Are you taking full advantage of LinkedIn in your active or passive career search? Position yourself for more career opportunities, more interviews, and more target industry connections by leveraging these six LinkedIn facts. Your LinkedIn profile is 11 times more likely to be viewed if you use a photo. If you don’t already have one, you need to get one today. And don’t waste your time with homemade shots – isn’t your caree...

Once upon a time all you had to do to land your next job was share your resume with your network. Sadly, those days are mostly gone. Your Networkingresume can no longer serve you as an effective networking tool – here are 4 reasons why. Resumes are too focused to work for networking purposes. The best networking tool these days is one that gives your readers a big picture perspective of your strengths and experiences. While...

Titles and taglines are terrific brand real estate in any resume. Not only do they quickly summarize important issues such as your career goal and brand, but they often include key words and almost always draw your reader’s eyes to critical details about your candidacy.Recognize, though, that you have more options than whether to use a title or tagline or not. In fact, here are 7 ways to use titles and taglines alone or in...

One of the most powerful ways to stand out with recruiters, influential contacts, and hiring executives is to make yourself useful. By that I mean sharing useful content that relates directly to your areas of expertise.You can share such content in LinkedIn status updates or in LI Groups discussion areas, of course, but you can also leverage these types of resources when building relationships one-on-one with specific indiv...

Are you guilty of managing your career only when you’re in or anticipating an active career search? Unfortunately, the “I’ll wait until I really need it” approach doesn’t work effectively. If you want to minimize your current or future unemployment or protect your work life from long gaps between jobs, you will need these 7 tools: A permanent email address with BrandYOU™ signature: To manage your career proactive over time...

Do you have an executive bio? And do you know how best to use one? Bios have been around for decades and are often used by senior executives. In fact, recruiters and employers tend to assume that if you are a senior executive, you already have one.Useful for reminding your network what you bring to the table and introducing your background to prospective contacts, your bio also presents key details about you to recruiters,...

By the time you sit down to update your resume or finally hire a professional to write it for you it’s already too late — too late to clarify your brand, achievements, and goals in the time available before you complete the project. The time to start all of these activities is long before you need them. In other words, now.A career journal can help you to jumpstart the process in a gentle way. Unlike a regular journal, a ca...

Is your resume ready for that next great opportunity? If a recruiter or prospective employer called with an interesting opening, would you be poised to seize the moment? You can answer “yes” to these questions ONLY if your resume is already in great shape and simply needs a quick update with your latest achievements. In other words, the time to get a resume update is when you DON”T yet need one. If you wait until...

One of the key principles I am constantly preaching to my clients is that when it comes to resumes and LinkedIn profiles, more is not really more. Less is emphatically more in these arenas. You can see this clearly in the resume achievement makeovers below. I’ve pulled resume bullets and paragraphs from random resumes and revamped each one in turn. In this first example the bullet is too long and too vague to i...

Ultimately, a job search is all about relationships – building meaningful connections with retained recruiters, hiring managers/executives, and key industry influencers. But how do you do that in world of information overload? The approach I recommend is to give before you seek to receive from these important connections. Everyone else is bombarding them with requests from the get-go; if you take a different approa...