As a resume writer and interview coach, I am blessed with wonderful clients that run the gamut from entry level to senior executives. Some have a great handle on how to self-promote; most do not. And surprisingly this isn’t always related to stature, experience, or education.

Business depends on growth, and growth depends on the cumulative impact of each employee’s individual performance. Your performance of a key function absolutely impacts the bottom line. Knowing yourself, your character, strengths, talents, and skills, relating these to your performance, and then demonstrating how your performance influenced your company’s year-end performance report, is an essential aspect of career management that impacts not only the interview, but also your annual review and other business conversations.

Your character, strengths, talents, education and skills—your credentials or value proposition—must be articulated clearly. They must be connected, in your interview conversation, to your employer’s bottom line. In relating stories of how your performance improved a previous employer’s business, you establish yourself as an employee who provides a return on investment. That is, investing in your pay will produce a return through your performance.

So many cannot articulate these workplace stories, and indeed, have no idea of what kind of return they offer. And what of you and your return? Any ideas?

The next blog will launch wholeheartedly into this topic. Until then, I encourage each reader to create a list of five or more aspects of their current or last job, a list of responsibilities or accountabilities that contribute to business growth or sustainability. If you are an administrative assistant, you must be organized and organize others; a network administrator, you must proactively keep the network humming along; a salesperson, you must not only keep existing accounts, but you must add new ones. Challenge yourself to create your list and tune in next month to see how to relate these to bottom line impact!

This is a question I hear ever more frequently from my executive clients, and in years past, the answer to the question would have been a resounding “Yes!” However, in the cyberspace world we now occupy, the answer is not quite so simple, and would have to be an equivocal “It depends.”

Surely employers and recruiters have a legitimate need to know where candidates under consideration reside, for purposes such as evaluating whether relocation will be necessary/worthwhile and factoring in length of commute. (A long commute, whether you are willing or not, is perceived by an employer as an impediment to both your commitment to the position and potentially to reliability in being at work on time.) There is also the potential for giving the impression one is trying to hide something, which is never good. So there could be considerable pushback from recruiters who want to see this information, or worse, omitting the information could eliminate you from consideration without your being aware of it.

However, there are legitimate and compelling reasons for leaving off your address. When your resume is uploaded to online sites and into corporate and recruiter databases, there is a potential for identity theft and security risk when details of residence and other contact information are supplied with a document that already reveals so many details that define you. In my view, putting your full address and your home phone number on a document that is widely accessible on the Internet is unwise.

If you are sending your resume directly to a potential employer or recruiter, it will be relatively safe to include this information. I recommend maintaining a variation of your document that provides one contact phone number (preferably cell), an email address (you may wish to set up a separate email address for job search), and your city, state, and zip of residence (street address omitted) for use online. You might also set up a P.O. Box for your job search. However, as use of a P.O. Box has tended historically to make employers think you are hiding something or do not really live in the area indicated, I recommend city, state, and zip only for online use.Including the zip will be sufficient in most cases for automated systems that screen resumes based on candidate location.

For further thoughts on this issue, see my article at:
http://www.executive-resumes.com/2009/07/should-you-list-your-street-address-on.html

John Campagino, Accenture’s head of global recruiting, was recently interviewed for an an article in March’s issue of Fortune Magazine. When asked what executives need to do to land a job in the tough job market we are experiencing today, he commented, “You’d better be on the web; or to put a sharper point on it, if you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, you’re nowhere.”

I receive a large number of emails from organizations serving the recruiter community on a daily basis, and the emphasis on using online networking sites, LinkedIn in particular, is striking. There are a plethora of seminar choices and tools that focus on teaching recruiters how to effectively leverage LinkedIn to source candidates. Clearly LinkedIn is the place to be, unless you want to be invisible in the invisible job market.

In discussing LinkedIn with my executive clients, the concern about a current employer’s perception of maintaining a presence on LinkedIn often arises. As long as you do not check the box indicating that you are “seeking new opportunities,” this should not be a problem. It is perfectly appropriate to use the site as a tool for developing new business contacts, building business, and cultivating relationships. Any employer who has advanced to the 21st century will realize that cutting edge technology such as this is the future of business.

I just did some research and found the #1 frustration of job hunters surveyed was “Hearing Nothing.” Sending a resume, filling out an application, writing a cover letter… and it goes to the Job Search Black Hole. I’d like to hear creative ways to escape that fate.  How can clients at least get a response?

One I thought of was: Sending it several times (2x/week) with some addendum about “Please let me know one way or another.”

I used that strategy of “pestering” to get my book published many moons ago.

Other suggestions?

By now all of us know that building a substantial online presence and leveraging a robust personal and professional network, both online and offline, are key components of career management. This is true for candidates at all levels, but most especially for my executive-level clientele. As a participant in the Career Thought Leaders Consortium, I’ve been following with interest some recent threads that have explored some of the potential issues that may be encountered with online networking.

Surveys and statistics consistently show that recruiters and hiring managers are increasingly using the Internet to source and research candidates, and in particular are focusing on social and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn. While ensuring positive information about yourself is easily found in these searches is an important way to expose yourself to potential job opportunities, a dark side to this new candidate sourcing trend is emerging. To quote a recent email dispatched by Challenger, Gray & Christmas (as cited by my colleague Beverly Harvey):

“Social and professional networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have become critical components of the job search. Digital networking is an effective and positive way to expand one’s connections and find potential job opportunities. A new entrant into the social networking world threatens to alter the landscape, and not necessarily for the better. Unvarnished.com ( http://www.getunvarnished.com/beta ) provides users the opportunity to post anonymous reviews of co-workers, bosses, subordinates, etc. The website’s founders said in a Chicago Tribune article that the site “encourages candid and nuanced information about prospective hires, bosses and business partners.” However, many are concerned that the site will open a Pandora’s Box of negative, spiteful, dishonest reviews. The fact that the reviewer remains anonymous further complicates matters by making it impossible to determine the veracity of any claims, whether they are positive or negative.”

While one might hope that recruiters would not place great stock in a free-for-all, unbridled site with absolutely no fact verification processes, it is likely true that due to human nature, negative information of any kind might easily eliminate a candidate from further consideration. Given two equally qualified candidates, which would you choose: the one with nothing but positive information out there, or the one who received a bad review on one or more of the sites you visited?

Another colleague, Meg Guiseppi, cited a blog post by Dan Schawbel regarding the site which was entitled, “Unvarnished Changes Personal Brand Reputation Management Forever.” Dan commented, “”When Unvarnished launches, everyone in the world will be held accountable for their brands on it, and it will force everyone to search their name online much more often. You will also have to claim your profile page before someone else does for you.”

Unvarnished is not alone in this space, and I am quite sure that more such sites will be popping up as time goes on. A couple of other fairly prominent sites candidates need to be concerned about and monitor include Yelp and Spokeo. If you check yourself out on Spokeo, I pretty much guarantee you will be “creeped out”–I know I was. I found a lot of eerily accurate information, along with some wildly inaccurate data. (You can go to this particular site and opt out, which I recommend).

As Leslie Gaines-Ross in her Harvard Business Review blog entry “Unvarnished: Your Personal Reputation in the Crosshairs” stated:
“What are Unvarnished’s creators thinking? How can this be good? With no accountability and no restraints, people will review and rate bosses who fired them, colleagues who rose above them, clients who complained about them, romantic targets who proved immune to their charms. Rumors, innuendo, and hearsay will be aired, regardless of whether even a scrap of truth lies beneath them.”

Have you ever fired anyone? Had a disgruntled subordinate? Been the face of the company to a very unhappy customer? If any of these or limitless other possible negative scenarios are in your career history, the potential for vengeful, negative comments about you on one or more of these sites could be a concern. We all now have an even more compelling need to monitor our brand in cyberspace.

What you say and how you say it matter significantly. Your words and the choice of the words you employ say much about you, your character, your integrity, your brand and the very essence of who you are and what you represent.

So as you write your resume, your cover letters, your social-platform profiles, your blog, your twits and other prose, pay critical attention to your words and how you use them.

Here are some thoughts to keep in mind to help you stay true to your character and resonate with your personal brand.

1. Write like you speak. Use words that are natural to your inner voice. Do not use vocabulary that does not fit your personality.

2. Use simple declarative sentences — a subject, verb and object. Keep it simple and succinct.

3. Tell a story. From our infancy, we are read stories to entertain, engage and educate. It is a form of communications to which we all have become accustomed. Use words that tell a story and paint a picture of the point of view that you hold, the achievements you have made, the opinions you have and the knowledge you possess.

4. Say what you know and believe. Speak from your experience, your knowledge, your research, your understanding, your premise. Forget invention unless fiction is your intention.

5. Be honest. Tell what is true. Do not lie, obfuscate, hide or distort. Human nature is savvy. People can often sense insincerity. Even if, in some cases, the insincerity is not obvious, the truth will out.

6. Use active voice. People often respond better to language that is energetic. So in simple terms make the subject the actor and the object the recipient of the action. An example: “The company benefitted greatly from my focus on return on invested capital” is passive. Instead use: “My strong focus on return on invested capital significantly improved the company’s financial position.”

7. Edit yourself. It is human nature that we can be our own worst critic. Yet, we can also be great editors if we give enough time and space in between writing and editing. So after you have written your latest blog or cover letter, sleep on it then edit.

8. Get other opinions. Sometimes the people who best know us can be authentic editors. They can tell us if our voice is stretched, out of tune or not in sync. Objective critics can sometimes be that final tuning fork that makes our words and word strings harmonize.

Increasingly search engines like Google and Bing are becoming the first destination of choice for companies and their search firms and human resource professionals when looking for people to recruit or vetting job candidates.

The chief dilemma for the job seeker is to how to make sure you can be found through search engines. Short of stardom and employing advertising, there are certain techniques you can employ to make sure you can be found and in a way that is controllable, professional and complementary.

1. Become part of social media platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Plaxo, Ning, etc. Employing platforms like these enable you to craft the type of profile that spotlights your professional career and equally important your professional and personal accomplishments. Be sure to target those platforms that fit with your profession and your personal brand.

2. Take control of third party web-based databases. These would include but are not limited to www.zoominfo.com, www.spoke.com, www.jigsaw.com, www.spokeo.com, etc. Many of these sites allow you to take ownership of your profile and manage the content. Make sure to delete errors or mistakes that could derail your consideration.

3. Establish a showcase on www.slideshare.com. Slideshare is a fabulous and rich content site on which you can upload presentations. In this case, what you will do is produce a PowerPoint presentation about you not unlike a C.V. You can include your resume, links and URLs to your web content, expanded accomplishments, academic credentials, professional photos and video, publications and other career information that help you tell a compelling story about you as a brand and as a professional. And you can be as creative as you want and need. Remember this is a multimedia medium where you need not spare any expense. Include enough information to tell your story. Last but not least, incorporate your Slideshare profile within your profile on www.linkedin.com, both of which are included in search engine results.

4. Highlight your career on www.visualCV.com. VisualCV portrays itself as “Your resume, only better.” VisualCV is customizable and can serve as a resume, online professional profile, business development tool or mini website. And to top it off, just like Slideshare, it is included in Google search engine results.

5. Don’t forget about Google. Build a Google profile. Yes Google gives you the ability to have a profile. If you already have a Google or Gmail account, a Google profile is the next step. Just go to www.google.com/profiles. Google provides the ability to include basic information about who, what, why, where and when. You can also include information on where you live or have lived, your web links, personal and professional interests, education, employers and aliases. Best of all, the profile is included in search.

6. Become an active Twitterer! Yes I realize this seems strange because you really care not to daily Tweet your food choices. Well don’t. Instead, employ Twitter as a strategic tool to add value to the knowledge stream on the web. If you are an expert or thought leader on a particular topic or topics then provide a steady stream of pithy and helpful commentary that enlightens and entertains. Twitter is actively searched in most search engines.

7. If you have a passion, blog!!! If you want to be recognized for something and develop a following, blogging can be a useful device. In fact, if you have a passion, blogging is a natural. But the key word is “passion.” If you are a thought leader or expert on something let people know and become recognized for your knowledge an enthusiasm. http://wordpress.com and http://blogspot.com are both useful and free platforms to express yourself. Get busy!

8. Get engaged with your communities! Do you belong to industry or professional groups? If you do and are not engaged, consider getting involved. Join a committee, run for an office or board position, volunteer for an event. Often times being a part of a group that is doing worthwhile things can attract attention.

Dondi Scumaci, the author of Designed for Success: the 10 commandments for women in the workplace, has identified some interesting observations about women and their workplace behaviors. Could there really be such as thing as female DNA that prevents MBA women from being identified or recognized as potential leaders?

Now, I have to be honest because I recognized in my own corporate career that I was exhibiting certain behaviors that while I was seen as hardworking, diligent, and dependable, prime leadership roles were not getting funneled in my direction.

Here are some seeds for thought and contemplation:

1) Women are raised and socialized differently from men

When I first entered the careers field as an executive talent agent a decade ago, I asked those with expertise and experience for their words of wisdom and advice. Universally, at some point in the conversation, the colleague offering advice about executive careers would say that the candidate’s resume could make or break their campaign. I carefully researched and discussed differing resume writing styles with experts and soon found out what made some writers better resources, in my opinion, for my executive clients. Along the way, I learned to recognize different stylistic preferences and grew to respect, even revere, various approaches.

During the intervening years, the world of executive career management including recruiting, and in turn the role the resume plays in a job search has been changing. I think it is not an exaggeration to remark that we are living a revolution. Dramatic changes in communications, technology and the economy all have shifted the relationship between prospective employee and potential employer which in turn, are forcing career industry professionals to adapt. The Career Thought Leaders Consortium is one fine example of this trend

Many in our profession have recognized this sea change and have polished their skills, updated their knowledge, added new services and transformed their businesses.  They  continue to push our field forward and provide the high quality  services that more sophisticated clients demand. Executive clients today are more knowledgeable.  They can get information via Internet search, through virtual communities and online discussions.  Unfortunately for some,  they master this arena by spending their own time in the job market while in transition.

What I am getting around to is that today we are light years away from the olden days of paper resumes and are living with a complexity beyond the days of broadcast faxes and mass emails. Today, a candidate’s competitive advantage is not just a great (but static) resume documenting a fantastic track record of accomplishments. Their future career success stems from how an individual communicates and distributes and makes available their reputation and unique problem-solving capabilities to those who can hire them and offer them additional opportunities to learn and grow their success.  Sounds like a networking process doesn’t it?  Sure, the individual has to have the goods, but just putting it in writing is not enough, just communicating this in one well-crafted document is too little and just sharing this when asked is usually not enough to ensure  a career.

The best possible resume is a good starting point for discussion; a better strategy is not only to build a strong reputation (good resume content,) but to also be visible.  Achievements have always been necessary and still are necessary, but are not sufficient for success.  How an individual communicates their value has broadened from just a “dam good resume” occasionally distributed when the candidate was actively looking or asked to submit their credentials to being a full time, non-stop personalized PR campaign.  This means being visible and searchable online.

We’ve been learning that having a personal website or online portfolio or Linkedin profile alone seldom attracts enough attention or generates enough desired contacts from prospective recruiters or hiring managers. These online pieces are major parts of a larger effort that includes an online resume, a marketing presence that is vibrant, updated regularly and contains relevant data differentiate those who get noticed. Think: what did you do today, what will you be doing tomorrow that demonstrates your abilities. It is said that past performance is no guarantee for the future. To be competitive, executives have to prove themselves, visibly speaking, in real time. In addition to producing results, they engage others.  They develop new connections. They interact. They give to others. And when the timing is right, they learn about a new position and make a move. In other words, the resume is now an important part of the overall marketing plan implementation process.  There is an intention to attract attention and pull opportunities towards the candidate.  Contrast this to when all career marketing/job searching efforts were designed to push the candidate to potential employers.

Today’s environment means game-changing strategy and a new style for executing an effective search for candidates and the modern career industry professionals who support them.  The best solution is for every employee to always have the mindset and behaviors of a potential candidate:  maintain their visibility with up to date information and messaging. There’s no worry about anyone discovering they are looking for a new job because they are always open to new opportunities that are able to find them even when they are not actively looking for leads to a new job. They never are out of “job search mode” but their standard MO is inviting connections, sharing  ideas and being approachable.

So many of the newly or soon-to-be unemployed prospective clients I talk with these days seem to be down in the dumps about their chances on the job market right now. It’s easy to understand that, with all of the doom and gloom stories in the media and the glaring fact that one or more of your neighbors, friends, or professional associates may have been out of work for a long time.

Certainly it is wise to be realistic about job market conditions, but not to the point that it results in paralysis. People ARE finding jobs, and GOOD ones even in today’s economy. It may take a little more patience and a more proactive approach than might have been the case in better times, but as an executive you are in a better position than the rank-and-file workforce. After all, you advanced to executive level because you exhibited executive skills including the ability to assess a situation, develop a strategy and plan to address it, assemble needed tools and resources, and execute the plan. These are exactly the skills that will take you successfully through the job search process.

To get you started on the situation assessment, here is a bit of a reality check on current job market trends and statistics:

>> We have indeed been experiencing one of the worst recessions in memory—for a visual of what has happened from 2007 to present see this interactive map.

>> However, job competition IS LESSENING in many major metro areas, according to Indeed.com’s recent Job Market Competition Report, Washington, DC and San Jose, California enjoy a 1:1 job seeker to available jobs ratio currently, and Baltimore, New York, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Hartford (CT), and Boston follow close on their heels at a 1:2 ratio. See the report for a complete listing of the top 50 metro areas.

>> ExecuNet has just published their 2010 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report, which encouragingly lists the top 10 high-growth functions for executives engaged in job search. They are:
1.  Business Development
2.  Sales
3. Operations Management
4.  Engineering
5.  Marketing
6.  General Management
7.  Finance
8.  Consulting
9.  R&D
10. MIS/Information Technology

>> A 2010 survey by CareerBuilder.com reports that the average length of job search in the market today is six months, and CNNMoney says that the timeframe is about 30 weeks. For executives, the average is generally a good bit longer, as much as 1-1.5 years. However, it is important to remember that these statistics are averages. If the average executive job search is 1-1.5 years, there were most likely candidates who found a job in 3 to 6 months as well (and logically, probably some who still had not found work 3 years later).

If you’d like to come in on the lower end of that spectrum:

Continue the job market research I started for for you in this post (the situation assessment).

Put together a powerful resume and career document portfolio and possibly engage a professional to guide you in tactical approaches for your search (tool development and resource gathering).

Identify and map out several job search strategies that show the greatest potential to deliver results for you (the plan).

Then pursue your plan with passion and a full-time job mentality (the execution). You have now dramatically improved your chances to defy the odds.