4 Common Resume Personal Branding Mistakes - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

4 Common Resume Personal Branding Mistakes - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career As we discussed in my 7/16/12 column, your resume brands you, whether you like it or not. As TheLadders.com recent eye mapping study so clearly showed us, resume readers make a decision within the first 4 6 seconds if your resume bears further review or if seems like a miss and headed for the discard pile. This is why resume personal branding is so important it influences the first decision recruiters, HR reps, and hiring managers make about you. So one would think that you would do a better job managing your resumes personal brand that readers use to draw critical first impressions. I doubt candidates create poor personal branding on purpose its just that no one ever taught you. And what better place to teach you about your resumes personal brand than the PersonalBrandingBlog? Lets start out by identifying some of the Personal Branding Mistakes that may be on your resume, eliminating you from job consideration even as youre reading this article. 4 Common Personal Branding Mistakes: Unclear exactly what job youre applying for:  Weve been taught to write resume broadly. The logic used to be that by describing the job you want very broadly, you be consider for a broader variety of jobs. That was then, this is now. Today, employers look for exact matches and find them with the help of Applicant Tracking Systems and human pre-screening. If you define the job youre applying for broadly (ex: Marketing Professional), you make the hiring manager (and pre-screeners) guess what job is this candidate applying for? If you cant even clearly communicate the job youre applying for, why would a hiring manager want to consider you when there are many other qualified candidates? You look like a commodity:  You brand yourself as a commodity because youve been taught to brand yourself this way. From your first career training in college (thanks college placement office!), youve been trained to brand yourself as a commodity that looks equivalent to other candidates. Fast forward to today, when trying to follow advice to differentiate yourself you dont know how. Commodity branding has been repeatedly hammered into your head, over and over, so that it feels natural. Branding yourself as a superior candidate feels uncomfortable, because it goes against what youve been taught and whats been reinforced though repetition. Superior branding is opposite many of the tried and true job search rules of thumb that are the basis of most job search methods. Were not talking about brainwashing its worse: this reinforcement is being given by people who mean well, but are still using methods that stopped working in 2007. Branding conflicts:  Most resumes contain branding that conflicts with your goals and even conflicts with the branding support provided by the rest of your resume. Heres how to tell if you have this problem: If you are being called by recruiters for the wrong jobs it happens because your brand and goals conflict. For example, an NYC programmer wrote me sharing frustrations that all he got called for were financial service IT jobs But thats exactly how his resume branded him. Also, if youre not being called for jobs that you feel youre clearly well qualified for (if this has happened numerous times), theres a good chance that your branding conflicts with supporting evidence in your resume or the hiring managers expectations. You go on and on and on :  Your personal brand forms the readers gut feel about you. To be effective, it should be extremely concise, so that the reader can immediately internalize your brand into their gut. Your personal brand is the first impression you want to manage, not selling statements including details about how you leap tall buildings in a single bound. Your reader cant internalize paragraphs they cant even read a paragraph in the 4-6 seconds it takes your reader to form a first impression. So look carefully at your resume What does it say about you in 4 6 seconds? Do you brand yourself as a commodity? Or as the specific solution to the hiring managers priority problems? Is your branding clear (to a stranger) in 4 6 seconds, or is it confusing, conflicting, with your branding message hidden somewhere within a paragraph of sales pitch? Author: Phil Rosenberg  is President of  http://www.reCareered.com, a leading job search information website and career coaching service. Phil also runs the Career Central group, one of Linkedin’s largest groups for job seekers and has built one of the 20 largest personal networks on Linkedin globally. An active blogger about social media, career advice and job search information, Phil’s articles have been published by The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNN, CBS, AOL, FastCompany, CIO, ZDnet, The Examiner, and leading job/career/recruiting publications and sites. Check out one of Phil’s complimentary job search webinars at  http://ResumeWebinar.com  .