of 16 mistakes I see many executives making in their job search.

Here are the first 5. Do any of them sound like you?

1. Not getting clear on where you’re going next.

2. Sitting in front of your computer all day, burying your nose in the job boards.

3. Not researching your target companies and industries.

4. Failing to re-connect and engage your neglected network while proactively reaching out to fresh faces.

5. Not treating your job search like it’s a full-time job.

Read the whole list, with advice on how to do it right, at Executive Career Brand.

Related posts:

10 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand Online Without a Blog

How to Build a Powerful Executive Network

10 Steps to an Authentic, Magnetic Personal Brand

What do you do every day, or on a regular basis, to reinforce your executive personal brand?

Are you doing any of these things suggested by Twitter personal branding experts in a recent guest blog post by Mohammed Altaee on Ryan Rancatore’s Personal Branding 101?

• Post a status message daily on Facebook, something engaging or interesting. — @ChrisBrogan
• Less time promoting their brand; more time in conversations driving value for their people. — @WalterAkana
• Follow your lead and build networks through reaching out / giving back. Also, focus on own website daily as personal brand ‘hub’. — @EmilyBennington
• Find at least 10 things worth retweeting in your home feed and share it to your followers. — @MAltaee (Mohammed Altaee)
• Do something unselfish that helps somebody else or promotes their work. Repeat as often as possible. — @RyanRancatore
• Every day ask yourself: How can I communicate my unique value message today? — @MegGuiseppi

Related posts:

10 Steps to an Authentic, Magnetic Personal Brand

Health Insurance for Your Personal Brand – The 3 Cs

How NOT to Build Your Executive Personal Brand

Think that your online identity doesn’t factor into executive hiring decision-making? Well it does. See my post Does Your Online Identity Scream “Hire Me”?

If you’re in executive job search now, or contemplating it, your personal brand and promise of value to potential employers need to be evident and far-reaching online.

Most recruiters and hiring decision makers are searching for and assessing top candidates by what they find about them online. If you’re not there, you’re missing opportunities to position yourself in front of them and capture their attention.

There are many, many ways to establish and extend your presence online. Read about 10 good places to build your online footprint at Executive Career Brand.

Want to get in on this hot industry?

More and more green jobs are opening up in the scramble to “go green”.

Before you take the plunge, you’ll need to scope out the lay of the land and get your ducks in a row.

Your green career transition will require special preparation to position yourself as a good fit to recruiters and hiring decision makers assessing you. And you may need training to get your skill sets up to snuff.

I offer 5 tactics to get you started in my post at Executive Career Brand.

Many of the executives I work with come to me with little or no online presence.

Some realize this may be detrimental to their job search. Others don’t believe online identity factors much into executive hiring decision-making.

The second group couldn’t be more wrong.

Recruiters and hiring professionals are much more likely to, first of all, find and second, be attracted to the candidates with strong, vibrant social media presence over those with little or none.

Recruiting expert Boris Epstein, CEO and Founder of BINC, a Professional Search Firm, wrote a blog post about what he and other recruiters are looking for in candidates’ online identity.

Read about it in my post at Executive Career Brand.

When I recently followed up with a client of mine, he complained that he wasn’t getting job interviews, even though he was responding to every job that “popped up” on job boards.

Aside from a little networking with his same crowd, that was about all he was doing!

His passive approach to job search didn’t reflect the proactive, diverse strategies he and I had mapped out for his campaign, including leveraging LinkedIn and Twitter to build out his network and connect with decision makers at his target companies.

He was spending over 90% of his time on job boards, which yield dismal results. This is a mistake too many executives make.

I reminded my client of what he needed to do to get back on track. The strategies I suggested are outlined in my Executive Career Brand post.

Based on various criteria defined through data collected on nearly 2,000 CEOs worldwide, Harvard Business Review ranked the top 100 CEOs who have done the best job running their companies over their entire time in office, or for those still on the job, up until September 30, 2009.

Criteria used included:

• During their tenures, the CEOs had to post a total shareholder return of 997 percent (adjusted for exchange-rate effects).
• They had to raise company shareholder wealth by $48.2 billion (adjusted for inflation, dividends, share repurchases and share issues).

No big surprise that Steve Jobs is #1 on the list. Following him are Yun Jong-Yong (Samsung Electronics), Alexey B. Miller (Gazprom), John T. Chambers (Cisco Systems) and Mukesh D. Ambani (Reliance Industries).

Some relatively unknown faces make it to the top, while some obvious candidates in terms of reputation don’t make the top 50, or even the top 100 or top 200.

The top five female CEOs are Margaret C. Whitman (eBay), Andrea Jung (Avon Products), Carol Meyrowitz (TJX), Susan M. Ivey (Reynolds American) and Kate Swann (WH Smith).

Location and industry didn’t factor heavily in the results. What did factor in was whether the CEO was with the same company or a different one before taking on the CEO role. CEOs who were insiders (promoted from within their companies) performed better than those who joined their organizations in that position.

Are you semi-addicted to social media like I am? Can’t seem to disconnect for even one day a week?

You know how it is. Portable devices like netbooks and Blackberries make it so easy to happily stay connected . . . endlessly.

But is it really necessary to check emails on Sunday, when you know you won’t respond until Monday . . . or keep up with social networking, when nothing happening there will be so critical it can’t wait until Monday?

Read about the goal I set for myself at Executive Career Brand.

The February 2010 issue of Personal Branding Magazine will be on the digital stands on February 1.  But you can get a free sample issue now!

Volume 3, Issue 3 is about becoming so important to your company, your customers and the people around you, that they can’t live without you. When you’re valued in the marketplace, you’re wielding a powerful personal brand.

Seth Godin reveals his hope for career revolutionaries who want to remain relevant in a world that is being transformed by the internet. Food Network’s powerhouse Guy Fieri talks about how he has built his personal brand as a television personality.

Dan interviews Alexandra Levit, author of “New Job, New You: A Guide to Reinventing Yourself in a Bright New Career”, and talks with New England Patriots’ (NFL) defensive end Jarvis Green about taking the leap into entrepreneurship.

The sample issue has 8 articles including:

• Grow, Polish & Protect Your Future
• How to Be An Authority by Getting Personal
• Be Timely – SEO Your Blog, Keep It Updated and Build a Following

Subscribe to the full paid issue to get all the skinny.

Related post:

Interview with Dan Schawbel – Me 2.0 Personal Branding

If you’re like a friend of mine, you need to print out every email sent to you to make it “real”.

You can’t manage all those communications unless they’re in a pile in front of you.
 
How seriously do you take the suggestion “Think before you print”, that we’re seeing more often at the bottom of environmentally-conscious emailers’ messages?

Get some tips on greening your job search and home office in my blog post over at Executive Career Brand.