5 Tips to Build Personal Branding Into Your Executive Resume

culled from:boyden.com/

A really great executive resume, one that gets interviews and gets you into your next job faster, is all about differentiating you and your value from others competing for the same jobs. With the impact of the Internet and constantly changing trends in strategic career marketing, new ways to accomplish this are always coming forward.
Taking advantage of the latest trends positions you as a forward-thinking leader and makes you much more likely to stand out, make a positive connection, and stimulate the attention you deserve.
1. Lead with a personal brand statement:
Personal branding is the great differentiator and may be the best marketing tool today to position yourself and your executive resume above your competition in the job market. Branding generates the kind of chemistry that helps companies determine whether you’ll be a good fit and a good hiring investment. The fact is you already have a personal brand or reputation. It’s just a matter of shaping it into a marketable career brand to drive your executive job search.
Truly a cutting-edge strategy, a designated brand statement placed at the top of your resume, in itself, is a powerful differentiating feature. Build your brand message by showcasing your vitality, pivotal leadership strengths, drivers, and unique value proposition in a concise 3-5 line statement. It should come from your own voice, give a feel for who you are, and lay out your brand attributes.
An executive resume personal brand statement may not be right for everyone, but it can be valuable used in other career marketing communications and as the foundation for your 30-second elevator pitch.
2. Format your resume with the readers’ needs in mind:
More and more hiring decision makers are reviewing resumes on their Blackberries when they are on the go. Brief, concise, brand-driven statements of value surrounded by enough white space to make them stand out will have the greatest impact, whether your resume is reviewed on a screen or on paper. Long, dense paragraphs make it hard for the reader to quickly access and digest important, make-or-break information from your executive resume.
3. Keep your resume to 2 pages:
Your mission in writing your resume is to generate enough interest in you to compel decision makers to want to meet you. Your resume is not a comprehensive career history. It is a career marketing document that needs to say just enough about you to achieve your mission – getting you interviews.
To accommodate the need for brevity, pare down and consolidate all your great achievements and qualifications into a quickly readable communication. Provide deeper slices of contributions or “success stories” in collateral 1-2 page documents (Leadership Initiatives Profile, Achievement Summary, Career Biography, Reference Dossier and Accolades, etc.). These companion documents can be crafted to stand alone outside of your executive resume for networking and other purposes.
4. Use the top of the first page to your best advantage:
The people tasked with reviewing many resumes for any given position usually don’t have much time to spend on each one. In fact, they may only give your resume 10-15 SECONDS to grab their attention. If it doesn’t do that, they may move on to the next resume and forget about you. You want to immediately capture the readers’ attention by showcasing your promise of value, to spark them to read the entire document and want to contact you.
Put your most important and compelling information above the fold on page one, since this is the first, and possibly the only, section of your executive resume that will be read. Consider this: if you tear off the top of the first page, it should be able to stand on its own as a career marketing communication.
It’s okay to move up to this spot some information that would chronologically land on the second page within the “Professional Experience” section – especially if it’s critical to your job target.
5. Highlight your key areas of expertise just once:
Instead of taking up precious space repeating obvious lists of responsibilities under each position you’ve held, consolidate them in the form of relevant key word phrases in the top of the first page. To receive the best impact from your executive resume, position them in nicely formatted columns or a shaded graphic box, titled something like “Key Areas of Expertise”.
Fill out the “Professional Experience” section with key contributions to each company and achievements that provide evidence of the value you will bring to your next employer.