Posts in Career Branding
Add Sizzle to Your LinkedIn Profile with DIY Professional Headshots and Backgrounds

Here are a couple of easy ways to add sizzle to your LinkedIn profile. Perhaps the most immediate impact you can make on your profile quality is to add an engaging and professional-looking profile picture. While you’re at it, here’s another quick and easy boost you can give your LinkedIn profile’s impression on visitors…

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The Best Executive Resume Recipe

Whether you plan to write your resume yourself or engage a professional executive resume writing service, your winning recipe will have these ingredients, and be prepared as follows… Your perfect executive resume starts with the right ingredients, in the right quantities, blended well, and tastefully presented.

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How to Make Your Executive Resume Stand Out -- The Art of the Humble Brag

It is the sales/marketing aspect of the executive resume that stops many executives cold. You may feel like you are being cocky or a braggart if you persuasively recount your accomplishments and lay out your capabilities in a way that captures your prospective employer’s interest. Yet mastering the art of the humble brag is absolutely critical to positioning yourself effectively in a competitive executive job market.

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How Long Should My Executive Resume Be for 2019-2020?

As an executive resume writer with over four decades of experience, my answer to the executive resume length question, in a nutshell is: “Your resume should be as long as necessary to effectively communicate your qualifications, experience, and value proposition.” It’s as simple as that! But you may ask, what is the best length for my executive resume?

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Hard Skills and Soft Skills Your Executive Resume Must Demonstrate

When you boil it all down, what a prospective employer is looking for when reviewing an executive resume is the right combination of hard and hard skills that will enable a candidate to deliver the results the company needs. But what ARE those "hard" and "soft" skills?

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Avoid Rejection with These Executive Resume Writing Tips

Since your executive resume is in most cases going to be your foot in the door to a new opportunity, it is critical to ensure it makes a dramatic positive impression on the reader, whether that may be a recruiter, hiring manager, or HR resume screener…. If your resume fails to meet criteria that person or system is looking for—and quickly—it may be discarded, never to be seen again.

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Should My Executive Resume Include a Photo?

A key question to consider is whether a photo will make you stand out in a positive or negative way. Even in those cases where the picture (or the whole executive resume) is not immediately discarded, think of the possible outcomes. Notice that only one out of the five possibilities listed is favorable.

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Do You Know What Your Personal Career Brand Is? Have You Refreshed It Lately?

Way back when I first started writing resumes, I realized that when you analyze it, job search is really a marketing activity – self-marketing, that is. So is overall executive career management. In reality, we all have a career brand – what others see as our essence.

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Structure Your Resume and Executive Job Search Strategy to Combat Ageism

Ageism in hiring and in the workplace after you have been hired is nothing new… Here are some anti-ageism steps to take in your executive job search and career management.

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Add Sizzle to a Boring Cover Letter

Cover letters can either excite a potential employer or bore him or her to tears. A major reason that your cover letter may be boring is that your language makes you come across as pompous or nineteenth century. Avoid overly formal or stilted language! Other things to watch out for…

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Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 8 Ways Your Cover Letter Could be Sabotaging You

It has unfortunately been my experience with a few executive clients that they take the high-impact executive resume we developed and send it out “bare” to a potential employer — without a customized cover letter. This comprises the first, and often fatal cover letter self-sabotage.

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